‘Thank You Leader’: California Mayor Pleads Guilty to Working as CCP Agent

Just earlier this week, the mayor of a California city, located in northeast Los Angeles, pled guilty to illegally acting as an agent of China. She was the mayor of an American city, while actually being an out-and-out agent for the CCP, even going so far as to call a Chinese official her quote-unquote leader. Let's go through the nuances and the details of her case, because through her case, we can see the broader techniques that the CCP uses to basically infiltrate American society. And of course, as always, if you appreciate content like this, please do smash those like and subscribe buttons, so this video can reach ever more people via the YouTube algorithm. Thank you so much for that. To start with, the city in question is called Arcadia. It's located about 13 miles northeast of downtown LA. And it's a fairly Asian area, evidenced by the fact that 65% of the people living there identify themselves as being Asian. Now, four years ago, back in November of 2022, Ms. Eileen Wong ran for city council. Ms. Eileen Wong, she was born in Chengdu, which is the capital of Sichuan province in southwestern China. And prior to entering politics, she ran a tutoring center called Little Stanford Academy for students K through 12. Ms. Wong also founded and led a Chinese-American chamber of commerce. Now, she eventually did win that election, and she became a councilwoman. And the way that it works over in Arcadia is that they have a five-person city council, and the position of mayor rotates among those five individuals. And so in 2025, it was her turn, and therefore, Ms. Wong became mayor. So far, all good. It's a true American come-up story. You have an immigrant moving here from a foreign country, establishing roots, starting up a business, running for office, getting elected, and now she can serve her community. Great. The only problem is that the quote-unquote community that she was serving actually appeared to be the Chinese Communist Party. You see, problems began to appear around Ms. Eileen Wong all the way back in the year 2024. That was when her campaign manager, who also happened to be her fiancé, was arrested, charged, and sentenced by the feds for working as a Chinese spy. And a review of the court documents from that case, it shows that Ms. Wong's political rise was a thrilling prospect for the Chinese Communist cadres over in China. Quote, Helping Wong win the midterm election, Sun said in a draft report to Chinese officials, was his proudest achievement as someone who persists in resisting any hostile forces that undermine the friendship of U.S.-China relations and Chinese secessionist forces. Other court documents in his case also show that Mr. Mike Sun, he was working, again, on U.S. soil, to disrupt Taiwanese-related events, to disrupt the activities of Falun Gong practitioners, who usually hold events to expose the crimes of the CCP. He was running a pro-CCP media outlet, which became a bigger issue. We'll get to that in a moment. He would also go to anti-CCP protests on American streets and take photos of the people protesting and send those photos to a Chinese official. And he was trying to raise money from Beijing to organize a pro-China demonstration. Basically, Ms. Wong's fiancé was just straight up doing the bidding of China here in America. All right, just to pause here for a super quick moment. If you've watched our program, Facts Matter, then you know that we focus on one thing, which is the facts. Not speculation, not narratives, just what the data shows. 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However, that all changed on Monday when the Justice Department released this notice right here, announcing that Ms. Aileen Wong, the current mayor of Arcadia, was also being federally charged with acting as an illegal agent for the People's Republic of China. The crux of the indictment against her had to do with that pro-CCP media outlet that they were running. Basically, it was a propaganda website that they beautifully named the U.S. News Center. Here's what the Justice Department wrote. And for your reference, when they say PRC, that refers to the People's Republic of China. promoting pro-PRC propaganda in the United States. Wong and Sun worked together to operate U.S. News Center, a website that purported to be a news source for the local Chinese American community. Wong and Sun received and executed directives from PRC government officials to post pro-PRC content on the website. And with the specific examples that the feds were able to provide, it's kind of egregious how much of a clearinghouse this website was for the CCP. And it's also clear how much of a go-getter Miss Aileen Wong actually was, evidenced by the speed at which she would disseminate the propaganda. Quote, for example, in June of 2021, a PRC official contacted Wong and other individuals via the WeChat encrypted messaging application with pre-written news articles, including a PRC official written essay in the LA Times that stated, China stands on the Xinjiang issue. There is no genocide in Xinjiang. There is no such thing as forced labor in any production activity, including cotton production. Spreading such rumor to defame China, destroy Xinjiang safety and stability, weaken local economy, suppress China's development. Minutes later, Wong posted the article on her own website and responded to the PRC official with a link to the article on her website. The others in the group chat did the same. The PRC official responded so fast. Thank you, everyone. Then a few months after that, she referred to one of the Chinese officials that she was communicating with as her, quote, unquote, leader. Quote, in August of 2021, Wong and three other members of the same group chat shared links to the same