By Jonathan Stempel, Sarah N. Lynch, and Karen Freifeld
NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. prosecutors charged two Chinese nationals with trying to obstruct the prosecution of Chinese telecommunications company Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, part of a broader crackdown on what they called attempts to exert illegal influence. in the United States.
Chinese nationals Guochun He and Zheng Wang were charged in a criminal complaint dated October 20 and made public on Monday. The court documents did not name the company, but a person familiar with the investigation said they were trying to intervene in the Huawei prosecution.
In February 2020, the Department of Justice announced that Huawei had been charged in a superseding indictment with violating the Missile Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
A Huawei spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment on Monday.
“The Department of Justice will not tolerate efforts by any foreign power to undermine the rule of law upon which our democracy is based,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a news conference.
Prosecutors also unveiled allegations against four Chinese nationals in what they called a long-running intelligence campaign.
The complaint against He and Wang alleges that they tried to obtain confidential information about witnesses, trial evidence and any potential new charges the company might face.
To do this, he claims they tried to recruit someone from a US law enforcement agency who they thought would help them spy for China.
The recruit, referred to only as “GE-1,” was actually working as a double agent for the United States under FBI supervision, the complaint said.
Beginning in October 2021, he and Wang paid the recruit $14,000 plus $600 in jewelry in exchange for what they believed was confidential information related to the Justice Department’s investigation and prosecution of the company, the complaint said.
According to the complaint, He and Wang first began trying to access nonpublic information related to the Justice Department’s investigation when the company was first charged in 2019.
But their activity escalated in the summer of 2021, where He asked GE-1 for details of meetings with the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York as prosecutors discussed preparations for a jury trial.
In response, GE-1 passed him a piece of paper that appeared to be marked classified. That page was supposed to discuss a plan by federal investigators to arrest two of the company’s China-based executives.
In exchange for that site, Ai paid GE-1 $41,000 in bitcoins, the complaint states.
Later that year, GE-1 also switched to a second page that allegedly also discussed legal strategy, including the use of several cooperating witnesses for the prosecution.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York and Sarah N. Lynch in Washington; Editing by Scott Malone, Jonathan Oatis and David Gregorio)
