An elderly Chinese-born engineer convicted of economic espionage for hoarding sensitive documents that included space shuttle details faced sentencing yesterday, with prosecutors seeking a 20-year term.
A judge found Dongfan “Greg” Chung, 74, guilty in July of six federal counts of economic espionage and other charges for keeping 300,000 pages of sensitive papers in his home. The documents also included information about the fueling system for a booster rocket.
Despite Chung’s age, prosecutors have requested a 20-year sentence, in part to send a message to other would-be spies.
Assistant US Attorney Greg Staples noted in sentencing papers that Chung amassed a personal wealth of more than US$3 million while betraying his adopted country.
“The [People’s Republic of China] is bent on stealing sensitive information from the United States and shows no sign of relenting,” Staples wrote. “Only strong sentences offer any hope of dissuading others from helping the PRC get that technology.”
Chung’s attorney, Thomas Bienert, did not return a call for comment. He has said his client would appeal.
Defense attorneys also filed a motion last week accusing prosecutors of withholding a report about an FBI interview with a Chinese professor with whom Chung corresponded.
The attorneys requested an evidentiary hearing yesterday on the matter. It was unclear if US District Judge Cormac Carney would grant the motion.
The government accused Chung, a stress analyst with high-level clearance, of using his 30-year career at Boeing Co and Rockwell International to steal the documents. They said investigators found papers stacked throughout Chung’s house that included sensitive information about the booster rocket — documents that employees were ordered to lock away at the end of each day. They said Boeing invested US$50 million in the technology over a five-year period.
During the non-jury trial, Chung’s lawyers argued that he may have violated Boeing policy by bringing the papers home, but he didn’t break any laws by doing so, and the US government couldn’t prove he had given secret information to China.
In his ruling, Carney wrote that the notion that Chung was merely a pack rat was “ludicrous” and said the evidence showed that he had been passing information to Chinese officials as a spy.
The government believes Chung began spying for the Chinese in the late 1970s, a few years after he became a naturalized US citizen and was hired by Rockwell International.
Chung worked for Rockwell until it was bought by Boeing in 1996.
Kouri Richins, a Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband is to serve a life sentence for his murder without the possibility of parole, a judge ruled on Wednesday. Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing a cocktail given to her husband, Eric Richins, with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022. A jury also found her guilty of four other felonies, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Feb. 14, 2022, with a
‘PERSONAL MISTAKES’: Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison A southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government and has resigned from her city position, officials said on Monday. Eileen Wang (王愛琳), mayor of Arcadia, was charged last month with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favorable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected
DELA ROSA CASE: The whereabouts of the senator, who is wanted by the ICC, was unclear, while President Marcos faces a political test over the senate situation Philippine authorities yesterday were seeking confirmation of reports that a top politician wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) had fled, a day after gunfire rang out at the Philippine Senate where he had taken refuge fearing his arrest. Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, the former national police chief and top enforcer of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs,” has been under Senate protection and is wanted for crimes against humanity, the same charges Duterte is accused of. “Several sources confirmed that the senator, Senator Bato, is no longer in the Senate premises, but we are still getting confirmation,” Presidential
HELP DENIED? The US Department of State said that the Cuban leadership refuses to allow the US to provide aid to Cubans, ‘who are in desperate need of assistance’ US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday said that Cuba’s leadership must change, as Washington renewed an offer of US$100 million in aid if the communist nation agrees to cooperate. Cuba has been suffering severe economic tumult led by an energy shortage that plunged 65 percent of the country into darkness on Tuesday. Cuba’s leaders have blamed US sanctions, but Rubio, a Cuban American and critic of the government established by Fidel Castro, said the system was to blame, including corruption by the military. “It’s a broken, nonfunctional economy, and it’s impossible to change it. I wish it were different,” he told
RSS