Donald Trump granted a presidential pardon on Friday to a former New York police sergeant who was convicted of helping China try to scare an ex-official into going back to his homeland, a prominent case in US authorities’ efforts to combat what they claim are Beijing’s far-flung efforts to repress critics.
Michael McMahon was sentenced this spring to 18 months in prison for his role in what a federal judge called “a campaign of transnational repression”. He insisted he was innocent, saying he was “unwittingly used” when he took what he thought was a straightforward private-investigator gig. McMahon said he was told he was working for a Chinese construction company – not the nation’s government.
A White House official, speaking on Friday on condition of anonymity to discuss a pardon that hasn’t been publicly announced, pointed to McMahon’s explanation that he’d been misled. The official also noted that McMahon earned dozens of commendations before a 2001 injury ended his 14-year New York police department career.
McMahon’s lawyer, Lawrence Lustberg, said the pardon “corrects a horrible injustice”.
“I will always believe that it was the Chinese government that victimized Mike, a true hero cop, whom our government should have celebrated and honored, rather than indicted,” Lustberg said by email.
The Brooklyn-based federal prosecutors’ office that brought the case declined to comment. Trump has issued a series of clemencies to his supporters throughout his second presidency in what has been a broader rebuke against a justice system that had convicted him of fraud across multiple cases before he was re-elected.
A jury had convicted McMahon, 58, of charges that included acting as an illegal foreign agent and stalking. He was released from prison to a halfway house earlier this year and was back at his New Jersey home on Friday, his attorney said.
McMahon had gotten support from US House members Mike Lawler of New Jersey and Pete Sessions of Texas, both Republican allies of Trump. They wrote to the court last year to back McMahon’s assertions of innocence and urge the judge to spare him prison.
Lawler cheered the pardon on Friday, writing on X that the former officer “never should have been prosecuted to begin with”. A message seeking comment was sent to Sessions’ office.
McMahon was one of three men convicted at the first trial stemming from US claims about China’s decade-old “Operation Fox Hunt” initiative. His co-defendants, both Chinese citizens, also were sentenced to prison, where they remain. Messages seeking comment were sent on Friday to attorneys for the men, who denied the charges.
Three other people pleaded guilty in the case, and another five defendants remain at large, believed to be in China.
US authorities have viewed “Operation Fox Hunt”, in at least some instances, as a tool of “transnational repression” – a term for sending government operatives to harass, threaten and silence dissidents living abroad.
Beijing says it is just trying to repatriate fugitives, including corrupt officials, and denies making threats to secure their return.
The case involving McMahon centered on a former Chinese city official named Xu Jin who moved with his family to suburban New Jersey in 2010. The Chinese government has accused him and his wife of bribery. The couple denied the allegation and said he was unjustly targeted because of internal politics within China’s communist government.
China has no extradition treaty with the US so it couldn’t legally compel Xu’s return. Instead, US prosecutors said, Beijing engineered years of creepy outreach and innuendo to try to induce him to come back.
Hired by co-defendants to locate Xu, McMahon searched law enforcement and government databases and conducted surveillance. He and Lustberg acknowledged that McMahon missed “red flags” about the $11,000 job, but they said he was duped by his clients and didn’t foresee that the information would be used to hound Xu.
“I never thought for one minute I was working for China, stalking anyone,” McMahon said at his sentencing.
Prosecutors and trial witnesses said Xu was subjected to a pressure campaign that included disparaging Facebook messages to friends of his adult daughter, a slew of letters to a relative in New Jersey and a startling visit from his octogenarian father, who was flown in from China to press his son to return.
Finally, Xu’s wife found a note on their front door that read, in translation: “If you are willing to go back to the mainland and spend 10 years in prison, your wife and children will be all right. That’s the end of this matter!”
Xu said at the trial that before seeing the note, he thought the Chinese Communist party’s overtures were “only a mental threat to me”.
“However, when I saw that note, I realized that it had become a physical threat,” Xu testified, through a court interpreter.
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