News analysis
When U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers stopped Thomas Weir Pauken II at Washington Dulles International Airport in January 2025, they found him carrying two cellphones, a laptop and $3,000 in cash, according to the FBI affidavit. He told them he had flown in to recruit an American chasing a job in the incoming Trump administration, so the man could pass information to Communist Chinese intelligence. That admission at the border is why months later he pled guilty to acting as an agent of the Chinese government and now faces up to 10 years in prison.
For more than a decade, Pauken lived in China and wrote commentary as Tom McGregor for the state broadcasters China Global Television Network, China Radio International, and China Central Television, before taking an editing job at the state-run Xinhua News Agency. For the last seven of those years, the affidavit says, he was also recruiting people in the United States who could feed information to China’s Ministry of State Security, the country’s main civilian intelligence service.
Pauken described his activity to the agents in detail, the kind of admission most foreign-agent cases never produce, and the filings read as a record of how a foreign service turns a well-placed American into an asset.
Targeted for GOP ties
The elder Thomas Pauken had served in the Reagan administration and chaired the Texas Republican Party through the mid-1990s, and from the start his son’s Chinese contacts pressed for information about him. The pen name grew from that same pressure; Pauken wrote as Tom McGregor at his father’s request, so his father’s name would not be tied to his work in China.
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A foreigner attached to that pedigree could reach into American conservative circles a Chinese intelligence officer never could, which is why the handlers cultivated him and, in 2022 or 2023, had him sit for a polygraph asking whether he worked for the CIA.
The elder Pauken told nonprofit news outlet NOTUS in a phone interview that his son was a naive man who had been pulled into something larger than he understood. His son had given up no American secrets, he said, and the real offense was nothing worse than a failure to file the right paperwork.
Multi-channel operation
The relationship that drove most of the work ran through a handler, a woman Pauken knew only as “Cathy.” A man who worked as a speechwriter for Xi Jinping introduced the two in 2017, the affidavit says, and Cathy presented herself as a consultant for a think tank he placed at Shanghai’s Jiaotong or Fudan University, though he never met her at either campus. Over time he took her for an officer of the Ministry of State Security.
She set his tasks, which were to meet Americans who might supply information, hand them laptops and phones for secure contact, tell them what Beijing wanted to know, and route their reports back to her. From 2019 on she paid him at least $100,000 and covered his American trips and told him the reports he produced were read by Xi himself.
The plea record describes two other contacts, men Pauken knew as “Richard” and “William,” who told him the reports he wrote for them were bound for Japan, even as he believed the pair worked for the Chinese government; they asked him to apply to the U.S. State Department and report on his progress. A separate set of clients from Wuhan paid him for reporting on American technology and on the U.S. Justice Department, and pushed him to find an expert to help them carry out cyberespionage. That channel too, Pauken told agents, ran through a contact who “works for State Security.”
Pauken was selling access and analysis to several Chinese buyers at once, every line leading back to the Chinese state, in what amounted to a private market for whatever a well-placed foreigner could gather. The Wuhan request matters most, because asking him to recruit a cyberespionage specialist moved the operation past influence and reporting and toward direct intrusion into American institutions.
The aim was access to the US government
On his January trip when he was caught, Pauken’s plan was to meet three people, the most important a job-seeker hoping for a post in the new Trump administration.
The FBI chose not to arrest him and instead agents told him to carry on as before, to avoid arousing the suspicion of his handlers. So the delivery Cathy had ordered went ahead under the bureau’s watch. Pauken handed the man a laptop, a Samsung phone, a flash drive and a half page of yellow paper with the passwords for the encrypted apps. The man told Pauken he wanted out and when the FBI interviewed him weeks later he turned over the yellow paper.
The recruit missed the job he wanted, but by early 2026 held a position in a U.S. government agency. He told the FBI Pauken asked him only for open-source information while relaying that his clients in China kept pressing for more.
Pauken came back a year later, after the two reconnected over a possible oil deal, and in February 2026, they met at a Washington hotel. The meeting was monitored by FBI agents. In it, Pauken handed the man a SIM card and offered a $10,000 bonus to resume working for Cathy. The money would be collected as a “donation” from through a website or nonprofit. He also told him that Cathy wanted one report a week and that the information would shape state policy and reach Xi himself.
The statute Pauken pleaded to explains why the government treated all this as espionage. Section 951 of the federal criminal code makes it a crime to act inside the United States under the direction or control of a foreign government without telling the attorney general first. That sits a long way above the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the disclosure law that asks paid advocates for foreign governments merely to register.
His lawyer, Charles Burnham, worked to keep the case in that lighter register, saying Pauken had only failed to complete “certain required U.S. Government forms.” But prosecutors called it a scheme to obtain sensitive U.S. government information for Beijing.
Pauken’s defense
Burnham maintained his client had never sought classified material, yet he did not contest Judge Leonie Brinkema’s description of it as information outside the public domain.
The main challenge for the defense is the affidavit, as Pauken told agents he never personally asked anyone for classified information, even as he admitted to an arrangement with the Ministry of State Security under which he recruited the people who would, and he recalled Cathy telling him, “Tom, you are going to be the one to convince” the man to deliver it.
Burnham alleged his client was motivated by more than just money, saying Pauken had hoped the work would promote peaceful relations and advance religious freedom in China.
Xinhua and CGTN, where Pauken spent over a decade working, are outlets that exist to represent a regime known for its vast human rights abuses, particularly against faiths the Communist Party deems “illegal” like independent Christians and Falun Gong adherents.
His plea is one of several this year that follow the same pattern. Eileen Wang, until recently the mayor of Arcadia, California, admitted in May to acting as an illegal Chinese agent by running a website that posed as a news source for the Chinese American community, and she faces up to 10 years herself. Her former campaign adviser is already serving a federal term, and a New York man was convicted in May of helping run an unofficial Chinese police post in Manhattan.
Against China’s agents prosecutors now reach for the agent-control statute rather than the gentler disclosure law, a turn that followed the Justice Department’s decision in early 2025 to retire its foreign influence task force in favor of treating this work as ordinary espionage. The harsher measures may deter potential recruits from working with Beijing, limiting its ability to conduct intelligence operations against the United States.
