TECH: US Justice Department claims Chinese spies tried to sabotage Huawei criminal investigation

Two spies from the Peo­ple’s Repub­lic of Chi­na tried to sab­o­tage a crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion by the U.S. Depart­ment of Jus­tice into a promi­nent Chi­nese tele­coms com­pa­ny, U.S. Attor­ney Gen­er­al Mer­rick Gar­land announced Wednesday.

Bloomberg report­ed that two agents, Guochun He and Zheng Wang, were work­ing on behalf of Huawei.

Accord­ing to the com­plaint seen by the media, He and Wang tried to bribe law enforce­ment offi­cers to pro­vide infor­ma­tion about the Depart­ment of Jus­tice investigation.

Since 2017, the two have devel­oped a rela­tion­ship with an employ­ee who is not named in the law­suit. They are said to have sought to obtain details about wit­ness­es, evi­dence and pos­si­ble addi­tion­al charges against Huawei.

He and Wang con­tin­ued to pay the employ­ee for more infor­ma­tion, not know­ing that he was work­ing with an FBI dou­ble agent. The two are accused of obstruct­ing the Depart­ment of Jus­tice’s pros­e­cu­tion of Huawei.

It is unknown whether any arrests have been made.

U.S. Attor­ney Gen­er­al Mer­rick Gar­land said, “This is a fla­grant attempt by the PRC intel­li­gence agency to hold PRC-based com­pa­nies out of lia­bil­i­ty and under­mine the integri­ty of our judi­cial system.”

“The Depart­ment of Jus­tice will not tol­er­ate attempts by any for­eign pow­er to under­mine the rule of law upon which our democ­ra­cy is based. We will con­tin­ue to vig­or­ous­ly defend the rights guar­an­teed to all peo­ple in our country.”