US to retry University of Tennessee professor on fraud charges following mistrial, drawing outcry
- Case against Hu Anming was one of the Justice Department’s ‘China Initiative’ prosecutions of economic espionage activities considered national security threats
- That programme has been assailed for racial profiling, and 89 members of Congress called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate it
The US Department of Justice will retry a fraud case that ended in a hung jury against a former University of Tennessee professor accused of lying about ties to a Chinese university.
In a federal trial last month in Knoxville, Hu Anming – a tenured professor at the university’s department of mechanical, aerospace and biomedical engineering – faced charges of wire fraud and making false statements for hiding his relationship with the Peking University of Technology in grant applications he had made to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
But that trial ended on June 16 after the jurors said they could not reach a verdict. Federal District Judge Thomas Varlan declared a mistrial, and the government had until Friday to decide whether to retry or drop the case.
The department did not release a statement about its decision, simply filing a notice of intent to retry Hu with the Knoxville court and requesting a status conference to schedule the retrial.
Asian-American groups were not quiet in their objections. “What the federal government has done today is confirm an utter disregard for justice and our democracy,” said John C. Yang, executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice.
“This trial has exposed the deeply problematic investigations, surveillance, and prosecutions of Asian-Americans and Asian immigrants,” he said.
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Chinese-American scientists fear US racial profiling
Michael Nguyen, senior policy & advocacy associate at Organisation of Chinese Americans – Asian Pacific American Advocates, called it “really disappointing that the Department of Justice, instead of deciding to drop the case, is going to put so much more resources and energy into continuing to prosecute somebody in a case that clearly did not have enough evidence to support a conviction”.
Nguyen added: “We are going to continue to stand behind him as he goes through this process. And we’re going to continue to raise awareness around not only this case, but so many other victims of these practices by the federal government.”
Civil rights advocates and lawmakers have accused the department of racially profiling Asians as it tries to track down spies operating in the US on behalf of the Chinese government.
US trial of scientist accused of hiding work in China ends in hung jury
Hu, 52, a naturalised Canadian citizen, was the first defendant in a non-espionage case to go to trial under the “China Initiative”, a DOJ programme set up in 2018 to investigate trade secret theft and economic espionage activities considered threats to national security. The charges Hu faced were filed only after the FBI failed to develop evidence of espionage.
“Based on the FBI agent’s own witness testimony,” Yang noted, “the FBI initiated an economic espionage investigation against Professor Hu based on a false premise, and they failed to find any evidence of economic espionage or any other criminal activity after a year and a half of investigation.”
Just before the Justice Department’s notice that it would retry Hu’s case, a group of 89 senators and House members urged Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate whether the department has used racial profiling against Asians in espionage cases, including Hu’s.
“We are deeply troubled by reports of alleged misconduct by the Federal Bureau of Investigation” in Hu‘s case, the lawmakers wrote in the letter.
They called on Garland to look at whether, under the China Initiative, there has been a policy to target people based on their race, ethnicity or national origin.
US to drop visa fraud charge against researcher accused of hiding ties to Chinese military
The China Initiative is part of a broader US government crackdown on researchers and scientists for their work with Chinese schools and institutions.
In the latest setback to its effort to bring cases against researchers, last week the Justice Department also dropped charges against five Chinese researchers it contended had committed visa fraud by hiding ties with the Chinese military.
Tang Juan, a visiting cancer researcher at the University California, Davis, was among the defendants whose cases were dropped by the FBI. She was scheduled to go to trial this week.
Other cases included Chen Song, a neurologist who worked at Stanford University; Guan Lei, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles; Xin Wang, a biomedical researcher at the University of California, San Francisco; and Zhao Kaikai, a doctoral candidate studying artificial intelligence at Indiana University.
Still other cases have ended in the dismissal of charges against scientists of Chinese ethnicity. Among them were Temple University physicist Xiaoxing Xi; University of Virginia robotics researcher Hu Haizhou; and former Cleveland Clinic researcher Qing Wang.
At the same time, multiple researchers in US universities have also been convicted of crimes related to espionage and intellectual property theft on behalf of China.
In April, a Chinese national pleaded guilty to crimes related to the illegal sale of US$100,000 worth of goods to Northwestern Polytechnical University, a Chinese military university that the Justice Department says is heavily involved in military research and works closely with the People’s Liberation Army on the advancement of its military capabilities.
Hu, who had been at the university since 2013, specialises in nanotechnologies, a field that is often applied in areas like advanced electronic sensors. He was suspended from his UT job soon after his indictment in February 2020.
Philip Lomonaco, Hu’s defence lawyer, said during the trial that the Justice Department “wanted a feather in its cap with an economic espionage case, so they ignored the facts and the law, destroyed the career of a professor with three PhDs in nanotechnology and now expects the court to follow their narrative”.
At a hearing this month, Lomonaco told the judge that despite the mistrial, Hu was “still being incarcerated through home detention” and was left with “no ability to make plans”.
