Sun, a former aide to two New York governors, was charged in 2024 with acting as an undisclosed agent of the Chinese Communist Party, laundering money, and arranging COVID kickbacks.

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Connecticut opened its door to Huang Ping in March 2019, two months after Ned Lamont took office and eleven months before Mike Pompeo stood in front of the nation’s governors and told them Beijing was sorting and rating them.

A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) production of emails between the governor’s office and the Chinese Consulate General in New York shows the consul general asking for a meeting, getting one, and then staying in the queue, by attempted contact, for five years. A second production covers Attorney General William Tong's office and the COVID personal-protective-equipment exchange. Neither file shows a secret pact. Both show a channel Hartford treated as ordinary. Several of the consulate’s notes arrived from what appear to be personal accounts, not official ones.

On February 19, 2019, Vice Consul Lin Mu wrote scheduler Rory Page from a 126.com address. Huang Ping, he said, had arrived in New York on November 15, 2018. Lamont was newly elected. China had been Connecticut’s fifth-largest goods export market in 2017, $762 million, and its fourth-largest services market, $639 million. If the governor’s schedule permitted time for a meeting, March 13 or 14 worked; the 15th was a fallback. A biography was attached.

Page thanked him for the call and copied the new scheduler, Mellaney Castro. On February 28 she wrote back: “I am very happy to let you know that Governor Lamont would like to meet.” He was available March 13 at 2 p.m. Lin Mu already had Speaker Joe Aresimowicz for March 14 at 1 p.m. On March 12, Castro confirmed the Lamont meeting: Capitol Avenue, second floor, Room 202, west entrance.

The consulate published the trip. From March 13 through 14, Huang met Lamont, Lieutenant Governor Susan Bysiewicz, and Secretary of the State Denise Merrill. Lamont, in the consulate’s account, welcomed him and talked up advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, finance, and insurance. A separate consulate note says Huang also met Aresimowicz and Attorney General William Tong. Tong said the exchanges between the two peoples were worth remembering, and that as a Chinese American he would build a bridge. No record of Tong’s visit is included in the FOIA production.

The political mail came next. On January 8, 2020, Huang wrote Lamont about the Taiwan election three days later. “Taiwan is part of China,” the letter says. It asks officials “at various levels” not to send congratulations, introduce bills or proclamations, send anyone to an inauguration, or invite Taiwan officials to the United States. No reply is in the production. A public search also turns up no Lamont congratulations, proclamation, or inauguration note after Tsai Ing-wen’s January 11 reelection. The State Department, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and members of the Senate Taiwan Caucus did congratulate her. Silence is not a written yes, and it is not proof Lamont adopted the consulate’s line. It is what the file shows, and what the public record does not.

On February 8, 2020, Pompeo told the National Governors Association that a Chinese think tank had labeled governors friendly, hardline, or ambiguous. Axios later identified the June 22, 2019 D&C Think report. Lamont is not among the names Axios published in either the hardline or the friendly group. He had been in office barely six months when that report was dated. The March meeting was three months old. The files do not put his name on the list. They do, however, show the method Pompeo described: a new consul general working a new governor, the speaker, the attorney general, the lieutenant governor, and the secretary of the state, then following with a one-China letter.

Then came COVID. The first case was officially confirmed in the United States on January 20, 2020. On February 24, 2020, Vice Consul Shaoding Zhu contacted Lamont to arrange a meeting with Huang on March 24. The FOIA production does not include a reply.

On April 1, 2020, Huang wrote Lamont offering to coordinate medical supplies. He cited the March 27 call between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, and asked the state to safeguard Chinese nationals and students. The next day, Jin Hu, president of the Connecticut China Council, wrote the council’s own list: Chairman Emeritus John Schuyler, Immediate Past President Paul Edelberg, Bruce McGuire of the Connecticut Hedge Fund Association, and Laura Jaworski of the Department of Economic and Community Development. Hu told them Huang had already contacted Lamont on April 1.

"John and I think we need to make sure the state office needs to send an acknowledgement quickly," wrote Hu. "I wonder if anyone from this email list can draft a responding letter on behalf of the state office."

Internal mail from that afternoon shows Tong asking whether they had an email for Huang or only for the vice consul. A staff note says people did not think a follow-up letter to Huang was needed. George Norfleet at the Department of Economic and Community Development had flagged the consulate letter to Chief of Staff Paul Mounds as "atypical" and asked who should drive the response.

Lamont and Tong ultimately sent a joint letter to Huang on April 2. Connecticut, they wrote, had exported more than $1.5 billion in goods and services to China in 2018 and imported more than $1.9 billion in goods. They asked Huang for “any assistance you could offer us in clearing the way” to his “great country’s manufacturing resources.” The contact they gave him was Chief Operating Officer Josh Geballe.

