Matthew Ziburis and his alleged co-conspirators targeted dissidents in three states with surveillance and efforts to spread negative information about them.
A former Florida corrections officer arrested over his role in a Chinese-government stalking plot on U.S. soil pleaded guilty late last month.
That man, Matthew Ziburis, was one of five individuals indicted by the Justice Department last year in an alleged stalking and intimidation campaign targeting three Chinese dissidents across the United States.
Ziburis pleaded guilty to two counts, conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government and conspiracy to commit interstate harassment, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn, N.Y., told National Review today. Inner City Press first reported the news.
Throughout 2022 the Justice Department charged several people in various Chinese government–organized espionage schemes on U.S. soil, with several Chinese-national defendants identified by prosecutors as members of the Ministry of State Security, the main Chinese-government spy agency.
Ziburis, a resident of Oyster Bay, N.Y., who previously worked as a prison guard in Florida, is the first defendant to plead guilty in any of the cases alleging Chinese government transnational repression and malign influence that were unveiled last year.
According to the Justice Department, Ziburis and his alleged co-conspirators targeted Chinese dissidents in New York, California, and Indiana with surveillance and efforts to spread negative information about them. While unnamed in Justice Department filings, two of the victims’ identities have been revealed already: Weiming Chen, a California-based sculptor, and Arthur Liu, a dissident who left China after the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Court documents alleged that Ziburis traveled to California in 2021 to spy on Chen, who had just sculpted a work that depicted the head of Chinese leader Xi Jinping as a Covid virus. Ziburis allegedly visited the artist’s studio, planted a location-tracking device in his car, photographed him, and made audio recordings of him. The sculpture was found mysteriously destroyed in an apparent act of arson, after Ziburis discussed plans to destroy it with other defendants in the case.
That year, Ziburis also traveled to Indiana to spy on another dissident, whose name is not publicly known.
And in late 2021, Ziburis attempted to persuade Arthur Liu to give him passport information for himself and his daughter, according to the indictment.
When Ziburis phoned Liu, posing as a member of the U.S. Olympic Committee seeking passport information for himself and his daughter, Alysa, Liu declined to provide their passport numbers, he told the Associated Press in an interview last year. At the time, Alysa Liu, a figure skater, was preparing to travel to compete at the Beijing Winter Olympics with Team USA.
Arthur Liu told the AP that he felt “something fishy was going on” and that he doesn’t recall being approached in person by Ziburis, though he also told the AP that he later learned the Chinese government knew about an Instagram post by Alysa Liu about Beijing’s atrocities against Uyghurs and that she had been approached and followed by a stranger asking her to go to his apartment.
Ziburis was arrested last March, alongside alleged co-conspirator Frank Liu — the Queens, N.Y.-based founder of a Chinese-language media company and a nongovernmental organization. Other alleged members of their team included Derrick Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security employee, and Craig Miller, who was a DHS deportation officer at the time of his arrest last June. Jason Sun, the fifth defendant, who allegedly orchestrated the plot, remains at large in China, where prosecutors say he is employed by a Chinese technology company.
In a statement last July about the case, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York Breon Peace pledged to continue “to root out corrupt officials in all levels of government” and “prosecute those who act on behalf of a hostile foreign state to target the free speech of U.S. residents on American soil.”
Other plots unveiled last year by the Justice Department include a failed attempt by the Ministry of State Security to infiltrate the EDNY prosecutor’s office on behalf of Huawei, and a scheme to derail, potentially with violence, the congressional campaign of Xiong Yan, a Tiananmen Square protest leader who is now a naturalized U.S. citizen.