Michael McMahon was hired as a private investigator and said he was unaware he was hired by the Chinese communist regime.
Former New York City Police Sergeant Michal McMahon was sentenced to 18 months in prison on April 16 after being found guilty of acting as an illegal agent of China.
McMahon was one of three men who were convicted in 2023 of stalking Xu Jin, a former Chinese official, and his family living in New Jersey as part of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s global campaign, called “Operation Fox Hunt,” to force the repatriation of alleged criminals.
He is the last to receive his sentence.
His co-defendants, Zheng Congying, a lawful permanent U.S. resident, and Zhu Yong, a Chinese retiree, were already sentenced to 16 months and two years, respectively, in January. His ruling was previously expected to come later this year. Zheng was scheduled to turn himself in on April 22 to serve his prison time.
The former police officer pleaded not guilty to all charges, stating he was led to think he was just working for a company trying to recover embezzled funds. He said he would not have taken the job if he had known the Chinese communist government was behind it.
“I was unwittingly used,” he said in court.
He secured the support of two Republican congressmen, Michael Lawler (R-N.Y.) and Pete Sessions (R-Texas), who wrote a letter to U.S. District Judge Pamela Chen urging her in vain to spare him from prison time.
McMahon was hired as a private investigator to surveil Xu, who was accused of corruption by the CCP and was found to have played a key role in finding Xu’s address.
He was convicted in 2023 of acting as an illegal foreign agent and conspiracy to commit interstate stalking, and on April 16, 2024, he was found guilty by a federal jury in Brooklyn of interstate stalking and acting as an agent of communist China.
McMahon was found not guilty of conspiracy to act as a foreign agent.
“McMahon, a former law enforcement officer who swore an oath to protect the public, went rogue and dishonorably engaged in a scheme at the direction of the People’s Republic of China,” John Durham, the top federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, said in an April 16 statement on the sentencing.
The convictions of McMahon and his codefendants were part of the federal government’s push to crack down on what officials called the CCP’s transnational repression.
“The conviction of these three defendants—including a retired NYPD sergeant—is yet another powerful reminder of the Chinese government’s ongoing, pervasive, and illegal behavior here in the United States,” then-Assistant Director Suzanne Turner of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division said in 2023.
Former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Christopher Wray said in 2020 that CCP leader Xi Jinping was using Operation Fox Hunt to target individuals all over the world viewed as a threat to the communist Chinese regime.
Frank Fang, Alex Wu, and Reuters contributed to this report.