Secretary of State Marco Rubio has fired a Foreign Service officer after the State Department said the man concealed a romantic relationship with a Chinese national who has known ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

The department announced the dismissal on Wednesday, October 8, 2025.

President Trump and Rubio both reviewed the case before the officer was removed, according to the State Department.

This is what zero tolerance actually looks like.

The Associated Press reported that the State Department fired the diplomat over a romantic relationship he admitted having with a Chinese woman alleged to have CCP ties, a rare personnel action inside the diplomatic corps.

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State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said the officer was dismissed after Trump and Rubio reviewed the matter and determined he had admitted concealing the relationship, according to AP. That put the decision at the top of the administration, rather than inside a quiet personnel file.

Pigott said Rubio’s State Department would maintain zero tolerance for employees caught undermining national security, which is the frame that turns this from a workplace scandal into a foreign-service warning.

AP reported the dismissal is believed to be the first of its kind. It came under a ban introduced late in the Biden administration that barred romantic or sexual relationships between American government personnel in China and Chinese citizens.

That ban applied to U.S. government personnel in China, their family members, and cleared contractors.

The State Department left the officer unnamed in its public statement. AP noted that the same case had already appeared in a surreptitiously filmed video.

The trail leads back to that undercover footage.

O’Keefe Media Group published its undercover report on August 6, 2025, identifying the Foreign Service officer as Daniel Choi and the Chinese national as Joi Zao, then releasing video clips of the exchange.

OMG reported that Choi discussed failing to file a required disclosure after starting the relationship and said he knew reporting restrictions applied to local dating at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. That matters because foreign contacts are not casual paperwork in diplomatic security.

The group reported that Choi described Zao’s father as a senior CCP-connected official and acknowledged she could have been a spy, while still explaining why he withheld the relationship from superiors.

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Those are hidden-camera claims from the man himself rather than an espionage charge. The State Department still treated the conduct as a national-security problem.

Fox News reported that Trump reviewed the case and approved the firing, citing the State Department statement, and connected the dismissal to the earlier hidden-camera footage.

Fox reported that the man believed to be the fired diplomat told the undercover journalist he defied the government for love, said the woman could have been a spy, and described her father as tied to the Communist Party. Those details are why the story exploded beyond a routine HR matter.

Fox also noted that Rubio had earlier said State and DHS planned to aggressively revoke student visas of Chinese nationals with CCP connections, putting the firing inside a broader administration push on Chinese influence risks.

The firing fits a policy Trump set out early in his second term.

The February 12, 2025 White House order titled One Voice for America’s Foreign Relations says officers and employees who implement U.S. foreign policy must do so under the President’s direction and authority, including inside the Foreign Service.

The order states that failure to faithfully implement the President’s policy is grounds for discipline, including separation. It also directs the Secretary of State to reform recruiting, evaluation, retention, and related standards so the department implements the elected President’s agenda.

An American diplomat stationed in Beijing quietly carrying on a relationship with a CCP-connected woman, then hiding it from his own government, is exactly the kind of exposure a serious foreign service is supposed to prevent. Rubio’s action shows the order had teeth.

For years, that kind of risk got buried in paperwork and looked past. Rubio’s State Department drew a line and enforced it, with the President signing off.

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This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.

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