A former FBI agent pleaded guilty Monday to passing sensitive agency information to the Chinese government.
Kun Shan Chun, known as Joey Chun, was arrested in March on suspicion he had used his top-secret clearance to collect and give sensitive state information to a Chinese official and other individuals. According to the Department of Justice, Chun disclosed the identity and potential travel patterns of an FBI special agent beginning in 2011.
Chun, born in China and a naturalized U.S. citizen, began working for the FBI in 1997. In 2013, he downloaded an FBI organizational chart, removed the names and passed it to a Chinese official.
"At the time, I knew that was wrong, and I'm sorry for my actions," Chun said in court Monday, according to Reuters.
He said he was motivated by the financial benefits he reaped from his relationship with the Chinese official and other Chinese business interests. He faces up to 10 years in prison and will be sentenced in December.
“Americans who act as unauthorized foreign agents commit a federal offense that betrays our nation and threatens our security. And when the perpetrator is an FBI employee, like Kun Shan Chun, the threat is all the more serious and the betrayal all the more duplicitous,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement. “Thanks to the excellent investigative work of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, the FBI succeeded in identifying and rooting out this criminal misconduct from within its own ranks.”
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