FBI May Have Been Unaware of China’s Secret Police Stations: House Select Committee

FBI Director Christopher Wray speaks during a press conference to announce an international ransomware enforcement action at the Justice Department in Washington on Jan. 26, 2023. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

The congressional committee tasked with overseeing the threat posed by China’s communist regime is demanding answers from the FBI, saying the bureau may have been unaware of secret Chinese police stations on U.S. soil until public reporting broke the story.

The House Select Committee on Strategic Competition with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sent a letter to the FBI on April 26 requesting that FBI Director Christopher Wray account for the bureau’s alleged failure to meaningfully inform the committee with details of its investigative practices on the matter.

“We expressed our concern that the FBI was not aware of the presence of [Chinese] law enforcement officials in the United States and acted only after a think tank reported on open-source information,” the letter reads, referencing previous correspondence between the committee and the FBI.

The committee sent the letter soon after the April 17 arrest of two alleged agents of the CCP who are charged with establishing an overseas police station in New York from which they carried out a systematic campaign of repression against Chinese dissidents.

The select committee’s letter states that when the FBI provided a classified briefing on the matter in March, it failed to provide any substantive insight into the issue or its methods for countering it.

“We are disappointed that the briefing failed to provide a response to any of our questions listed in our initial letter and that it did not inform Select Committee Members about the FBI’s efforts to address the very significant threat of transnational repression by the CCP,” the letter reads.

“We were disappointed that the FBI provided only vague information—virtually all of which could be found in public reporting.”

FBI May Not Have Known

The two people arrested—Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping—allegedly conspired to work as agents of the CCP and took orders from the regime to track down and silence Chinese dissidents living in the United States, according to prosecutors.

The police station they established in New York is believed to be one of more than 100 such stations operated by the CCP’s agents throughout the world, according to Safeguard Defenders, a Spain-based nonprofit.

Despite this massive presence, however, the FBI didn’t conduct a raid of the station until October 2022, one month after the existence of the facility was made public by Safeguard Defenders.

The select committee is therefore demanding from Wray a straightforward answer as to whether the FBI ever had knowledge of the facility or merely acted in reaction to public investigations.

“The threat of [Chinese communist] transnational repression schemes that target U.S. citizens—primarily Chinese Americans—undermines the foundational American principles of freedom and liberty,” the letter reads.

“United States law enforcement agencies must hold these perpetrators to account and better protect the U.S. from future threats.”

FBI officials didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.