article on their respective, quote, unquote, news websites, after which the PRC official thanked them for their reporting. At the PRC's official's request, Wong made edits to the article, sent the official a link to the article reflecting the request to change, then sent the official a screenshot showing the article had been viewed 15,128 times. In response, the official messaged, great. Wong replied, thank you, leader. And then a few months after that, Ms. Wong was also communicating with another man who was later convicted of being a CCP foreign asset himself. And she was doing his bidding, too. Quote, in November of 2021, Wong communicated with John Chen, a high-level member of the PRC intelligence apparatus who regularly attended elite Chinese Communist Party functions, including military parades, and met personally with PRC President Xi Jinping, according to court documents. Wong asked Chen to post a news article from her website and wrote, this is what the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wants to send. And the man that was referenced in that part of the court documents, by the way, Mr. John Chen, we did a whole entire full-length episode on his shenanigans alone. But basically, he was the guy that was caught trying to bribe an IRS agent. And he did that in order to have the IRS open up a fake investigation against Falun Gong practitioners here in America. Now, we also covered the persecution of Falun Gong in much greater depth in a previous episode, too. But the gist of it is that starting in the year 1999, the CCP, under then President Jiang Zemin, launched a brutal crackdown on the nearly 100 million Chinese people who were practicing Falun Gong, that particular meditation discipline. And since then, within mainland China, practitioners have been arrested, they've been beaten, they've been thrown into re-education camps, labor camps, women have been raped, many have been killed, and there's even substantial and voluminous evidence that the CCP has built an industrial-scale organ harvesting operation in order to profit off the physical bodies of the practitioners that they've imprisoned. There was a great movie released not too long ago on this topic called State Organs. I was actually honored to host one of the Q&A panels with the director of the film here in New York. Regardless, though, after the persecution began, the Falun Gong practitioners who were able to leave China, they started various projects in order to help clarify the truth on the situation, expose the persecution, and to basically expose the Chinese Communist Party more broadly. And among those projects was a dance company called Shen Yun. I'm sure you've seen their ads before, including in our program. And their dances, they, for one, present China as it was before communism, but also, as a part of each performance, they have multiple numbers which directly expose the CCP and their crimes against humanity. And of course, the CCP has taken issue with that, which is exactly why they sent Mr. John Chen to attempt to bribe an IRS agent to get Shen Yun's non-profit status revoked. However, John Chen was caught and sentenced to prison. But interestingly, among the mass of court filings in these various cases, there was one court document where Mr. John Chen, he put together a report for Chinese officials back home regarding this Eileen Wang winning her election, and here's what he wrote. Quote, ...fighting Taiwanese independence forces and Falun Gong practitioners in the local area. John Chen also proposed a plan to disrupt a new congressman's upcoming visit to Taiwan. He also flagged Falun Gong participation in the Rose Parade and Independence Day Parade, and allegedly promised to counter that by creating their own drum band and float, and they applied for $80,000 in funding from Chinese officials to make it happen. Essentially, on a macro level, this whole thing appears to just be a giant cobweb of people here in America trying to advance the soft power interests of the Chinese Communist Party, going so far as to request $80,000 to create a drum band to compete with the Falun Gong practitioners in a local march. And this mayor, the mayor of Arcadia, appeared to just be a single cog in this larger machine, although being an elected official, and especially the mayor of an L.A. suburb, that was a big deal and that was a big win for the CCP until it was exposed and she now had to step down, resign, and then in terms of the next steps, well, she pled guilty, she accepted a plea agreement, and she now faces the prospect of upwards of 10 years in prison. Once she gets her sentence, I will give you an update on that. Until then, though, if you would like to read more about any of these various cases, and or if you'd like to watch that prior episode we did regarding that IRS bribery scheme, which in my opinion, that was a great episode. We went into good depth and we had the, we went and pulled out the text messages from the court documents and we created like a visual of how the CCP agents were coordinating with the fake IRS agent who was actually a FBI double agent. It was a good episode. If you want to check it out, I'll throw a link to it down in the description box below. But this is what the CCP is up to on American soil. They are not only in the community trying to affect public opinion, but they're also creating fake news websites with innocuous names like the U.S. News Center. But more alarmingly, they're actually getting their people into office. So there you have it. If you again would like to go deeper into any of my research links, they're down in the description box below. Right below those like and subscribe buttons, both of which you hope you've already smashed. Until next time, I'm your host Roman from the Epoch Times. Stay informed. Most importantly, stay free.