The Chinese Drug Cartels Were Reading the Maine Wire: Unsealed DOJ Docs

Chinese gangsters indicted for alleged drug and human trafficking were reading my investigative reports on their activities in Maine.

As we reported yesterday, Operation Take Back America has begun.

In New England, the operation kicked off with charges against a group of Chinese nationals indicted in a sprawling marijuana trafficking and money laundering scheme involving properties in Massachusetts and Maine.

According to the 22-page indictment unsealed Wednesday, the alleged Chinese drug smugglers and human traffickers were actively reading and sharing my investigative reporting on their networks just days after I first started exposing their illicit drug hubs in Maine.

As the indictment shows, the alleged criminal conspirators were sharing my very first article in the Triad Weed series four days after it was published. The November 8, 2023, article exposed a network of more than 100 Chinese-owned properties in rural Maine used as unlicensed cannabis grow sites, operated by what the Department of Homeland Security had referred to as Asian transnational criminal organizations.

The bigger takeaway from the indictment, however, is just how much the Department of Justice knew about the Chinese criminal organizations operating in New England under President Joe Biden but nonetheless refused to file charges.

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High Crimes: If you haven’t already watched the documentary I published with Tucker Carlson, you should probably check it out.

I’m hoping the seven indicted gangbangers in Massachusetts get a chance to watch it before they’re jailed or deported.

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The indictment, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, charges seven individuals—Jianxiong Chen, Yuxiong Wu, Dinghui Li, Dechao Ma, Peng Lian Zhu, Hongbin Wu, and Yanrong Zhu—with conspiracy to manufacture and distribute marijuana, money laundering, and, in Chen’s case, smuggling Chinese nationals into the U.S. to work in illicit grow houses.

All of the alleged criminal activities and financial transactions detailed in the indictment occurred between January 2020 and January 2024, but only when President Donald Trump started appointing leaders within the Justice Department did the feds begin taking action.

But the DOJ’s conduct under Biden is even worse than mere inaction.

The indictment also contradicts statements previously made by President Joe Biden’s U.S. Attorney for the District of Maine, Darcie McElwee, when it comes to the role of human trafficking and forced labor in the Chinese marijuana conspiracy.

Before McElwee exited the top Justice Department posting in Maine, she had stated multiple times that there was no evidence of human trafficking — despite the fact that the very first federal indictment of a Chinese marijuana trafficker in Maine involved evidence of human trafficking.

On May 3, 2024, McElwee posted a lengthy statement downplaying the Chinese criminal conspiracy and insisting that federal law enforcement were actively tackling the problem.

“To date, we have seen no evidence of illegal U.S. border crossings into Maine by any individuals associated with these illicit grows,” McElwee said. “Rather, the individuals tending these grows in homes across central Maine who have been encountered by law enforcement have been individuals who are either U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents living in states like New York and Massachusetts.”

That statement, it turns out, wasn’t true, meaning McElwee was either ignorant of the evidence in both Massachusetts cases and a Maine case, or she was misleading the public, potentially for political reasons, i.e., to downplay how illegal immigration across the southern border under former President Biden was contributing to crime in Maine.

According to records from the Penobscot County Sheriff’s Office, the February 2024 search warrant execution at a Chinese cannabis house at 549 Main Road in Passadumkeag resulted in the arrest of Xisen Guo, who is scheduled for sentencing in his federal case on July 18. But the Sheriff’s Office’s records also record an interview with an elderly Chinese man, Guanshi Yuan, who said through an interpreter that Guo had plucked him off the streets of New York and taken him to Maine to work the cannabis house against his will.

That document would have been readily accessible to McElwee at the time she insisted there was no human trafficking occurring at the Chinese marijuana grows in Maine. (My previous reporting on Guo and his shell companies — GC 168 Realty LLC and Chen G Realty LLC — shows that he was involved in much more than the single marijuana operation for which he pleaded guilty.)

Now, there is even more evidence that the Biden Justice Department was aware of human trafficking among the Chinese cannabis cartels operating in New England, despite what McElwee publicly stated on multiple occasions (reports that were, by the way, hungrily regurgitated by government-funded media companies like the Bangor Daily News, Maine Public Broadcasting, and the George Soros-funded Press Herald newspapers).

According to the indictment unsealed this week in the District of Massachusetts, Jianxiong Chen, Yuxiong Wu, Dinghui Li, Dechao Ma, Peng Lian Zhu, Hongbin Wu, and Yanrong Zhu are all accused of operating a conspiracy that trafficked illegal aliens into the United States and then stole their passports in order to compel them to work at marijuana growing sites in both Massachusetts and Maine.

The indictment states that on at least one occasion, Chen “paid for one alien to be smuggled across the United States–Mexico border” and then “paid for the alien’s airplane ticket to fly from San Diego, California, to Boston, Massachusetts.”

After trafficking the Chinese illegal alien into New England, Chen allegedly “took possession of the alien’s Chinese passport after the alien arrived in Massachusetts and kept the passport in a safe” at his Braintree residence.

According to the indictment, WeChat messages exchanged among the Chinese drug traffickers showed that Chen was treating the alien like an indentured servant, effectively forcing him to work off the debt from being smuggled into the U.S. by laboring at illicit marijuana grows in New England.

Meanwhile, Chen was living in a $1.5 million home in Massachusetts and driving a Porsche.

Despite being demonstrably wrong all along about how the Chinese drug cartels were using human trafficking victims as part of their schemes, McElwee isn’t likely to lose any sleep over it.

She was appointed by Gov. Janet Mills (D) to be a justice for Maine's Superior Court in February, just days after leaving the U.S. Attorney’s Office. She’ll serve a seven-year term and is eligible for reappointment.