Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was pictured celebrating Tibetan New Year next to Baimadajie Angwang, a New York police officer recently arrested for serving as an “illegal agent” of the Chinese Communist Party, providing the government with intelligence on ethnic Tibetans.
The photo, posted to Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram, shows the Congresswoman in between the alleged spy and a woman with a child. Angwang is wearing his New York Police Department uniform.
The resurfaced photo also comes as Ocasio-Cortez has been campaigning for months to defund the police, notoriously stating “defunding the police means defunding the police.”
Angwang, accused of spying on New York-based Tibetans, can be seen in a room full of his potential targets.
CNBC outlined the specifics of Angwang’s arrest:
A New York City police officer who also serves in the U.S. Army Reserve was arrested Monday on a federal charges of acting as an illegal agent of China, for which he spied on his fellow ethnic Tibetans, authorities said.
The 33-year-old cop, Baimadajie Angwang, who was born in the autonomous region of Tibet in China, allegedly reported to officials at the Chinese consulate in New York on the activities of other ethnic Tibetans in the New York area.
Authorities noted in a criminal complaint that Angwang, who currently works for the New York Police Department in the 111th precinct in northeastern, Queens, “initially traveled to the United States on a cultural exchange visa.”
But after overstaying a second visa he “eventually sought asylum in the United States on the basis that he had allegedly been arrested and tortured in the [People’s Republic of China] due partly to this Tibetan ethnicity,” the complaint said.
The complaint said that beginning as early as 2014, Angwanmaintained a relationship one Chinese official at the consulate, and then in 2018 developed a relationship with a second official there, who was his handler, and whom he called “Boss.”
