The FBI refers to this phenomenon as “information laundering.”
It mainly refers to spreading false information online to the point at which “it’s then adopted by more mainstream sites in an attempt to legitimize it,” a spokesperson from the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office told The Epoch Times.
“This is a generalized description of what we’ve seen at the FBI,” the spokesperson said.
Information laundering is a textbook component of disinformation, the term used by the communist regime in Soviet Russia, according to Ronald Rychlak, a law professor at the University of Mississippi and expert on Soviet disinformation.
“A key component of disinformation is it has to come from a reliable source,” he told The Epoch Times. “It’s not legitimate if it comes from the Chinese communist government. It was not legitimate if it came from the Soviet newspaper during the height of the Soviet Union.
“It has to be placed in a news outlet, with a source, with a person who people accept as being legitimate.”
A real disinformation operation requires a gradual process, he said.
“You can’t just go to The New York Times, The Washington Post, or The Epoch Times or whatever, and say: ‘Here’s a story. Publish it.’ You have to have it come from multiple sources,” he said.
The Soviets often introduced false information through industry newsletters, local magazines, and newspapers in the United States that were always hungry for content.
“You get this going to six or seven different news outlets. Pretty soon, a reliable source or a reliable person reads it in three different places and repeats it,” Rychlak said.
“Those first stories would not rise to the level of what the Soviet intelligence bureau would consider disinformation because they weren’t really trustworthy or reliable. They were laying the groundwork to get to the level where people would accept it to be reliable.”
Another step is to gradually influence reporters at major news media outlets to predispose them to pick up the false narrative.
“The reporter may very well think that he or she is just being a good reporter, investigating leads, looking into things, not being aware that someone is laying breadcrumbs down, trying to lead you in a particular direction,” Rychlak said.
“They don’t want the American reporter, the Western reporter, to cooperate with them. They want them to believe in their heart that they are being a good journalist doing the right thing and reporting accurately.
“They just want to mislead them so that they are not, in fact, reporting accurately.”
It may involve cultivating people over an extended period, intending for them to eventually become agents of influence.
“It’s a long game,” he said. “It’s planting seeds, letting them grow, putting people in position, letting them grow into more leadership positions.
“It probably won’t make as good a movie because it’s not focused on a moment in time.”
Information laundering falls into the rubric of “covert influence operations,” according to Nicholas Eftimiades, a veteran of the CIA, State Department, and Defense Intelligence Agency and an expert on CCP overseas operations.
“You can quantify it in elected officials and installing elected officials with pro-China policies,” he told The Epoch Times.
Ensuring that the manipulation remains undetected by the target is, in fact, typical, Eftimiades noted.
“That is the hallmark [of] Chinese behavior forever. Very sophisticated—I mean, compared to us, compared to the West—very sophisticated, very calculating, very patient, and they actually do a great job in this,” he said.
The tactic is on full display when U.S. officials travel to China, according to Eftimiades, and the more significant the target, the more sophisticated the operation becomes so that the individual’s entire experience feels natural but was actually carefully arranged.
Those carrying out the operation hold a meeting with representatives from each agency to coordinate the person’s visit to China and plan what they will show him, what messages they want to convey, and who will sit next to him to engage in specific conversations, he said.
“And they would do that for the entire length of the four or five days that the person was there, carefully orchestrating what is seen, what is heard, and ... how they want to shape that person’s opinion,” Eftimiades said.
“So that type of thing is very, very common when the Chinese deal with senior officials.”
People who become so influenced by the CCP end up becoming its unwitting pawns.
“You’ve certainly seen it in academia,” Eftimiades said. “I mean, I got guys in academia that will believe every word that the CCP tells them.”
Rychlak said information laundering is much easier with the internet.
“It’s on steroids with social media, where I can easily set up bots, and I can have thousands of apparently different sources reporting—maybe not word for word the same story, because that will be a giveaway, but pretty darn close—the same basic account of things,” he said.
Information as a Weapon
For the Soviets, the primary purpose of disinformation was to destabilize the United States, Rychlak said. But the CCP is using the same tactic for various purposes, from manipulating officials into supporting pro-CCP policy positions to attacking the Party’s enemies overseas.On the policy side, the CCP’s priorities include economic prerogatives, such as the flow of investments and know-how from the United States to China, and geostrategic issues, particularly Taiwan, the democratic island nation the Chinese regime has long threatened to annex.
The CCP primarily targets Chinese democracy activists, Tibetan and Uyghur activists, underground Christians, and Falun Gong practitioners abroad.
