Whether this is a good story or a bad one depends on the facts of the case, which in media accounts are not reported in enough detail to be sure about. The White House says that highly decorated former NYPD Sergeant Michael McMahon, by then working as a private investigator, took the job of finding a person that the CCP wanted to harass and repatriate without knowing that this was the mission; and that his 2023 conviction was flawed (CNN, November 7, 2025).
Why pardon
According to a White House official: “Mr. McMahon is a former law enforcement officer who had a distinguished career serving with the NYPD, earning 75 commendations, including the Police Combat Cross, before medically retiring after a crash during a high-speed chase. While on modified desk duty, Mr. McMahon also responded in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
“As a private investigator, Mr. McMahon was indicted for his work investigating an individual he was told had embezzled funds from a construction company. In reality, the people who had hired him were actually Chinese spies utilizing his services to track down an individual. The investigation of Mr. McMahon and his trial had issues. Key interviews were not disclosed and key witnesses allegedly fabricated incidents.”
The New York Times says that the pardon bypassed normal Justice Department procedures for identifying “deserving recipients who have served their time and expressed remorse,” a characterization of the appropriate conditions for granting a pardon which, among other dubious features, seems to preclude the possibility of being pardoned because believed to be innocent.
One advocate of the pardon, Representative Mike Lawler, says that McMahon “never should have been prosecuted in the first place. He fully cooperated, gave them all the information that he had on the case. And then the Biden D.O.J. prosecuted him to make an example out of him when he didn’t do anything wrong.”
The accusations
In the 2023 trial, prosecutors claimed, per CNN, that McMahon and two others, Zhu Yong and Zheng Conging, “embarked on a years-long campaign targeting a former Chinese government official who had lived in the US for several years. The three men threatened, harassed, surveilled and intimidated the man and his family between 2016 and 2019 to return to China.”
The accusations are here all mashed together. It’s likely that McMahon, being a private investigator, surveilled. Did he also threaten, harass, and intimidate?
It was not McMahon who tried to force his way into target’s home in New Jersey and then left this note on the door: “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!” The author of the action and the threat was Zheng.
According to an April 2025 DOJ press release, McMahon knew who he was dealing with. He knew that “the operation was intended not only to locate John Doe #1, but to coerce him to return to the PRC by exerting pressure on his family members…. McMahon knew that the subjects of his investigation were wanted by the PRC government, a fact that he texted about with another investigator he contracted to help him. Following his arrest, McMahon acknowledged knowing that his employers wanted to get the victim back to China ‘so they could prosecute him.’… McMahon was paid more than $19,000 in total for his role in the illegal repatriation scheme. In an apparent attempt to conceal the source, McMahon deposited payments from his PRC clients into his son’s bank account, the only time he had done so with client payments.”
But why would emissaries from the People’s Republic of China undertaking a mission of transnational repression begin by telling an American private eye that they wanted to find a particular person in order to harass him for fleeing the Chinese Communist Party?
Operation Fox Hunt
The guilty verdicts in 2023 were, said CNN, “the first trial victory in the US Department of Justice’s efforts to combat Operation Fox Hunt, the Chinese Communist Party’s international alleged anti-corruption campaign targeting those the Chinese government considers fugitives.”
The CCP uses terms like “corruption,” “subversion,” and “collusion” to label any resistance to or criticism of its totalitarian rule.
In 2025, the CCP’s massive campaigns to hunt down Chinese nationals around the globe for wanting to escape persecution and live more freely is probably better known than it was even several years ago. Yet despite a fair amount of research and national attention to the problem by congressional committees and others, Red China’s transnational repression is not even that well known today.
Also see:
ProPublica: “Operation Fox Hunt: How China Exports Repression Using a Network of Spies Hidden in Plain Sight”