On May 12, Tong’s office announced the largest PPE shipment the state had received. “I reached out to Ambassador Huang with the assistance of prominent Connecticut Chinese-Americans Andrew Mao, Sheldon Pang, and Michael Chen,” Tong said. Huang, he added, “had visited my office in Hartford shortly after I took office, and we were grateful for that initial outreach.”

Lamont’s release the same day listed 6 million surgical masks, 500,000 protective masks, 100,000 surgical gowns, and 100,000 temporal thermometers. He thanked “the Chinese people,” and the China Construction Bank for facilitating the shipment and for a donation. “Further cooperation and collaboration between the United States and China is very important as we navigate this global pandemic,” he said.

The Hartford Courant’s May 14 account told the commercial version. The path, it reported, ran through hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio, the China Construction Bank, and Stamford developers Carl and Paul Kuehner. Their company, BLT Management Inc., was the supplier on the purchase orders, and the brothers employed Dalio’s son. Lamont credited “his great friend” Dalio with negotiating the deal. Those orders, dated April 30 and May 5, came to a little more than $15 million: 35,000 protective overalls, 46,000 surgical gowns, 1 million N95 masks, more than 6 million surgical masks, and 100,000 infrared thermometers.

The requests from Huang’s office did not stop when the PPE arrived. On February 22, 2022, Vice Consul Shaoding Zhu wrote from a Gmail account that Huang wanted to see Lamont again in Hartford, “since we last met more than two years ago.” Cindy Rusczyk copied the scheduler, and Kathleen Salvio indicated that Lamont was out of town. Zhu asked for Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz’s email. Huang ended up delivering the keynote at the China-U.S. Relations Forum of the World Affairs Council of Connecticut on April 6, 2022. He told the room he was glad to be back in the state and to see “old and new friends.” “In the early days of the pandemic, China helped Connecticut to purchase a large amount of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) from China and donated part of it to Connecticut,” he said.

On August 27, 2024, Vice Consul Yiwen Chen, again from a Gmail account, wrote to Matthew Brokman and a Lamont staffer named Thea Montanez. The note said Huang was ending his New York tenure in late September and hoped to see the governor before he left. The production does not show whether that meeting happened.

On September 3, 2024, federal agents arrested Linda Sun at her Long Island home. She had been a deputy diversity officer under Andrew Cuomo and deputy chief of staff under Kathy Hochul. The charges included: acting as an unregistered agent of the People’s Republic of China, visa fraud, bringing in aliens and money laundering conspiracy. Her husband, Chris Hu, was charged alongside her for money laundering conspiracy, conspiracy to commit bank fraud and misuse of means of identification.

Superseding indictments later expanded the case to 19 counts, including alleged pandemic-era kickbacks on medical-supply contracts. “When masks, gloves, and other protective supplies were hard to find, Sun abused her position of trust to steer contracts to her associates so that she and her husband could share in the profits," stated Joseph Nocella Jr., United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, on June 26, 2025.

Prosecutors said Sun used the governors’ offices for Beijing. She blocked Taiwanese officials from meetings, cut references the consulate disliked — including language treating Taiwan as a country and references to the Uyghurs — and reported the results to Chinese officials. She prepared unauthorized invitation letters that made it easier for PRC officials to enter the United States and meet New York officials. Reporters identified Huang Ping as the unnamed “PRC Official-1” in the indictment. The indictment does not name him. He was not charged. Sun pleaded not guilty.

Hochul said had asked the State Department to expel Huang after the arrest. The department said he had already finished a normal rotation in August and left at the end of his term. The consulate told reporters the same day that Huang was “performing his duties as usual.” The last note in the Connecticut production is dated August 27, 2024: Vice Consul Yiwen Chen, writing from a Gmail account, told Lamont’s staff that Huang was ending his New York tenure in late September and hoped to see the governor before he left.

Sun's case went to trial in November 2025. On December 22, after the jury reported it was deadlocked on all 19 counts and that its positions were firmly held, U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan declared a mistrial. Prosecutors said they intend to retry it.

China’s foreign ministry lists Tong and Sun as speakers at the same event: Huang’s Lunar New Year reception on January 17, 2023. Tong is sitting one person away from Sun in the front row. Tong also recorded a 2022 New Year video for the consulate, since removed from YouTube, thanking Huang, his wife Zhang Aiping, and “the people of the People’s Republic of China” for their help during the pandemic.

Nothing in these files puts Sun inside Connecticut government, shows the PPE was a bribe, or shows Lamont was labeled friendly in China's governor ranking. What they show is an open line. Huang met Lamont, Bysiewicz, Merrill, Aresimowicz, and Tong in March 2019, two months after Lamont took office. In January 2020, Huang sent the one-China letter, asking that no one congratulate Taiwan. In April, Huang offered PPE help; Lamont and Tong wrote him for help “clearing the way” to Chinese manufacturing the next day. Tong later credited that first Hartford visit with Huang when the PPE arrived. And Huang was still in the governor’s queue in late August/September 2024—the same consul general who reporters identified as the official on the other end of the Linda Sun case.

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