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A US judge has officially sentenced an American journalist who spent seven years feeding reports to Chinese intelligence and trying to recruit sources inside the US government.

Getting into it: Thomas Weir Pauken II was sentenced to two years in federal prison and three years of supervised release with no overseas travel. This all started back in 2017 after he met a woman in China who called herself Cathy and said she worked as a think tank consultant. Pauken, a Texas native who moved to Beijing in 2010 and spent the next decade bouncing between Chinese state media jobs, including CCTV and Xinhua, eventually figured out that Cathy actually worked for the Ministry of State Security (MSS), a Chinese intelligence agency. He kept working for her anyway.

According to prosecutors, Cathy paid him for two things. The first was written reports on US-China relations, which she told him were being passed up to Chinese President Xi Jinping. The second was recruitment. She gave Pauken tasks to find Americans with access to sensitive or classified material, hand them laptops and cellphones so they could communicate with her directly, tell them what information she wanted, and carry their reports back to her.

The arrangement ran from at least 2019 until his arrest in February 2026. Pauken was paid at least $100,000, which was wired to his wife’s bank account, while Cathy also covered his flights to the U.S. and a family vacation to Shanghai. The couple purchased two apartments in China for a combined $400,000, and prosecutors said Pauken traveled through airports carrying burner phones and SIM cards for his sources, along with enough cash to purchase computers for them.

Other shit he did: At a political event in the summer of 2023, Pauken met a man with a security clearance who was trying to land a more senior post in the Trump administration, identified in court filings only as Person 1. He later told Customs and Border Protection and FBI agents he was “80% sure” the man would pass classified material to China, though he said he advised him not to. When Person 1 stopped producing, the MSS sent Pauken back to the US to restart the relationship.

Prosecutors said he offered Person 1 a $10,000 bonus in February 2026, paid through covert means, to keep supplying information. Days later the FBI picked him up at a Crowne Plaza near Dulles International Airport, one night before his flight back to China. He pleaded guilty in June.

Before sentencing, Pauken told the judge, “I learned a lot of secrets and I did tell the Chinese about these secrets. I thought I was helping, but now I realize I could’ve caused even more damage, including war.”

Pauken’s father, the 82-year-old former Texas Republican Party chairman and Reagan administration official who served as a military intelligence officer in Vietnam, sat through the sentencing and brushed past reporters on his way out.

In a statement, Assistant Director Roman Rozhavsky of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division 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. The sentencing provides a clear warning: anyone operating as an agent of a foreign government against the U.S. will be found by the FBI and held accountable.”