Former New York City Police Sergeant Michal McMahon was sentenced to 18 months in prison on April 16 after being found guilty of acting as an illegal agent of China.
McMahon was one of three men who were convicted in 2023 of stalking Xu Jin, a former Chinese official, and his family living in New Jersey as part of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s global campaign, called “Operation Fox Hunt,” to force the repatriation of alleged criminals.
He is the last to receive his sentence.
The former police officer pleaded not guilty to all charges, stating he was led to think he was just working for a company trying to recover embezzled funds. He said he would not have taken the job if he had known the Chinese communist government was behind it.
"I was unwittingly used," he said in court.
He secured the support of two Republican congressmen, Michael Lawler (R-N.Y.) and Pete Sessions (R-Texas), who wrote a letter to U.S. District Judge Pamela Chen urging her in vain to spare him from prison time.
McMahon was hired as a private investigator to surveil Xu, who was accused of corruption by the CCP and was found to have played a key role in finding Xu’s address.
McMahon was found not guilty of conspiracy to act as a foreign agent.
The convictions of McMahon and his codefendants were part of the federal government’s push to crack down on what officials called the CCP’s transnational repression.
“The conviction of these three defendants—including a retired NYPD sergeant—is yet another powerful reminder of the Chinese government’s ongoing, pervasive, and illegal behavior here in the United States,” then-Assistant Director Suzanne Turner of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division said in 2023.
Former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Christopher Wray said in 2020 that CCP leader Xi Jinping was using Operation Fox Hunt to target individuals all over the world viewed as a threat to the communist Chinese regime.