Two New York-based MPS Officers are Charged with Incriminating Pro-Democracy Campaigns in the United States

Agents also posted videos and articles targeting Chinese pro-democracy advocates in the US, the Justice Department alleged, some of which included explicit death threats. In addition to this, the agents allegedly used threats to scare people into skipping the pro-democracy protests.

They are expected to appear in federal court in New York on Monday, according to John Marzulli, a spokesman for the US Attorney in the Eastern District of New York. The police station has been shut down since a search warrant was executed at the location last fall, the spokesman said.

The Justice Department states that all 34 are believed to be in China. The officers were part of a group of people that were working to change how the world sees the PRC.

The agents are accused of being ordered by theMPS to make accounts that looked like they were run by Americans. Topics of their propaganda machine include US foreign policy, human rights issues in Hong Kong, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Covid-19 and racial justice protests following the murder of George Floyd, according to prosecutors.

Two New York-based MPS officers, Lu and Chen, have been arrested in connection with the indictments. The two men are accused of running a front for the MPS in an unassuming building in downtown New York City. The US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York said in a press conference that the building in Chinatown contained an “unscrupulous police station” of the Chinese national police.

Prosecutors say one such victim was an unnamed person living in California who was a “PRC dissident and PRC pro-democracy advocate” who “reported to the FBI that he/she served as an adviser to a 2022 congressional candidate from New York State” who also was the target of a PRC pressure campaign.

During an interview with the FBI, Lu said that he had established the office, which he called an “oversees service center,” to help Chinese nationals living in the United States “renew Chinese government documents.” Lu told investigators during the interview that Chen acted as the primary point of contact with officials back in China.

During a separate interview, Chen initially denied having any direct contact with the Chinese government, according to court documents, though he later recanted.

Investigators say that during that interview, Chen took a seven-minute bathroom break, during which an agent repeatedly warned him through the bathroom door not to delete anything on his phone. When agents later searched the phone, they found that chat logs with MPS officials had been cleared.

Harth claims that today’s charges against Chinese police in the US are the first of their kind. “Other countries are still pretending this is not an issue,” she says. We are happy to see this happen to people in the United States, but also for the signal it sends to other authorities around the world.

As for the other two criminal cases announced today that target Chinese trolling, disinformation, and censorship, Harth says Safeguard Defenders hasn’t seen evidence that such troll farms are operated from within the MPS’s secret facilities overseas, but she’s not surprised to learn that they’re linked to the MPS. She suspects that the Chinese state was behind the shady accounts that flooded her organization’s public communications. She says that it is very tellingly troll or bot work.