Washington
U.S. journalist sentenced to 2 years in federal prison for acting as an illegal agent for China
WASHINGTON (AP) — An American journalist has been sentenced to two years in federal prison for acting as an agent of a foreign government within the United States, the U.S. Justice Department said.
Thomas Weir Pauken II, 51, pleaded guilty earlier this year and is not planning to appeal, according to his defense lawyer, Charles Burnham. Pauken also was sentenced to 36 months of supervised release with no overseas travel, the department said in a news release on Tuesday. He was arrested in February.
The case is the latest in a series of federal prosecutions involving people accused of working for the Chinese government without proper disclosure, as tensions between Washington and Beijing remain high.
“Pauken betrayed his country for money” for supporting “Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) operations, recruiting, and gathering of sensitive information from potential assets,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg in the news release.
Pauken worked as a journalist for various Chinese news organizations after moving to China in 2010, including state broadcaster CCTV. He most recently worked as an editor for Xinhua, China’s state news agency, a position he had held since 2024.
“Mr. Pauken has accepted responsibility and respects the court’s sentence,” his lawyer said, adding that “as the government agreed in court, Mr. Pauken did not provide any classified information to the Chinese.”
According to court documents, from at least 2019 until February 2026, Pauken worked at the direction of people he knew worked for China’s government, including a person he met in 2017 identified as “Cathy.” “Cathy” told him the reports were read by Chinese President Xi Jinping, according to a Feb. 27 federal court affidavit filed by FBI Special Agent Timothy J. Healy.
Pauken received at least $100,000 for his work with “Cathy,” the department said.
In addition to writing reports, Pauken was also asked by “Cathy” to recruit people to provide classified information. In one case, Pauken was instructed to meet with a person identified in the affidavit as “Person 1” and provide the person a Samsung phone, a computer, and passwords for Signal and Telegram, as well as NetDisk.
Pauken was stopped by Customs and Border Protection agents when he returned to the U.S. in January 2025. In interviews with CBP and FBI agents, Pauken said he was “80 percent sure” that the person who was seeking a job in the Trump administration would provide classified information to China, although Pauken advised the person not to, according to the affidavit.
Pauken also told investigators that “Cathy” would usually pay for his trips to the U.S. through the years, and often wired payments to his wife’s bank accounts, the affidavit said.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs didn’t immediately respond on Wednesday to a request seeking comment.
Pauken, a Texas native, used the alias of Tom McGregor when working as a commentator and writer at the request of his father, who shares his name and wanted to distance himself from his son’s work in China.
The younger Pauken published two books under his real name, Thomas W. Pauken II. One was published in 2019 about U.S.-China relations and another in 2023 about Shenzhen, a city across from Hong Kong in mainland China.
Pauken’s father was a former chairman of the Texas Republican Party in the 1990s and ran for governor more than a decade ago.
In the most recent publicly visible Facebook post under McGregor’s name, Pauken shared photos of his wife and child on a trip, writing “My family and I enjoying our trip to Washington DC.” He was arrested later that month.
Massachusetts
Federal judge considers whether to extend ban against U.S. Postal Service mail voting changes
BOSTON (AP) — A federal judge in Boston said Thursday the U.S. Postal Service has told her nothing about how it would implement a plan to regulate mail ballots for the midterms as she considers whether to let the plan proceed in the weeks before Election Day.
U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani is deciding whether to extend her prohibition on the proposed regulation of mail ballots, an effort undertaken as part of an executive order by President Donald Trump. The hearing in the closely watched case came a day before the first state begins sending mail ballots to voters.
“We are 70 days from the election and I have nothing from the USPS about how this will happen,” Talwani told Michael Velchik, the Justice Department lawyer representing the Postal Service.
Last week, Talwani imposed a 14-day temporary restraining order to keep it from being used. That order expires next week as more states begin sending out mail ballots. Velchik said the administration will most likely go to the Supreme Court by the end of the week to seek permission to resume implementing the plan.
Talwani has been here before. In June, she prohibited the administration from implementing Trump’s order for the November election, ruling the changes came too close to voting for the federal government to embark on such a project.
