Recently former DOJ officials involved in the program, amongst others, have referred to as for an finish to the hassle or a major change in its focus. Testifying on the matter earlier than Congress, Attorney General Merrick Garland promised that the Justice Department could be finishing up a overview of this system.
Given this context, “if there had been an acquittal in this [the Lieber] case, it would have looked bad for the government,” says Seton Hall University regulation professor Margaret Lewis, who has written extensively on the initiative.
But the underlying info of the case have been sturdy—particularly given the video footage of Lieber admitting to FBI brokers that he obtained money from a Chinese college, had a Chinese checking account, and hadn’t been (in his personal phrases) “completely transparent by any stretch of the imagination” when requested about these and different points by Harvard directors and authorities investigators.
These info made the Lieber case “an outlier” amongst China Initiative circumstances, in response to one protection lawyer who adopted the case for clues for his personal consumer’s upcoming trial. While it’s not significantly helpful for predicting how the federal government may deal with future analysis integrity circumstances beneath the initiative, it has raised questions on a vital element to the investigations—the expertise recruitment applications.
Unanswered questions on the Thousand Talents Program
The query of Lieber’s innocence could also be resolved, at the least for now—his legal professional, Marc Mukasey, told reporters that they “respect the verdict but will keep fighting,” suggesting a possible attraction—however the trial has introduced up extra questions in regards to the China Initiative itself and, particularly, the Chinese “talent programs” that prompted such scrutiny.
Talent applications are government-sponsored recruitment plans designed to draw abroad consultants (a.okay.a. “talents”) to work in China. While collaboration with Chinese universities, together with collaboration via expertise applications, was lengthy inspired by US establishments, the federal authorities has change into more and more involved about them up to now few years.
A 2019 Senate report discovered that China funded over 200 expertise applications that had collectively recruited over 7,000 members. The report additionally warned that expertise applications incentivized its members to “lie on grant applications to US grant-making agencies, set up ‘shadow labs’ in China working on research identical to their US research, and, in some cases, transfer US scientists’ hard-earned intellectual capital.”
“Part of what made Dr. Lieber a person to be interviewed was that he had many Chinese students, right?”
—Marc Mukasey, Lieber’s protection legal professional
MIT Technology Review’s information investigation discovered that 19 of the 77 identified China Initiative circumstances (25%) have been prompted by suspicions that defendants had participated in Chinese expertise applications. Fourteen of those talent-program circumstances, in the meantime, alleged analysis integrity points stemming from failures to reveal all affiliations to Chinese entities on grant documentation. None of the 14 circumstances includes costs that the scientist in query transferred US mental property to China.
Despite the federal government’s suspicion of expertise applications, it’s nonetheless not fully clear whether or not disclosing participation in them is taken into account materials or immaterial to the federal authorities.
This was a query that the protection legal professional for the opposite China Initiative case, who was following the trial to higher put together his personal consumer’s case and didn’t need to be named in order to not jeopardize it, hoped could be clarified in the midst of the trial. Without that clarification, he stated, some defendants may argue that they’d not identified it was materials to report talent-program participation itself.
In the top, this was a moot challenge in Lieber’s trial: he had lined up his participation, and revenue, each to Harvard University officers after which to authorities investigators, and the prosecutor didn’t must make clear on the report whether or not participation within the Thousand Talents Program did or didn’t must be reported.
“My ears perked up”
On the fifth day of the trial, Mukasey, Lieber’s protection legal professional, requested Department of Defense investigator Amy Mousseau a sequence of questions on her motivations in investigating the chemist. Was it true, Mukasey requested, that the Naval Research Laboratory knowledgeable Mousseau that Lieber had “too many Chinese students in his lab?”
“Yes,” Mousseau responded.
US Attorney James Drabick objected to the question, however, so Mukasey rephrased it. “Part of what made Dr. Lieber a person to be interviewed was that he had many Chinese students, right?”
“The trial was about particular person guilt … not a coverage dialogue on the China Initiative.”
—Seton Hall University law professor Margaret Lewis
When Mousseau did not immediately answer, he continued, “Did it come to your attention in connection with the investigation that Dr. Lieber had many Chinese students working in his lab, yes or no?”
“Yes,” Mousseau responded.
A courtroom tweet summarizing the exchange “made my ears perked up,” said Lewis, the law scholar, because “it goes to this fundamental question of ‘To what extent does the government, and US society more generally, see connectivity to China as a reason for enhanced suspicion?’”
It displays a “bias,” she adds, that goes against what the Justice Department has long claimed: that “their actions are purely based on what people have done, their conduct, and not by ethnicity, race, nationality, national origin, or any of those factors.”
But racial bias, which is well documented within the FBI and DOJ, according to Michael German, a former FBI special agent turned whistleblower and a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice, is not the only type of bias that this trial reveals. Another issue that he sees is selective prosecution.
“I’m sure if the Justice Department focused the same resource on investigating corporate executives rather than academics, they could find far more people who didn’t properly report all of their income,” he says. “Tax evasion”—the subject of two of the charges that Lieber was ultimately convicted of—“is a problem, but it isn’t the problem the China Initiative was intended to solve.”
For many critics of the China Initiative, there are broader and more fundamental questions that each case—regardless of outcome—highlights.
Are “years in prison the penalty that we, as society, think is appropriate for these kinds of disclosure violations?” asks Lewis, the law scholar. The verdict also doesn’t say anything, she adds, about another concern: that the China Initiative creates a “larger threat narrative attached to people with connections to China.”
That these issues remain unresolved at the end of Lieber’s trial is to be expected, according to Lewis. “The trial was about Lieber’s individual guilt,” she says, “not a policy discussion on the China Initiative.”
