NEW YORK  – China’s consul general in New York has been expelled, CNN reported on Wednesday, deepening the crisis swirling around the former aide of the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, who has been charged with acting as a secret agent for the Chinese government.

The news network said that Hochul had broken the news about the expulsion of Huang Ping, the consul general, at an unrelated event. She told reporters that she told the Chinese consulate she wanted Ping expelled after she had been in touch with the US state department at the request of the secretary of state, Antony Blinken.  “I have conveyed my desire to have the consul general from the People’s Republic of China and the New York mission expelled, and I’ve been informed that the consul general is no longer in the New York mission,” she said.

No confirmation of the expulsion has yet been made by either the Chinese or the US governments. Later on Wednesday, the state department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, appeared to contradict the governor’s account of an expulsion. At a regular press briefing, he said that Ping had not been expelled, but had ended his stint at the consulate in August at the “end of a regular scheduled rotation”.

Miller added: “There was no expulsion action. This individual was not expelled. That said, foreign interference, including attempts to influence through covert activity, are things that we take very seriously.” The reported expulsion of a top Chinese diplomat comes 24 hours after Linda Sun was charged with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, money-laundering conspiracy, visa fraud and alien smuggling. Sun had risen to the rank of deputy chief of staff to Hochul having also worked for the previous New York governor, Andrew Cuomo.  She worked for state government for about 15 years until she was fired by Hochul after the governor’s office said it had discovered “evidence of misconduct”. Hochul said that her former aide had demonstrated an “absolute betrayal of the trust of two administrations in state government”. (The Guardian)…[+]