US journalist pleads guilty for working as Chinese agent in legal crackdown

A US journalist named Thomas Weir Pauken II has pleaded guilty in a US court for working as a Chinese agent.

Pauken who had been living and working in China for over a decade has pleaded guilty in a US court to working as an illegal agent for the People's Republic of China (PRC).

The accused Chinese agent pleaded guilty on Thursday to acting as a foreign agent for Beijing after allegedly collecting US$100,000 in return for gathering intelligence in the US on “American targets” and American politicians.

US Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg said a 50-year-old US journalist "admitted to being part of a conspiracy to obtain sensitive information from the US government" for China.

Additional court filings show that Pauken had been living in China since 2010 and had worked for several media organizations there, including China Central Television and Xinhua News.

According to court documents, Pauken worked "at the direction and control of people he knew worked for the PRC" from at least 2019 until February this year.

Among the people Pauken worked with is a person identified as "Cathy," whom the US Department of Justice DOJ said provided him with "taskings, including meeting with potential intelligence assets."

Pauken and "Cathy" were introduced by a man employed as a speechwriter for Chinese President Xi Jinping during the "Trump-China trade wars" in 2017, court filings show.

The American journalist "gathered intelligence on his American targets and reported it back to his Chinese intelligence handlers," said Assistant Director Roman Rozhavsky of the FBI's Counterintelligence and Espionage Division.

Pauken was also instructed to travel several times between 2019 and 2025 to meet with people in the US who could provide him with information to pass on to the PRC.

He also sold a group of people from Wuhan information about the US DoJ and information about technology who also asked Pauken to support them in finding an expert to help them engage in cyberespionage.

Notably, the accused Chinese agent Thomas Pauken is scheduled to be sentenced on 1 September and faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.