The scale of such attacks appears proportional to infiltration resistance, according to Casey Fleming, chief executive of BlackOps Partners and a counterintelligence expert.
“Falun Gong has really done a good job of that, of warding off infiltration by the CCP. And that’s exactly why the CCP is going after them through these methods of persecuting on U.S. soil, aggressively,” he told The Epoch Times.
The ongoing persecution campaign has led to the imprisonment of millions, with most suffering abuse and torture, and many killed—often with their organs harvested for the regime’s profitable transplant industry.
Falun Gong practitioners overseas have been active in raising awareness of the CCP’s human rights abuses. They have also challenged the Party on cultural grounds, mainly through the Shen Yun Performing Arts company, which presents acclaimed classical Chinese dance shows worldwide under the tagline “China before communism.”
“They’re under relentless, nonstop pressure,” Eftimiades said.
“It is a multiple-level front that they, as Falun Gong, face against China. It is warfare on multiple levels.”
Both Eftimiades and Fleming said that describing the campaign as “warfare” is not an exaggeration.
The CCP sees its influence operations as a component of its military doctrine of “unrestricted warfare,” they said.
Beijing has publicly acknowledged its doctrine of “three warfares”: psychological warfare, public opinion warfare, and legal warfare.
Eftimiades said there is evidence of at least six or seven other warfare domains that the Chinese regime pursues.
Disinformation is “information warfare,” which is part of “cognitive warfare,” Fleming said.
Even though the CCP has been aggressively building up its military for decades, its “plan is not to ever have to go to conventional warfare,” he said.
The CCP has been increasingly active in legal warfare, or weaponizing the law, to achieve its goals, The Epoch Times reported in December 2024.
“Researchers, business owners, and academics who expose the truth about a Chinese company—whether it be the Party’s theft of genomic data, forced labor, or malign trade practices—have suddenly found themselves slapped with frivolous lawsuits,” Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), chair of the House Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said during a September 2024 hearing on “how the CCP uses the law to silence critics and enforce its rule.”
Over the past few years, an American man with longtime business ties to China repeatedly filed defective environmental lawsuits against Shen Yun’s campus in upstate New York. The last one was dismissed by a federal judge in September 2024—this time “with prejudice,” so it can’t be refiled.
In July 2024, two Chinese Americans—John Chen and Lin Feng—pleaded guilty to acting as agents of Beijing after they attempted to bribe an IRS agent to open a bogus investigation into Shen Yun.
Lin told the FBI that he and Chen also surveilled the Falun Gong community in Orange County, New York, where the Shen Yun campus is located, to collect information for an environmental lawsuit meant to inhibit the growth of the Falun Gong community in the area, according to court documents.
In November 2024, Shen Yun was hit with another lawsuit filed by an ex-performer who left the company about five years ago. Parts of the suit appear to be lifted from a New York Times article attacking Shen Yun.
The New York Times has published at least 10 articles attacking Shen Yun in the past six months, with the former performer playing a central role in the allegations. In an interview with the paper, reporter Nicole Hong, the lead author of the articles, said that she and her colleague Michael Rothfeld started working on the articles after a “tipster” approached them with supposed information on Shen Yun’s “inner workings” and introduced them to a former performer.
Meanwhile, a Chinese American YouTuber has claimed credit for supplying some sources for the articles. The same man has been used by the Chinese regime as a tool in its smear campaign against Falun Gong, according to at least three CCP whistleblowers speaking to the Falun Dafa Information Center, a nonprofit monitoring the persecution of Falun Gong.
The man has made threatening comments directed toward Shen Yun personnel, and in 2023, the FBI issued a warning to law enforcement that he was “potentially armed and dangerous” after he was spotted near the Shen Yun campus.
He was subsequently arrested and charged with illegal firearms possession.
“He will send out anything that is provided to him, perhaps unaware it comes from the CCP. The agents won’t reveal their identities [to him], but he is already a pawn of the CCP,” the whistleblower said, according to a Falun Dafa Information Center report.
‘Tip of the Iceberg’
After Chen’s arrest, he reportedly told his cellmate that he worked for the 610 Office, an extralegal CCP police agency formed in 1999 to execute the persecution of Falun Gong, according to court documents. He claimed that the Chinese regime paid him $250,000 to emigrate to the United States decades ago and then sent him $50,000 a month.Those sums likely aren’t exaggerated, Fleming said.
“It’s not just a one-off situation. There are literally hundreds of those,” he said.
“The level of infiltration and subversion in the United States, Canada, the UK, [and] Australia is beyond anyone’s comprehension. ... They’ve been building these operations and networks since the 1980s.”
