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The alleged leader of a secret Chinese government “police station” housed in a nondescript Manhattan building was urged to help track a prominent pro-Democracy dissident, a jury heard this week.
“Just help me verify if this person exists,” wrote Liu Rongyan, a security officer from China’s Fujian Province, to “Harry” Lu Jianwang, according to evidence revealed at Lu’s ongoing Brooklyn federal court trial.
The missive involved Xu Jie, a longtime critic of China’s government who fled the country in 2013.
“A friend is looking for him for a personal matter,” Rongyan added — punctuating her text with a sheepish grin emoji — in a March 2022 message on Chinese messaging platform WeChat.
Lu, the 64-year-old head of the America Changle Association, which advocates for immigrants hailing from China’s Fujian Province, forwarded Rongyan’s request to Keith Cheng, the leader of a separate Big Apple-based Fujian organization, trial evidence showed.
Jurors did not see any evidence during the one-week-trial about what details Jie Lu may or may not have later provided to Rongyan, his alleged Chinese government handler.
Trial evidence largely showed that the “station,” where the FBI discovered a handful of computer monitors and a ping-pong table covered in a red tablecloth, helped Fujian natives renew their Chinese driver’s licenses remotely — which Lu’s lawyer called innocuous and not a federal crime.
“If Harry Lu is an ‘agent,’ he is the worst agent ever,” His lawyer John Carman told the jury in his closing statement Tuesday morning.
Lu, a Bronx resident and naturalized US citizen, cooly observed closing statements from the defense table, where he sat in a dark suit with an American flag pin affixed to its lapel.
But Jie — who became a critic of the Beijing regime after the country’s brutal 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of its protesting citizens — took the stand and described being harassed near his Pomona, Calif., home by alleged Chinese agents both before and after Lu received the texts.
“I admire a country that has the separation of power,” said Jie, who now works as a Lyft driver and shoots YouTube videos criticizing China’s government, to jurors Monday.
“Living in America, at least we have the law as a bottom line to protect us,” Jie said.
Lu faces up to five years in prison if convicted of illegally acting as a Chinese agent by establishing the alleged spy site inside a glass-windowed six-story building at 107 East Broadway.
Prosecutors at one point dramatically unfurled for jurors a blue banner recovered from the site that declared it was a “Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station.”
But Carman insisted to the jury, “This isn’t spy time. This is not international espionage. This case is about license renewal.”
The jury will start deliberating in the case Wednesday morning.
English (US)