The trial of Harvard professor Dr. Charles Lieber, who allegedly concealed his ties to a Chinese university and the Chinese government’s Thousand Talents Program while receiving U.S. government funding, began this week, a possible bellwether for the future of the Justice Department’s China Initiative.
Lieber, the former chairman of the department of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University, received $15 million in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Pentagon over the years before being arrested and charged in January 2020 with crimes including false statements. He was hit with a superseding indictment for falsely reporting on income tax returns related to his role as a “strategic scientist” at the Wuhan University of Technology and his lucrative participation in the Thousand Talents Program. The DOJ says the Chinese program is “designed to attract, recruit, and cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China’s scientific development, economic prosperity, and national security.”
Lieber maintains his innocence, and the jury selection began Tuesday in a Boston federal courtroom.
The DOJ said that under Lieber’s three-year Thousand Talents contract, the Wuhan University of Technology paid him a salary of up to $50,000 per month and awarded him more than $1.5 million to establish a research lab at the Chinese school. Prosecutors argue Lieber repeatedly lied to federal investigators.
Andrew Lelling, then-U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, touted his office’s case against Lieber during a February 2020 conference. He said the China Initiative aimed at raising awareness at schools so that “maybe next time an academic does not lie about his connections to a Chinese program or maybe next time an academic at that institution thinks twice or thinks a little bit harder about their collaboration with a Chinese institution.”
But Lelling, now a partner at Jones Day, changed his tune after the recent publishing of an MIT Technology Review article titled “The U.S. crackdown on Chinese economic espionage is a mess. We have the data to show it.”
“The Initiative has drifted and, in some significant ways, lost its focus,” Lelling wrote on his LinkedIn in December. “DOJ should revamp, and shut down, parts of the program, to avoid needlessly chilling scientific and business collaborations with Chinese partners.”
PRO-CHINA GROUP ADVISED BY KEY BIDEN PICKS COMPARED DOJ’S CHINA INITIATIVE TO MCCARTHYISM
An open letter from 177 Stanford University professors, which was eventually endorsed by hundreds of other professors at multiple schools, claimed the initiative “is harming the United States’ research and technology competitiveness and it is fueling biases.”
Despite criticism, the China Initiative has resulted in numerous successful prosecutions.
FBI Director Christopher Wray said last year that the bureau has more than 2,000 active investigations that trace back to China, half of which are related directly to intellectual property theft while the other half are a variety of counterintelligence investigations.
“There’s no country that presents a broader, more comprehensive threat to America’s innovation, to our economic security, and to our democratic ideas than China does,” Wray said.
A group of Republican senators called upon Garland in May not to implement an “amnesty program” they said the Justice Department was considering under which researchers at U.S. colleges and universities could disclose past foreign funding, including from China, without fear of prosecution.
In a reversal, the DOJ dropped a half-dozen cases against Chinese military researchers in July after it had accused them of lying on their visas. DOJ spokesman Wyn Hornbuckle said it was “in the interest of justice.”
The Lieber case is being presided over by U.S. District Judge Rya Zobel, who set $1 million bail and ordered him and his wife to surrender their passports in January 2020. The professor was placed on indefinite paid leave by Harvard after his arrest.
At the same time mainstream media is silent on Financial Ties Link Biden Family to China
Hunter Biden has maintained long-standing business arrangements with China government entities, from which he earned millions. There is also evidence that Joe Biden knew and may have received payment from these entities, as well.
U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs U.S. Senate Committee on Finance Majority issued a staff report titled “Hunter Biden, Burisma, and Corruption: The Impact on U.S. Government Policy and Related Concerns.”
A report compiled by the Republican staff of a joint Senate committee outlines how, while Joe Biden was the vice president of the United States, his son, Hunter, was able to capitalize on his father’s position to increase his own wealth by forging close ties to China’s state-owned banks.
In 2013, Hunter Biden accompanied his father, then vice president, on an official visit to China. During that trip, at U.S. taxpayer expense, Hunter met with Chinese banker Jonathan Li, his partner in starting a private investment fund. Ten days later, authorities in Shanghai issued the fund a Chinese business license. Hunter was listed as a member of the board of directors, in what the South China Morning Post and the New York Times both described as a state-backed private equity fund, Bohai Harvest RST (BHR Partners). Eighty percent of the shares in Bohai Harvest RST (BHR Partners) were controlled by shareholders in the Chinese government.
On the firm’s website, they claimed to have the support of Chinese state-owned banks, the Bank of China, China Development Bank Capital, and other major Chinese financial institutions. The company was described by The New York Post as a joint venture between Hunter Biden’s American firm, Rosemont Seneca, and China’s central bank, The Bank of China (BOC). The Chinese government was literally funding a business that it co-owned with the son of the U.S. vice president.
In 2015, a Chinese state-backed real-estate conglomerate purchased a controlling stake in Rosemont Realty, an affiliate of the company where Hunter was an advisor, Rosemont Seneca. Two years later, Hunter Biden’s emails revealed that he had been given a 20% stake in a Chinese investment fund at a massive discount, plus an additional 10% “for the big guy.” Tony Bobulinski, Hunter’s former business partner, later confirmed that “the big guy” was referring to Joe Biden.
In 2015, Bohai Harvest RST (BHR Partners), together with Chinese state-owned military aviation contractor Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), bought Henniges, an American manufacturer of components with both civilian and military applications. AVIC is a major Chinese military contractor, operating directly under the control of the State Council, producing military aircraft and drones for the People’s Liberation Army.
Bohai Harvest RST (BHR Partners) also invested in Megvii Technology Inc, a maker of facial recognition technology. Megvii Technology was once placed on a trade blacklist by the U.S. government, after Human Rights Watch reported that the company’s hardware was being used for surveillance and repression of ethnic Uyghur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region.
Perhaps the most brazen of BHR’s investments was in China General Nuclear Power Company (CGN), a company charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with conspiracy to unlawfully produce and develop nuclear material, without the required authorization from the U.S. Department of Energy. CGN and three of its subsidiaries were also accused of attempting to steal U.S. military technology. In August, 2019, CGN was added to the U.S. Department of Commerce “entity list,” prohibiting American companies from selling products to the company.