But the Supreme Court late last month ruled that Talwani’s order was premature because the Postal Service had not yet published regulations governing how it would apply Trump’s order. The agency did so just before the high court ruling came down, prompting Democrats and voting rights groups to swiftly re-file their lawsuits.
They counter that the president has no authority to set election rules, which is a power designated in the Constitution to the states and in some cases Congress.
They won an initial victory with Talwani’s restraining order, which has already been appealed by the administration.
Trump has long opposed mail voting and falsely blamed it for his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden, even though he often uses that method to cast his own ballot.
Election officials say there’s simply no way they can comply with the Postal Service directives, which could require a complete overhaul of their operations. Before it delivers mail ballots for any state, the Postal Service would have to approve the design of the envelopes that contain them and have the state upload a list of voters receiving them to an online portal.
Some ballots have already gone out. A few municipalities in Wisconsin opted to send mail ballots to voters earlier this week, but Friday marks the full kickoff of voting as North Carolina starts shipping its mail ballots to all voters who requested them.
The administration has contended the changes are relatively minor and legal. But the portal was still not active this week, and most election offices have already printed their envelopes and ballots.
Velchik told Talwani that the federal government is offering states the choice to opt into the system. But the Postal Service has yet to identify a single state that has done so.
A whistleblower report made public this week warns that the postal system’s requirements could lead to millions of mail ballots never being sent. The new rule requires all ballots to be physically brought to post offices before being mailed to voters, but if a single one’s bar code registers an error, the whole batch gets thrown out, even if it contains tens of thousands of legitimate ballots.
Washington
A judge blocks Trump’s new bid to curb birthright citizenship, citing Supreme Court precedent
A federal judge has blocked President Donald Trump’s latest attempt to limit birthright citizenship, granting a preliminary injunction against an executive order that the administration said would target “birth tourism.”
U.S. District Judge Deborah L. Boardman in Maryland on Wednesday issued the injunction until a class-action lawsuit brought by immigrant families and advocacy groups is resolved.
“The Supreme Court has spoken: Children in the certified class are ‘citizens at birth,’” Boardman, appointed by President Joe Biden, wrote in Wednesday’s ruling.
Birthright citizenship is guaranteed under current law for anyone who is born on U.S. soil, with a few exceptions. The law stretches back to 1868, when the 14th Amendment was ratified in the aftermath of the Civil War.
But Trump has long wanted to end birthright citizenship, issuing a previous executive order declaring that children born to people who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens. The Supreme Court struck down that attempt in June.
In August, the president tried again with a narrowed executive order that appeared to restrict automatic citizenship for specific categories of people, including children born to adults with connections to foreign embassies or organizations or to anyone considered an “alien enemy” of the United States.
The order defined birth tourism as someone who enters the United States on a “nonimmigrant visa for the purpose of giving birth on American soil.” Birth tourism is already considered fraud and grounds to restrict a visa if someone seeks one specifically to obtain U.S. citizenship for a child.
The order sought to deny citizenship to children born to adults who “engaged in a commercial transaction to purchase or access birthright citizenship,” and some families said they feared their children could be denied citizenship simply because they purchased airfare to come to the U.S. and got pregnant after they arrived.
Families and organizations who sued over the birthright citizenship restrictions told the court that the executive branch has taken a broad view of who qualifies as an alien enemy, sometimes relying on speculation or misinformation to make that determination.
Others said they feared their children would be denied citizenship because a member of the parents’ extended family was connected to a gang in their home country, even though the parents were not gang members.
Uncertainty surrounding the order left them with confusion and fear, the families said.
They were joined in the lawsuit by We Are CASA, the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project and the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection.
The administration’s attorneys argued that the request to block the order was premature and said the federal agencies tasked with enforcing it would use “appropriate measures” to do so, relying on official guidance that hasn’t been issued yet.
The judge rejected that argument.
“No matter what the guidance says, the 2026 Executive Order commands agencies to deny citizenship documents to several broad categories of children,” Boardman wrote.
“The White House must recognize it will not succeed in stripping children of their right to citizenship, evading binding court decisions or placing the president’s anti-immigrant agenda above the Constitution,” Shana Khader, legal director at We Are CASA, said in a prepared statement.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
