Catfished by Cops

The Hamas Terrorist Who Wasn’t

“How’s the backyard, Jason? Is there somewhere we can talk?”

It was May 20, 2020, at the height of the pandemic, and an FBI SWAT team had raided the house Jason Fong shared with his parents in Orange County, California. Fong, a 24-year-old Chinese American who, until recently, had been a U.S. Marine Corps reservist, sat handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser outside.

“Just a couple of chairs at the back table,” he told the Irvine police detective and FBI agent questioning him.

Fong led the two lawmen to the backyard, where all three sat at a table near the pool. A body camera worn by FBI Special Agent Thuan Ngo recorded the conversation. Fong, still handcuffed, wore a blue button-down shirt and a white face mask. The family dog wandered around, happily wagging its tail.

“How long have you had this dog?” the detective, Michael Moore, asked.

“Since I was 16,” Fong answered.

Moore read Fong his Miranda rights; Ngo advised him that making a false statement to a federal agent is a felony.

“Let’s back up a little bit,” Moore said. “What are some big changes that have occurred in your life? You converted to Islam?”

“Yeah,” Fong answered.

The detective asked Fong how he became a Muslim, how many guns he owned, and how he used social media.

“I followed a couple of pages that were just mainly Muslim, like, shitposting, kinda just like —”

“Muslim what?” Ngo interrupted, apparently stumped by the word “shitposting.” “I’m sorry?”

“Kind of just, like, meme pages,” Fong answered. “A lot of them make jokes about stupid stuff, like extremism and all that stuff — things I do not condone. … They make memes about extremism in a joking manner.”

Fong described how he communicated with like-minded people on the internet, mostly in the joking or ironic ways of the extremely online. “It’s just satire,” he said, adding that he tried to dissuade anyone who appeared to take a genuine interest in extremist ideologies and groups.

But the federal agent kept pushing. He asked if anyone Fong knew via the chat group claimed to support terrorists. He asked for usernames.

“You’re saying you don’t support any of these groups, right?” Ngo asked.

“I do not,” Fong said.

“You don’t believe in any of these groups at all?”

“I don’t.”

Fong’s case represents a new and increasingly common form of terrorism sting conducted primarily online, in which federal investigators and prosecutors must navigate the often obscure boundary between protected speech and evidence of crime.

The detective and the FBI agent knew more than they were letting on that day in 2020. Hundreds of pages of New York Police Department and FBI internal reports, months’ worth of chat logs, and hours of recordings obtained by The Intercept reveal how the investigation of Fong began thousands of miles away in an NYPD intelligence unit. These internal documents and recordings also demonstrate how the FBI is coopting local law enforcement resources in its ever-expanding search for potential terrorists. Neither the NYPD nor the FBI responded to a list of questions from The Intercept.

Since February 2020, when the NYPD first introduced an undercover employee to Fong in a private group chat, the FBI had been secretly monitoring his online activity. Fong’s supposed chat group friends included at least two government agents — one from the NYPD and another from the FBI. As violent crime spiked in New York City during the pandemic, a division of America’s largest and oldest municipal police department was catfishing a California man who had no connections to New York and no plans to travel there.

Following the backyard interrogation, the Justice Department charged Fong with four counts of providing material support to terrorists, alleging that he shared in the group chat military training documents he’d found online and believed could be used to aid Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, a Syrian militant group, and that he tried to raise money for Hamas by sharing a website for Al Qassam Brigades, the Hamas militant wing responsible for the October 7 attack in Israel. 

Read the full story in The Intercept.