The latest prosecution could be ’the tip of the iceberg’ of Beijing’s influence campaign, experts said, calling for more vigilance and resources.
The arrest of New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s former aide Linda Sun this week has shown the vulnerability of state governments in navigating Chinese interference attempts while Beijing is actively targeting them, top intelligence experts say.
Sun worked at the New York State (NYS) government for more than ten years during Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Hochul’s tenures, including as Hochul’s deputy chief of staff. She was arrested and charged on Sept. 3 with violating and conspiring to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act, visa fraud, alien smuggling, and money laundering conspiracy. Her husband Chris Hu was also arrested and charged with separate offenses.
Sun, a naturalized U.S. citizen who immigrated from China when she was five, was accused of doing the bidding of four Chinese Consulate officials and two Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agents—including blocking communications between the NYS government and representatives of Taiwan, screening the governors’ messages to keep out references of Taiwan’s official name and human rights atrocities against the Uyghur people, smuggling a Chinese consulate official into a private NYS government conference call, and providing unauthorized invitation letters for Chinese provincial delegates to fraudulently obtain U.S. visas—for monetary and other benefits worth millions of dollars, mostly via her husband’s business.
The couple has pleaded not guilty to the charges, and Sun’s defense lawyer Jarrod Schaeffer said his client was “understandably upset that these charges have been brought.”
Nonetheless, the case has exposed a glaring security problem, according to two intelligence experts who both held a number of senior national security roles in government.
State governments have been “rather naive” about foreign agents, says Dennis Wilder, senior fellow at Georgetown University’s U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues.
“The difficulty with state-level security is this: They don’t have the ability to vet in the kind of detailed way that the U.S. national government does. They don’t have those kinds of resources. They don’t have people to do that kind of in-depth research, and frankly, at the state level, they don’t think necessarily that somebody is going to try to plant an agent within their government,” Wilder said, adding that the emerging cases are making state governments more attentive and more likely to seek assistance from the FBI and others.
By Lily Zhou and Frank Fang