The Chen case is merely an instance in which somebody got caught.
“This is barely the tip of the iceberg of the espionage and the influence operations throughout the United States,” he said.
The court documents suggest that the FBI gained access to Chen’s text messages through his iCloud account. In exchanges with another Chinese American man in California, Chen described their writing a report for his CCP handlers, his pitching of operations to the CCP, and an operation’s acceptance as “an official work put into record.” This designation, he said, meant that they would get monetary support, according to court documents.
Chen urged the man to “add content” to the report about their “past struggle fighting Taiwanese independence forces in a named California city over the years and fighting ‘FLG’ [Falun Gong] influences in that city,” according to court documents.
The other man, Mike Sun, was indicted in December 2024 for acting as an unregistered Chinese agent after he worked as a campaign manager in 2022 to install a candidate favorable to the CCP into a city council position, according to the indictment. Sun was a campaign treasurer for a member of the Arcadia City Council in California that year.
Chinese agents’ pitching operations to the CCP appears novel in the influence operations context but is well known in the CCP’s information gathering, Eftimiades said.
“We see this on the intelligence side,” he said, describing how Chinese hacking outfits, both private and government, would feel out what the CCP is looking for and proactively hack that information to then sell it to the regime.
“It becomes an intelligence bazaar, if you will.”
In addition, Fleming noted that the intelligence and influence sides are connected.
Educate, Retaliate
The FBI’s mention of CCP information laundering adds to the growing awareness of CCP operations on U.S. soil and stronger law enforcement responses.“Things are changing now, and the U.S. is just waking up,” Eftimiades said.
The response requires a paradigm shift, according to Rychlak.
“When we think about intelligence operations, we tend to think about people, enemies stealing information from us, copying our information, getting our secrets, things like that,” he said.
“The real problem, the real bigger issue all along, certainly since the Soviet era, has been the implantation of false information.
“I think that our intelligence people, our police authorities, international and national authorities are waking up to this issue. I hope they are. I mean, they need to. It’s incredibly important.”
Much more needs to be done, both Eftimiades and Fleming acknowledged.
“The first thing we need before others is a government-wide strategy,” Eftimiades said.
“We have nothing; we have no way of countering the covert political influence operations of the [People’s Republic of China].
“Even worse, we don’t even have an understanding of them. Our government agencies don’t have an understanding of them.
“There’s no understanding of how China is enacting its political warfare, and as a result, no strategy to deal with it.”
The education needs to extend to the state level, too, as the CCP has been active there, Eftimiades said.
“And the other thing is, members of the government, members of the Congress, they have to be assisted,” he said, adding that when someone shows up at a congressman’s door representing a company in his or her district, the congressman has no idea who that person is or what affiliations the person has.
“There has to be a better [way to support] politicians at the federal and state level, so they understand truly who they’re dealing with and what those affiliations are. Otherwise, we’re at the mercy of China.”
For example, it has been common for U.S. officials to associate with various Chinese expat associations, considering them mere liaisons with the Chinese American community. However, Eftimiades warned that such groups are usually part of the CCP’s United Front influence network.
“Politicians are just going, shaking hands, doing what they normally do, until someone says, ‘You know, by the way, do you realize that this group’s representatives are working under the [CCP’s] United Front Work Department and that its individuals attend those policy meetings in Beijing, those propaganda policy meetings?’ And most of the time, U.S. politicians are clueless,” he said.
“Our political apparatus has to have the information available to them so that they understand who they’re dealing with. Who are they actually supporting and servicing? Is it Americans and America’s interests, or is it, in this case, China’s interests and the CCP’s interests?”
U.S. companies also need Washington to support them when dealing with the CCP, according to Eftimiades.
“U.S companies are subject to the pressures put on them by the CCP to support Chinese policies, or at a minimum, stay silent on them,“ he said. ”And they can’t be expected to [resist] that on their own. They have to have government support to be able to resist CCP coercion.”
Washington has to be able to “retaliate,” Eftimiades said, and whether the response is economic, political, or otherwise, it must be coordinated with allies. This cannot be a unilateral effort by the United States, he said.
Finally, Eftimiades said the law needs to change to reflect the current information landscape, citing the Foreign Agents Registration Act as an example.
“When the Foreign Agents Registration Act was created, there was no online communication,“ he said. ”So in order to be prosecuted, those acts have to be done in the United States currently. Well, that’s ridiculous. We’re living in an online world. So, at a minimum, that has to be changed.”
Fleming concluded: “If you support foreign influence, or you take money for foreign influence, then it’s treason and you get to spend time in prison.
“We’re in a wartime situation.”
