A former San Diego-based U.S. Navy sailor convicted of selling military secrets to a Chinese intelligence officer was sentenced Monday to over 16 years in prison.
Jinchao Wei, 25, who worked as a machinist’s mate aboard the USS Essex, sent sensitive information pertaining to U.S. Navy ships to a person he met online and accepted thousands of dollars in exchange, according to federal prosecutors.
Wei was arrested in mid-2023 and according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office was the first person to be charged with espionage in the Southern District of California, which consists of San Diego and Imperial counties.
A San Diego federal jury convicted Wei last summer of six out of seven counts he faced, including espionage and conspiracy. Wei was sentenced Monday to 200 months in prison.
Wei “betrayed his oath, his shipmates, the United States Navy, and the American people — a level of disloyalty that strikes at the heart of our national security and demanded this powerful sentence,” U.S. Attorney Adam Gordon said in a statement.
Prosecutors allege Wei was initially contacted by the alleged officer in early 2022 over a Chinese social media site.
During those initial conversations, Wei was offered $500 to look into where various Navy ships were docked — which prosecutors say prompted Wei to tell a fellow sailor, “This is quite obviously (expletive) espionage.”
Over the next 18 months, Wei was paid more than $12,000 to send photographs and videos of the USS Essex, as well as thousands of pages of technical and operational documents concerning U.S. Navy surface warfare ships, prosecutors contended.
During the trial’s closing arguments, Wei’s defense attorney, Sean Jones, told jurors the government didn’t prove Wei knowingly engaged in espionage. The attorney argued that Wei believed the man he was speaking with was merely a Chinese academic who was interested in military ships, and described their conversations as educational in nature.
Jones said the espionage remark referred to one specific request made by the alleged officer, which Wei refused to comply with. Afterward, Jones said, Wei was reassured that none of the subsequent requests involved anything untoward.
But prosecutors argued Wei clearly understood he was engaging in illegal activity due to the training he received from the Navy regarding how to detect recruitment efforts from foreign governments.
Wei and his handler also took aims to keep their communications secretive by using encrypted apps and a search of his internet history also showed he had looked into other cases of U.S. Navy sailors who were prosecuted and convicted of espionage.
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