Linda Sun, once among the highest-ranking Chinese American officials in New York State government, and her husband, Chris Hu, suffered another legal blow this week.
Sun and Hu were arrested in September 2024 after an FBI raid at their $3.5 million home on Long Island. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn charged Sun with unlawfully acting as an unregistered agent for the Chinese government, money laundering, and other offenses.
Then in June, prosecutors brought new charges accusing the couple of using Sun’s New York state position to steer multimillion-dollar state contracts to companies linked to their associates and family members during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The couple mounted several legal challenges since then, all unsuccessful, which included a motion to dismiss an earlier version of the indictment that was denied in May.
And on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Brian M. Cogan denied another motion filed by Sun and her husband Hu that would have dismissed the four counts of honest services wire fraud and federal program bribery.
Prosecutors said Hu stood to gain from contracts — worth more than $8 million — which were overseen by Sun’s team, and which were awarded by the New York State Department of Health to a company operated by Hu and his associate and another operated by Sun’s cousin.
According to court filings, Sun sought dismissal of the charges on two grounds: that the indictment failed to allege sufficient facts to support the counts of honest services wire fraud and federal program bribery, and that the alleged conduct fell outside the statute of limitations.
Judge Cogan rejected both arguments, finding that the indictment adequately alleged materiality and fraudulent intent to support the wire fraud charge.
According to the filing, during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sun served on a state team responsible for procuring personal protective equipment (PPE). Prosecutors alleged that a representative from the Jiangsu Trade & Business Representative Office in China had provided Sun with a list of PPE vendors, but that she altered the list to substitute one vendor with her cousin’s company. Sun then allegedly promoted her cousin’s surgical masks to New York State officials as the “gold standard.”
In another instance, Sun allegedly told state officials that a company operated by her husband and his business associate had been “referred by the Chinese chamber of commerce.” The state subsequently awarded multimillion-dollar contracts to both her cousin’s firm and Hu’s associate’s company. Prosecutors alleged that between 2020 and 2021, Sun and Hu received about $2.3 million in kickbacks, which Hu then laundered through accounts opened in a relative’s name.
Sun failed to disclose her personal ties to the companies that secured the contracts, prosecutors said. Judge Cogan also noted that without Sun’s alleged misrepresentations portraying the firms as People’s Republic of China-backed vendors, New York procurement officials “would have never known the Cousin Company or Associate Company existed.”
Hu separately argued that, as “a private person with no agency-based fiduciary duty to the public,” he could not be charged with honest services fraud. The judge dismissed that claim, finding that the indictment “more than adequately alleges” that Hu aided and abetted Sun’s scheme by helping operate one of the companies that sold “millions of dollars” worth of PPE to the state and by laundering proceeds from the kickbacks.
Judge Cogan also ruled that the facts supporting the federal program bribery counts were “virtually the same” as those underlying the wire fraud charges, and therefore allowed both to proceed. He further denied the defendants’ claim that the charges were barred by the statute of limitations, noting that the alleged kickback payments continued into 2021 — within five years of the filing of the latest indictment in October 2025.
Sun, once one of the highest-ranking Chinese American officials in New York State government, was seen within the Chinese community as a bridge between Albany and Chinese constituents. Her arrest last year sent shockwaves through that community.
你知道吗？非公民办理驾照时的这个错误可能会导致选民欺诈
The couple now faces a sweeping federal case that includes charges of acting as unregistered agents of the Chinese government, visa fraud, alien smuggling, money laundering and bank fraud. Prosecutors allege that Sun used her position in state government to advance Chinese government interests, such as discouraging meetings between New York state officials and Taiwanese representatives and arranging unauthorized proclamations for PRC officials.
In August 2024, a grand jury returned a ten-count indictment against Sun and Hu, charging them with fraud, immigration violations, money laundering, and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Before the court could rule on their motion to dismiss, prosecutors filed four superseding indictments between June and October in 2025.
The case is part of a broader Justice Department initiative to combat what officials describe as Beijing’s “transnational repression and influence operations” in the United States. The trial is scheduled to begin on Nov. 3, 2025.
