National Review: The 610 Office Suppresses Falun Gong Through Overseas Agents

(Minghui.org) The Chinese Communist Party has extended its persecution overseas through various agents, reported National Review on May 26, 2023 in an article titled “Chinese-Government Agents Tried to Bribe the IRS in Anti–Falun Gong Plot: DOJ.”

In this article written by Jimmy Quinn, the U.S. Justice Department reviewed a criminal complaint on May 26 that two men had tried to bribe an IRS officer to harass Falun Gong on behalf of China’s Ministry of Public Security. “The defendants were arrested today in California on charges including acting as unregistered foreign agents, money laundering, and bribery,” wrote the article. 

In a statement on the same day, Attorney General Merrick Garland said the Chinese government had again tried and failed to target the CCP’s critics overseas. “The Justice Department will continue to investigate, disrupt, and prosecute efforts by the PRC government to silence its critics and extend the reaches of its regime onto U.S. soil,” wrote the statement.

According to a criminal complaint filed by federal prosecutors, defendants John Chen and Lin Feng had paid an IRS agent to get the agency to “strip a Falun Gong nonprofit group of its tax-exempt status. Chen and Feng are both Los Angeles residents, while the former is a U.S. citizen, and the latter is a Chinese citizen.”

Chen planned the scheme in January 2023, saying that it could further the Chinese government’s aim to “topple” Falun Gong, a faith group suppressed by the CCP. “Falun Gong practitioners across China are subject to widespread surveillance, arbitrary detention, imprisonment, and torture, and they are at a high risk of extrajudicial execution,” wrote a Freedom House 2017 report.

More specifically, Chen and Feng worked with a Chinese-government official to submit a whistleblower complaint to the IRS, claiming that the Falun Gong group was abusing its nonprofit status. “Christopher Essick, the FBI agent who wrote the criminal complaint, strongly suggests that a Tianjin-based officer with the Chinese Ministry of Public Security’s 610 Office coordinated the plot. That cell is tasked with carrying out Beijing’s repression campaigns against Falun Gong practitioners,” explained the National Review article.

In early May, the two defendants met with an undercover officer who pretended to be an IRS agent involved with the tax agency’s whistleblower program. The two defendants promised to pay the person they thought to be an IRS agent $50,000 to open an audit into the Falun Gong organization. Essick stated in the criminal report that the report submitted by Chen and Feng would likely not have otherwise resulted in the elimination of the Falun Gong group’s nonprofit status.

“This month, Chen and Feng each traveled to China and returned with thousands of dollars in cash to use in the bribery scheme. Before his arrest, Chen told the undercover officer on May 18 that he and Feng would travel to China a few more times this summer to bring back money for the bribe,” the report continued.

The Justice Department is currently prosecuting several other Chinese-government transnational repression cases. Most of them involve stalking and harassing Chinese dissidents on U.S. soil. “The scheme announced today is also not the first time that alleged Chinese agents have tried to use bribery to infiltrate U.S.-government agencies and advance harassment plots,” concluded the National Review article.

“Other cases brought in 2022 by federal prosecutors have seen the attempted use of bribes to procure sensitive DOJ documents about the prosecution of Huawei and to obtain personal information about U.S.-based dissidents.”