Gavin Newsom has been running California like a sanctuary paradise for years, and now the bill is coming due.
A massive scandal just blew up, and the man now running the Department of Homeland Security says Newsom’s fingerprints are all over it.
And now Gavin Newsom is shaking with fear over Kash Patel exposing this dark secret.
A Mayor, a WeChat Group Chat, and Beijing’s Directives
The mayor of Arcadia, California, Eileen Wang, abruptly resigned Monday as federal prosecutors announced she had been charged with acting as a covert foreign agent for China.
Wang, 58, faces a single felony count of acting in the United States as an illegal agent of a foreign government — a charge that carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. She agreed to plead guilty.
According to her plea agreement, from late 2020 through 2022, Wang and Yaoning “Mike” Sun worked at the direction and control of Chinese government officials to promote pro-China propaganda in the United States. The two operated a website called U.S. News Center, which posed as a news source for the local Chinese American community, and received directives from Chinese officials to post pro-China content on it.
In one documented instance in June 2021, a Chinese official sent Wang and others a pre-written essay via the WeChat messaging app — content that denied any genocide or forced labor in Xinjiang. Within minutes, Wang posted the article on her own website and sent a link back to the official.
Court records show Sun — at the direction of Chinese government officials — coordinated with others to promote Beijing’s interests by, among other things, orchestrating a team to help elect Wang to the Arcadia City Council. In other words, the operation wasn’t just propaganda. It was election interference at the local level.
Wang is the former fiancee of Yaoning “Mike” Sun, who was sentenced to four years in federal prison earlier this year for similarly acting as a covert agent for China, including while he was serving as a campaign adviser for Wang herself.
FBI Director Kash Patel posted on X that “Mayor Wang admitted to acting as a foreign agent from at least 2020 through 2022 — promoting PRC propaganda in the U.S. and acting at PRC’s direction to promote their interests.” Patel added that the FBI and its partners would “continue to move aggressively to root out this kind of influence in American institutions all over the country.”
Mullin Puts the Blame Squarely on Newsom
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin blamed California Governor Gavin Newsom’s policies for leading to the alleged infiltration of Chinese actors into California, speaking Tuesday on Fox News’ “The Story.” His comments came directly after the Justice Department announced the charges against Wang.
“[Newsom] does the bidding for the extreme left, and he’s more interested in taking care of the criminals on the streets than taking care of the constituents on his actual streets,” Mullin told Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum.
Mullin didn’t stop there.
“They feel like there is an open-door invitation in these sanctuary cities, and it’s not just China. This is North Korea, this is Russia,” the DHS secretary said.
Mullin told MacCallum that America’s adversaries are “using the political theater that the Democrats have as a point of weakness to be able to infiltrate our communities,” adding that with Wang’s case, “it’s obvious that they were using this to influence what people were seeing.”
“You expect this kind of stuff to happen. It’s shameful. It should never happen, but unfortunately, in this case, it looks like it did,” Mullin said.
Mullin noted that intelligence reports have warned for some time about China infiltrating American universities and stealing intellectual property that was on loan to those schools. The Wang case is just the part that got caught.
The Timing Could Not Be Worse for Newsom
The case comes as President Donald Trump is set to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping at a high-stakes summit in China this week — a meeting Mullin said undermines national security.
Mullin said Chinese leadership cannot outmaneuver Trump, while expressing hope the meeting could bring positive change for Taiwan and the U.S.-China nuclear arms situation.
“Hopefully we can prevent China from going into Taiwan in 2027, like they have repeatedly said they were going to do. Hopefully we can keep this nuclear arms build-up from getting out of control,” Mullin added.
So on the same week Trump is flying to Beijing to confront Xi face to face, a Democrat-run California city just handed Beijing a propaganda win — proof that its influence operations inside the United States were working, at least for a while.
Arcadia is a city of about 54,000 people, with roughly 59% of its population identifying as Asian and over 42% as ethnically Chinese. Beijing didn’t pick that target by accident.
Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg put it plainly: “Individuals elected to public office in the United States should act only for the people of the United States that they represent.” He called it “deeply concerning” that someone who had previously received and executed directives from Chinese government officials ended up in a position of public trust.
And Eisenberg’s concern is well-founded. Wang wasn’t running some fringe website from her garage. She was the mayor of an American city.
First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said the plea agreement Wang entered into is “the latest success in our determination to defend the homeland against China’s efforts to corrupt our institutions.”
But here’s the thing — Gavin Newsom has spent years making California the most welcoming state in the country for people who have no interest in following American law. Sanctuary policies don’t just shield illegal aliens from deportation. They send a signal. And foreign intelligence services read that signal loud and clear.
Mullin is right that the Democrat Party’s obsession with “political theater” created the conditions for this. When a state’s governor is more focused on suing the federal government and grandstanding for the cameras than securing his own backyard, gaps open up. And China is very good at walking through gaps.
Wang’s co-conspirator is already sitting in a federal prison cell. Wang herself is headed there too, barring some dramatic reversal. But the bigger question nobody in Sacramento wants to answer is how many more Eileen Wangs are out there — quietly pushing Beijing’s preferred narratives, quietly helping Beijing’s preferred candidates, quietly doing the work that the Chinese Communist Party can’t do openly.
California has a problem. And its governor doesn’t seem to think it’s his job to fix it.
Sources: Fox News, U.S. Department of Justice, Breitbart, Time, NBC Los Angeles, Spectrum News 1, Newsweek