Video shows Harvard professor initially denying bringing cash payments back from China
- Nanotechnologist Charles Lieber is on trial for tax evasion in a case brought by the Justice Department’s China Initiative, which is meant to cut down on trade-secret theft
- FBI video interview with Lieber shows him eventually acknowledge he did not declare the payments for his affiliation with the Thousand Talents Plan on his taxes
In dramatic evidence Friday in the federal criminal trial of Harvard professor Charles Lieber, the scientist was shown on video denying having brought back tens of thousands of US dollars from China before acknowledging he put it in his luggage and spent it on groceries to avoid paying income taxes.
Lieber is on trial in US District Court in Boston facing six total counts of tax evasion, failing to disclose foreign bank accounts and hiding his collaboration with Chinese institutions.
Affiliating with the Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) and the Thousand Talents Plan, a Chinese programme aimed at recruiting top foreign scientists, is not illegal. But failing to report it is. Lieber, 62, has pleaded not guilty to all counts.
The video, shot from above, shows Lieber shortly after his arrest in January 2020 in a small room at the Harvard police station wearing a blue windbreaker, sitting uncomfortably in a chair near the wall.
FBI agents planned to detain him at 6am at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts. But he left for work so early that day that they made the arrest at his laboratory.
Lieber, then the chairman of Harvard’s chemistry department, is initially heard on tape suggesting to two FBI agents that his only connection to talent programme funds is related to a Chinese former student and that he does not have access to any Chinese bank accounts.
“I haven’t been paid by Wuhan except for airfare,” he says. “A lot of countries, money is what they have in excess … That’s one of the things China uses to seduce people.”