House GOP ‘Disappointed’ by FBI’s Secrecy over Chinese Police Stations

T he House Select Committee on the CCP is pressing FBI director Christopher Wray to provide information and documents about its response to Chinese police stations in the U.S. In a letter addressed to Wray today, GOP members of the panel said they were “disappointed” by a briefing on the topic last month because it failed to answer key questions, such as whether the bureau is aware of additional Chinese police stations on U.S. soil.

The letter follows the April 18 arrests of two New Yorkers for allegedly operating a secret Chinese police station in Lower Manhattan. That illegal Chinese government law-enforcement outpost had become an object of bipartisan scrutiny after its existence was first revealed by the human-rights watchdog Safeguard Defenders last fall.

Earlier this year, House CCP Committee chairman Mike Gallagher (R., Wis.) told Wray in a letter that he is “troubled by the fact that the FBI appears to have been late to the game,” only acting in response to the Safeguard Defenders report. Members of the committee subsequently received an FBI briefing on March 30 — a few weeks before the arrests were made. A source told National Review after that briefing that while committee members got the sense that the FBI is taking this seriously, the bureau needs to do much more than what it’s doing now.

Today’s letter reveals that Gallagher and other members of the committee remain highly skeptical of the adequacy of the FBI’s response in the wake of the criminal cases brought earlier this month. While the Fuzhou police station in New York has closed, Safeguard Defenders says it has found evidence of at least three other such police stations in the U.S., whose precise locations remain unknown.

According to the House committee members, the FBI would not even say if it knows where they are.

“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 stated.

The FBI’s press office confirmed that the bureau received the letter and said it “takes very seriously any actions by a foreign power to operate illegally on U.S. soil to intimidate or threaten people living here.”

“The FBI has been sounding the alarm about the threat posed by the Chinese government for years, including its efforts to project its authoritarian view around the world,” the statement continued. “The recently announced charges in the Eastern District of New York, charging more than forty defendants with various crimes related to efforts by the People’s Republic of China to harass Chinese nationals residing in the United States, show the commitment by the FBI and our partners to use our lawful authorities to uncover and stop such illegal activity.”

Federal prosecutors said one of the defendants in the Chinese police-station case, Lu Jianwang, assisted the Chinese Ministry of Public Security’s effort to locate an unnamed dissident based in the U.S. Gallagher has called CCP repression tactics targeting Chinese nationals and Asian Americans “mafia behavior.”

“The threat of PRC transnational repression schemes that target U.S. citizens—primarily Chinese Americans—undermines the foundational American principles of freedom and liberty,” the lawmakers wrote in their letter today. “United States law enforcement agencies must hold these perpetrators to account and better protect the U.S. from future threats.”

The Select Committee members additionally told Wray in the letter today that FBI briefers last month failed to answer questions in Gallagher’s February 24 letter. These include whether the FBI was aware of the Chinese police station before the Safeguard Defenders report, what steps the FBI has taken to investigate and close the stations, and if the FBI has worked with the State Department to address the issue with Chinese officials. National Review has separately requested comment from the State Department on whether it has raised the issue with Chinese officials in the U.S., in light of evidence that the Chinese consulate general in New York sent officials to the police station. Department spokespeople, however, have repeatedly declined to comment.

Gallagher and the committee have said multiple times that they are seeking a cooperative relationship with the FBI, but as apparent frustrations mount, the committee’s oversight is growing more assertive. In a departure from the February 24 letter, which requested only a briefing from Wray, today’s letter demands documents from the bureau, in addition to another briefing before May 31.

The members requested documents and information on the FBI’s transnational-repression strategy, guidance to FBI field offices on the matter, investigations the FBI had conducted on Chinese police stations before the release of the Safeguard Defenders report, and the FBI’s collaboration with other agencies in the investigation. And they reminded Wray that their panel “has broad authority” to investigate this matter and other topics relating to the CCP’s competition with the U.S.