A local reporter credited Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Reporter Philip Lenczycki with helping piece together information about Chinese involvement in illegal marijuana operations.
Two men who were charged in connection with an illegal marijuana operation in Maine have ties to a known Chinese Communist Party front group, the Daily Caller News Foundation exclusively reported in May. Maine Wire Editor-in-Chief Steve Robinson told Daily Caller News Foundation co-founder Tucker Carlson about items found in an abandoned vehicle near a location where marijuana was being illegally grown.
“Thanks to Philip Lenczycki of the Daily Caller News Foundation, who reported just last week… there was reporting that we did in Dexter, my hometown, about a mile from where I grew up, about an illegal marijuana grow,” Robinson told Carlson during an interview on the Tucker Carlson Network. “We found an abandoned BMW there, and there were two shirts over the driver’s seat and the passenger seat that had Chinese writing on them for the Sijiu Association of New York.”
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“I was like, ‘Huh? That’s weird,’ took some pictures of it, didn’t really think anything of it,” Robinson continued. “This place, by the way, is like a mile from a military facility, the U.S. Army Reserve garrison, and later, Philip was able to connect the dots between two individuals arrested in Carmel, Maine, one of them was Weizhan Huang, and that film from a Chinese Communist Party in New York where two of these individuals who were arrested mugshots were on video at this event, and then Weizhan Huang is featured, while he’s out on bail, by the way, is featured in Chinese state-run media back in his hometown doing classic United Front work, talking about how he’s going to come back to the United States and he’s going to bring home the bacon.”
Huang and Yongchao Huang, who was also arrested in the June 29, 2023, raid carried out by the Penobscot County Sheriff’s Office, attended the inaugural banquet in 2022 during which the Sijiu Association was launched.
Law enforcement authorities estimated over 270 sites in Maine are being used by Chinese illegal growing operations, the DCNF reported in August 2023. One site of 100 plants could potentially be able to generate over $16 million a year at the time, according to a memo obtained by the DCNF.
“Thanks to, I guess, the work we did on the ground and Phillip’s advanced knowledge of Cantonese, Mandarin and the culture, the language and how these Chinese benevolent associations, they’re all front groups,” Robinson said, before urging the Trump administration to shut down Chinese consulates in the U.S.
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