Jury finds Chinese national not guilty of trespassing at Mar-a-Lago
A Florida jury found a Chinese woman not guilty of trespassing on President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property after she was charged there in December, but the panel on Wednesday convicted her of resisting an officer during the incident.
The trial of Lu Jing, the Chinese national who was accused of trespassing on the Palm Beach resort late last year, began Tuesday in West Palm Beach and ended on Wednesday when jurors rendered their verdict following an hour and a half of deliberation.
Sentencing for Lu is scheduled for Friday morning, according to the Office of the State Attorney of the 15th Judicial Circuit. She faces up to a year of imprisonment and a $1,000 fine.
CNN has reached out to Lu’s attorney for comment.
Lu is the second Chinese recently national accused of breaching security at Mar-a-Lago. Yujing Zhang trespassed on Mar-a-Lago in March 2019 and was found guilty last November of unlawfully entering a restricted zone and making false statements to a federal officer. She was sentenced to eight months in prison, but left much earlier due to the amount of time she had already served.
Officials said last year that during the December incident, Lu trespassed on the resort and was asked to leave by security. She then returned to the premises and began to take photos when Palm Beach Police Department responded and arrested her, according to Michael Ogrodnick, a spokesman for the department.
She pleaded not guilty to all of the charges brought against her during her first court appearance in December.
The President was not at the property at the time of either trespassing incident, but the breaches called into question the security at the resort, a semi-public location where Trump sometimes conducts official White House business.
Late last month, authorities fired gunshots at a woman who breached two security checkpoints with her SUV on the outer perimeter of the Florida resort. The incident was not terrorism-related and the suspect was likely impaired in some way, officials said.
