fbpx

China Initiative’s first academic offender raises verdict more


Recently former DOJ officials who participated in the programamong others, they called for an end to the effort or a significant change in focus. Attorney General Merrick Garland testifying before Congress promise He said the Department of Justice would review the program.

In this context, “if there was an acquittal in this matter [the Lieber] In that case, it would look bad for the government,” says Margaret Lewis, professor of law at Seton Hall University. written comprehensively on the initiative.

But the underlying facts of the case were strong—especially given the video footage of Lieber admitting to FBI agents that he had received cash from a Chinese university, had a Chinese bank account, and was (in his own words) “not completely transparent”. When asked about this and other issues by Harvard administrators and government investigators, by any stretch of the imagination”.

These facts have made the Lieber case an “outlier” among the China Initiative cases, according to a defense attorney who is following the case for his client’s upcoming trial. While not particularly useful for predicting how the government might handle future research integrity cases under the initiative, it has raised questions about talent recruitment programs, a crucial component of investigations.

Unanswered Questions in the Thousand Talents Program

The question of Lieber’s innocence can be resolved, at least for now – his lawyer, Marc Mukasey, told reporters “They respect the decision but will continue to fight”, they suggested, a potential appeal – but the case raised additional questions about the China Initiative itself and, in particular, the Chinese “talent programs” that led to such scrutiny.

Talent programs are government-sponsored recruitment schemes designed to attract overseas experts (“talents”) to work in China. While collaboration with Chinese universities, including collaboration through talent programs, has long been encouraged by US institutions, the federal government has become increasingly concerned about them over the past few years.

A 2019 Senate report It found that China has funded more than 200 talent programs that have collectively recruited more than 7,000 participants. The report also warned that talent programs “encourage their members to lie in their grant applications to U.S. grant organizations.” Shadow labs in China work on research similar to US studies and in some cases transfer hard-earned intellectual capital from US scientists.”

“One of the things that made Dr. Lieber an interviewee was that he had many Chinese students, right?”

—Marc Mukasey, Lieber’s defense attorney

MIT Technology Review’s data search found that 19 out of 77 known China Initiative cases (25%) were triggered by suspects’ suspected involvement in Chinese talent programs. Meanwhile, fourteen of these talent program cases allegedly had research integrity issues resulting from the failure to disclose all ties to Chinese organizations in grant documents. None of the 14 cases involved accusations that the scientist in question transferred US intellectual property to China.

While the government is skeptical of talent programs, it’s still not entirely clear whether disclosing participation in them is financial or trivial to the federal government.

This was a question that the defense attorney for the other China Initiative case, who was following the hearing to better prepare his client’s case, and who did not want to be named so as not to jeopardize the case, hoped it would be clarified during the litigation process. hearing. Without that disclosure, he said, some defendants could argue that they didn’t know that participation in the talent show itself was important to be reported.

Ultimately, this was a contentious issue in Lieber’s case: he had covered up his involvement and income to both Harvard University officials and later government investigators, and the prosecutor did not need or report the Thousand Talents Program.

“My ears are ringing”

On the fifth day of the trial, Lieber’s defense attorney, Mukasey, asked DoD inspector Amy Mousseau a series of questions about her motivations in investigating her chemist. “The Marine Research Laboratory reported that Lieber had ‘too many Chinese students in his lab?’ she asked.

“Yes,” replied Mousseau.

But US Attorney James Drabick objected to the question, so Mukasey restated the question. “One of the things that made Dr. Lieber an interviewee was that he had many Chinese students, right?”

“The trial was about individual guilt … not a policy debate on the China Initiative.”

—Seton Hall University law professor Margaret Lewis

When Mousseau didn’t answer immediately, he continued, “Did you notice, yes or no, in connection with the investigation in which many Chinese students were working in Dr. Lieber’s lab?”

“Yes,” replied Mousseau.

A courtroom tweet The exchange “plucked my ears,” said legal scholar Lewis, because “to what extent does the government, and US society more generally, view the connection with China as an advanced cause of development? suspicion?”

He displays a “prejudice” that goes against what the Department of Justice has long claimed: “his actions are based on ethnicity, race, nationality, national origin, or any of these factors.”

But racial bias, which is well documented within the FBI and DOJ, isn’t the only type of bias this case has uncovered, according to Michael German, a former FBI special agent and former FBI special agent with the Brennan Center for Justice. Another issue he sees is selective prosecution.

“I’m sure if the Justice Department had focused the same resource on researching corporate executives rather than academics, they would have found a lot more people who weren’t reporting all their income properly,” he says. “Tax evasion”, the subject of the two charges against which Lieber was ultimately convicted, is a problem, but that is not what the China Initiative aims to solve.

For many critics of the China Initiative, there are broader and more fundamental questions highlighted by each such case, regardless of the outcome.

The punishment we see as appropriate as a society for such disclosure violations is “years of imprisonment?” asks the legal scholar Lewis. He adds that the decision also says nothing about another concern: that the China Initiative creates “a narrative of a greater threat to people with ties to China.”

According to Lewis, these issues are expected to remain unresolved at the end of Lieber’s trial. “The trial was about Lieber’s individual guilt,” he says, “not a policy debate on the China Initiative.”





Source link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

(0)