Thomas Weir Pauken II, an American citizen who worked in China from 2019 to 2026, was sentenced on Tuesday to two years in prison for “acting as an agent of a foreign government within the United States.”
“Pauken exploited his U.S. citizenship and corresponding ability to travel to the U.S. without restriction in order to support Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) operations, recruiting, and gathering of sensitive information from potential assets,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg said.
“Pauken betrayed his country for money. The National Security Division is committed to holding accountable anyone who aids or abets Chinese espionage efforts,” Eisenberg added.
Pauken, 50, was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) at the Crowne Plaza Hotel near Dulles Airport in Washington, DC, in February 2026. A few days before the arrest, he allegedly offered a $10,000 payment to an unidentified Trump administration official to use their security clearance to provide Chinese intelligence with sensitive information. Pauken had been scheduled to fly from Dulles back to China the day before he was taken into custody.
The individual Pauken was allegedly trying to bribe, identified in court documents as “Person 1,” was a source Pauken met at a “political event” in the summer of 2023. The source provided Pauken with information to relay to China for a while, but then stopped. Prosecutors said China’s MSS ordered its reliable agent, Pauken, to persuade Person 1 to resume providing information.
Both prosecutors and defense attorneys said Pauken was motivated by avarice and “low self-esteem,” rather than ideology. His father was a Vietnam veteran, an official in the Reagan administration, and chair of the Texas Republican Party in the mid-1990s. According to his attorney, the younger Tom Pauken moved to China in 2010 because “his life was a mess and he needed a clean slate.”
Pauken evidently had a successful career as a writer and videographer for Chinese media outlets for about seven years. His last aboveboard job was working as an editor for China’s state-run Xinhua news agency.
In 2017, Pauken was allegedly recruited as an agent for Chinese military intelligence by a woman identified as “Cathy” in court filings. Cathy initially claimed she conducted research for a legitimate think tank operation.
Pauken also allegedly did some intelligence-gathering work for two other contacts in China who told him they worked for the government of Japan, although he suspected they were actually Chinese operatives, and he was allegedly hired by a group in the now-infamous city of Wuhan to produce reports on the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and its technological resources. Pauken said this group intended to use his information to mount cyberattacks against the U.S. government.
Pauken’s main gig was working for “Cathy,” who paid him at least $100,000 for his services between 2019 and 2026, and covered his travel expenses to the United States for meetings with potential intelligence assets.
Pauken pleaded guilty to the charges against him in June.
“Thomas Pauken knowingly assisted a foreign adversary in actively subverting the government of the United States for his own financial gain,” First Assistant U.S. attorney Theophani K. Stamos of the Eastern District of Virginia said on Tuesday.
“This was not an isolated act; Pauken continued his course of conduct to aid China for seven years. It is unconscionable that an American citizen would not only undermine the interests of the United States, but also facilitate others in doing so,” Stamos said.
“This case illustrates the lengths to which the Chinese Communist Party will go to undermine our democratic institutions, and it also demonstrates the FBI’s resolve to defend the homeland from threats to our national security,” said Assistant Director Roman Rozhavsky of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division.
“He did it because he got paid. He made a lot of money, and he did it for the money,” Justice Department prosecutor Eli Ross said at Pauken’s sentencing hearing in Alexandria, Virginia.
Defense attorney Charles Burnham claimed Pauken was also motivated by a “misplaced and naive, but sincere belief” that working for Chinese intelligence might help improve relations between the United States and China. He said Chinese spymasters shrewdly played on Pauken’s insecurities and deep need to prove he was important.
“He was a pawn. He was manipulated,” Burnham argued. “He wasn’t betraying America – he was preventing World War III.”
“I’m sorry. I obviously did wrong things. I’m not disputing the facts of what the prosecutor said. I do dispute the motive. I thought I was helping, but now I realize I could have caused more damage,” Pauken told the judge at his sentencing hearing.
Prosecutors argued that Pauken certainly knew what he was doing because he carried a sizable arsenal of burner phones and other electronics that could be used by people he recruited to pass information back to China, plus the cash he needed to bribe them. He funneled his pay from Chinese intelligence into his wife’s bank account.
The judge felt that seven years of working as a Chinese agent was an awfully long time to keep repeating an innocent mistake caused by misguided idealism. Rozhavsky hoped Pauken’s two-year prison sentence, to be followed by 36 months of supervised release without overseas travel, would provide a “clear warning” to others that “anyone operating as an agent of a foreign government against the U.S. will be found by the FBI and held accountable.”
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