American Journalist Thomas Pauken II Gets Two Years for Acting as Illegal Chinese Agent

A federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia sentenced Thomas Weir Pauken II, 50, to two years in prison Tuesday for acting as an illegal agent of the Chinese government inside the United States, according to the U.S. Justice Department. Pauken also received three years of supervised release with a ban on overseas travel.

Pauken pleaded guilty in June to violating federal law by working at the direction of Chinese intelligence without notifying the U.S. attorney general. His lawyer, Charles Burnham, said Pauken is not appealing and "has accepted responsibility and respects the court's sentence."

A Decade in Beijing's State Media

Pauken moved to China in 2010 and built a career as a journalist and commentator for state-run outlets, including broadcaster CCTV, according to the Associated Press. He most recently worked as an editor for Xinhua, China's state news agency, a job he held since 2024. He wrote under the pen name Tom McGregor, a choice his father requested to avoid tying the family name to his son's work in China, the Washington Examiner reported.

That father is Tom Pauken, a Vietnam veteran who served in the Reagan administration and chaired the Texas Republican Party in the mid-1990s before running for governor, according to the South China Morning Post.

How the Recruitment Happened

Prosecutors said Pauken was recruited in 2017 by a woman identified in court filings as "Cathy," who initially told him she worked for a think tank before he learned she was tied to China's Ministry of State Security, Breitbart reported. From 2019 until his arrest, Pauken produced reports for Cathy on U.S.-China relations that she told him were being read by Chinese President Xi Jinping, according to an FBI affidavit filed by Special Agent Timothy J. Healy and cited by ABC News.

Cathy paid Pauken at least $100,000 over roughly seven years, prosecutor Eli Ross said at sentencing, according to Politico. Payments were often wired to his wife's bank accounts, and Cathy typically covered his travel to the U.S., court filings show.

Beyond writing reports, Cathy tasked Pauken with recruiting Americans who might hand over sensitive information. In one instance, he gave a person identified as "Person 1" a Samsung phone, a laptop, and passwords for Signal, Telegram and NetDisk, according to the affidavit.

The Arrest

The FBI arrested Pauken in February at a Crowne Plaza Hotel near Dulles International Airport, just before he was scheduled to fly back to China, Breitbart reported. Days earlier, he had allegedly offered $10,000 and a SIM card to an unnamed Trump administration official he'd met at a political event in the summer of 2023, encouraging that person to make contact with Cathy, whom Pauken believed to be a Chinese intelligence officer.

Pauken told investigators he was "80 percent sure" the official would eventually hand over classified information to China, though he claims he advised against it, according to WTOP. He had also been stopped by Customs and Border Protection agents when he re-entered the U.S. in January 2025.

Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Eisenberg said Pauken "betrayed his country for money" and "exploited his U.S. citizenship and corresponding ability to travel to the U.S. without restriction." Roman Rozhavsky, assistant director of the FBI's Counterintelligence and Espionage Division, called the case a warning that "anyone operating as an agent of a foreign government against the U.S. will be found by the FBI and held accountable."

The Failed Double-Agent Attempt

Politico's Josh Gerstein reported a detail missing from other coverage: prosecutor Eli Ross told the court the FBI had at one point tried unsuccessfully to flip Pauken into a double agent. Pauken discussed his China work with the bureau but did not follow its instructions afterward, and his contact with his Chinese handler continued regardless.

Both prosecutors and Pauken's defense agreed he never passed along classified U.S. information. Still, in court Pauken told Judge Leonie Brinkema, "I learned a lot of secrets and I did tell the Chinese about these secrets," calling his conduct "wrong," "shocking" and "terrible." He said he believed he was helping improve U.S.-China relations. "I thought I was helping, but now I realize I could've caused even more damage, including war," he said, according to Politico.

Brinkema, a Clinton appointee, was unmoved by the mitigation. "Don't underplay what happened here," she told Pauken, calling the offense "a very serious offense" even absent a classified-information breach.

Court filings also describe two other contacts who told Pauken they worked for Japan's government, though he suspected they were Chinese operatives, and a Wuhan-based group that allegedly paid him to research the Justice Department's technological resources for what he believed could be used in cyberattacks, according to Breitbart. Those threads were not part of the charged conduct and remain undetailed in the public record.

The identity of the Trump administration official Pauken tried to recruit, along with "Person 1," has not been disclosed. Whether that person faces any consequence, and whether the FBI's failed double-agent effort draws further scrutiny from Congress, remains an open question as the case closes.