What Secrets Does “Beijing’s Donald Trump” Know?

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Guo Wengui’s American adventure began eight years ago in a penthouse on Fifth Avenue, and it ended there—for now, at least. Early Wednesday morning, the FBI arrested Guo at Sherry-Netherland, the Upper East Side co-op where he paid sixty-eight million dollars in cash for the entire eighteenth floor in 2015. From that perch , Guo made a single value. strange foray into the ranks of Republican politics, amassing enormous wealth and a legion of admirers close to Donald Trump—and leaving many intriguing questions about what exactly he’s doing in American politics.

Even the confirmed parts of Guo’s story are always strange. Raised in the hinterlands of Shandong Province, Guo was a soft-spoken middle-school dropout who served time in prison before somehow finding his way into the real-estate boom of nineteen ninety-two thousand. He built a high-end property empire, symbolized by a dragon-shaped building complex in Beijing. He fled China in 2014, after the fall of his Communist Party patron, an enigmatic counterintelligence chief. And, in America, Guo recast himself as a critic of the Communist Party itself, applied for asylum, earned membership at Mar-a-Lago, and secured protection from powerful conservatives running a emerging hard line against China.

The Washington Free Beacon has declared Guo a “leading Chinese dissident,” and Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist, has variously hailed him as “the Donald Trump of Beijing” and the “George Washington of the new China .” They started a media company together, and Guo awarded Bannon a million-dollar contract for “strategic consulting services.” When Bannon was arrested, in 2020, on fraud charges, he was aboard Guo’s superyacht, Lady May, off the coast of Connecticut. Even after Guo and his followers launched attacks on respected Chinese dissidents, he continued to enjoy the company of Trump allies, such as Rudy Giuliani, Michael Flynn, Peter Navarro, and Jason Miller, which appeared at Guo’s events and his broadcasts.

For years, China specialists have speculated about what Guo was doing in this country. Is it all just the intuitive scrambling of a survivor who has figured out how to deploy his old playbook in Beijing to good effect in Washington? Or is he somehow secretly connected to his old contacts at the Ministry of State Security in China and trying to return to power back home? Where does all that money come from—and where is it going?

The Department of Justice has already given us some answers. In a detailed indictment unsealed Wednesday, federal prosecutors accused Guo and a co-defendant, Kin Ming Je, of orchestrating a fraud involving more than a billion dollars, from which Guo obtained hundreds of thousands of followers online—many of them Chinese expatriates who believed in his promises to “abolish the CCP”—and solicited their investments in an array of bogus ventures involving cryptocurrency, clubs, and the media. The amounts cited in the indictment are remarkable: in a six-week period in 2020, investors bought four hundred and fifty-two million dollars of stock in one of Guo’s ventures; for another project, investors provided two hundred and fifty million dollars for membership in GClubs, which proved to have few benefits.

In a statement, Damian Williams, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, accused Guo of “lining his pockets with his stolen money, including buying himself, and his close relatives -son, a 50,000-square-foot mansion, a $3.5 million Ferrari and even two $36,000 mattresses.” Even in times of excess, Guo’s inventory of alleged indulgences—a $4.4-million custom-built Bugatti sports car, a sixty-two-thousand-dollar television, and a fifty-three-thousand-dollar “fireplace log cradle holder” -raised others. In a court appearance on Wednesday, Guo pleaded not guilty and was ordered held pending further proceedings. On Wednesday, Kin Ming Je, a figure who operated behind the scenes and accused of financing and profiting from various ventures, remained empty.

For all the displays of gruesome abuses, the plots of fraud drawn by prosecutors have hardly changed since “The Music Man”—there have always been flimflam men preying on the hopes of others —but a test has the potential to dig a long way. more interesting story about Guo’s dealings with American politics, intelligence, and law enforcement. In a sign of how many layers prosecutors had to explore, Guo was identified in the opening lines of his indictment as “HO WAN KWOK, a/k/a ‘Miles Guo,’ a/k/a ‘Miles Kwok ,’ a /k/a ‘Guo Wengui,’ a/k/a ‘Brother Seven,’ a/k/a ‘The Principal.’ ”

One of the first things to look for will be clues as to whether Guo is cooperating or fighting the case. For years, he defied the efforts of creditors and the courts to tame him. In one case, a protracted battle over an unpaid debt of two hundred and fifty-four million dollars, a New York judge punished Guo for “hiding his assets in a maze of corporate entities and family members,” and ordered him to pay. one hundred and thirty-four million dollars in fines for moving Lady May out of state in violation of a court order. Guo, in turn, filed for personal bankruptcy, dragging out the proceedings.

He often incites his followers—some of whom have paid—to harass those who doubt his authenticity or check his background. They protested outside the homes of Chinese dissidents who questioned Guo’s loyalty, accusing them of being stooges of the CCP. During the bankruptcy process, he used that strategy with a court-appointed trustee, Luc Despins of the law firm Paul Hastings, sending supporters to demonstrate outside his home and office, with flyers showing the lawyer’s face with a hammer and sickle, or blood dripping from his teeth. They even protested for months outside the home of Despins’ son, a third-grade teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A restraining order did little to stop the demonstrations, and in January the bankruptcy judge, Julie Manning, issued an order barring Guo or his agents from such protests and limiting what could be they post on social media. It’s not yet clear whether Guo will be released on bail—he’s a flight risk, as he boasts of holding eleven passports—but he could be a challenging defendant, either way.

A bigger issue to watch is what prosecutors reveal about Guo’s financial and strategic dealings with Trump allies. In a concise inventory recently, Dan Friedman, a Mother Jones reporter who has written extensively about Guo’s activities, said that Guo “spread lies about Hunter Biden, helped finance the efforts to subvert the 2020 election, and underpin the falsified claims that Covid is a Chinese bioweapon.” It’s anyone’s guess what else will be revealed when prosecutors put people under oath and subpoena financial records. Who is Guo paying, and for what? What role did his social-media networks play in amplifying lies about COVID, the 2020 election, and Joe Biden? Just this month, one of the groups founded by Guo and Bannon, the New Federal State of China, was identified as a major sponsor of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

Above all, it is worth seeing what is learned about Guo’s relationships with governments—both the United States and China. In a profile last year, I described Guo’s occasional role as a source for American diplomats and federal investigators, who treated him with varying degrees of skepticism. Those ties could make him “troublesome” to prosecute, as a former Justice Department official said at the time, because Guo could threaten to reveal secrets about his dealings with the US government . That offered a clue to many who had watched Guo’s increasingly futile political career in Washington and wondered why he had not been deported or prosecuted sooner. “What took the feds so long?” Bill Bishop, who writes the Sinocism newsletter, tweeted about the accusation, adding, “Why are they going after him now?” In a remarkable passage, during a federal case in a business dispute, Judge Lewis J. Liman wrote, “The evidence at trial does not allow the Court to decide whether Guo was, in fact, a dissident or a double agent. . . . Others will have to determine who the real Guo is.” His test would finally answer that question.

But some truths may prove elusive. In a sign of the complexity of the case, the New York Fire Department reported on Wednesday that a fire broke out in Guo’s Sherry-Netherland penthouse around noon, hours after his arrest. The US Attorney’s office said the fire is under investigation. It may take more than an arrest to end Guo’s journey. In one of the many videos he broadcast on YouTube from that apartment, in 2019, Guo lamented that his former homeland was prone to cases of spectacular fraud, and blamed the Communist Party for fostering a culture of deception and propaganda that has confused people. who and what to believe. In Chinese, he said, “Our country believes in con men. Only con men have the strength to survive.” ♦

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