Five Men Indicted in Connection with PRC Repression Scheme Targeting Chinese Dissidents in the U.S.
Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
On July 6, a federal grand jury in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York indicted five individuals with various crimes in connection with “a transnational repression scheme” targeting critics of the Chinese government. The superseding indictment adds two new defendants—Craig Miller, a 15-year employee of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Derrick Taylor, a retired DHS law enforcement officer who later worked as a private investigator—to a March 2022 indictment of Fan “Frank” Liu, Matthew Ziburis, and Qiang “Jason” Sun. The Justice Department alleges that the group stalked, harassed, and spied on critics of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), targeting the dissidents on behalf of China’s Ministry of State Security.
The grand jury charged Liu and Ziburis with conspiring to act as agents of the Chinese government; Liu, Ziburis, and Sun with conspiring to engage in interstate harassment and criminal use of a means of identification; and Liu and Sun with conspiring to bribe an Internal Revenue Service employee to obtain the tax records of a Chinese dissident in the United States. Both Miller and Taylor face charges of obstruction of justice, and Taylor is charged with making a false statement to the FBI.
The complaint alleges that former DHS employees Miller and Taylor lied to FBI agents about their improper use of federal law enforcement databases to obtain personal identifying information about dissidents. In one instance described in the complaint, Taylor and Miller allegedly helped to procure passport information about a dissident and his daughter.
You can read the indictment here and below:
