Among the people Pauken worked with is a person identified as “Cathy”, whom the US Department of Justice (DOJ) said provided him with “taskings, including meeting with potential intelligence assets”.
Pauken and “Cathy” were introduced by a man employed as a speechwriter for Chinese President Xi Jinping during the “Trump-China trade wars” in 2017, court filings show.
The DOJ said that the US journalist received at least $100,000 (£73,000) from “Cathy” for his work.
Pauken was also instructed to travel several times between 2019 and 2025 to meet with people in the US who could provide him with information to pass on to the PRC.
The American journalist “gathered intelligence on his American targets and reported it back to his Chinese intelligence handlers,” said Assistant Director Roman Rozhavsky of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division.
Rozhavsky added that the case was an example of “the lengths to which the Chinese Communist Party will go to undermine our democratic institutions and degrade our political freedoms”.