(FreedomBeacon.com)- We have reported frequently on the many cases of Chinese academics and other professionals stealing American intelligence, intellectual property, and secrets. It’s a huge problem that the United States federal government is always tackling in one way or another – which makes the latest news that the Department of Justice just dropped a pretty serious case against a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor all the more confusing.
Gang Chen, who arrived in the United States in 1989 and became a citizen in the year 2000, was accused of hiding millions of dollars in contracts with China at the same time he was being paid by the United States government to perform research. In 2021, he was arrested and charged with failing to file a foreign bank account report, committing wire fraud, and also making a false statement in a tax return.
Federal authorities had found that he had contracts with a number of different entities from the People’s Republic of China, which should have been disclosed to the United States Department of Energy.
However, the Department of Justice this month filed a dismissal in the case, claiming that it was “in the interests of justice.”
United States Attorney Rachel Rollins said that the dismissal of criminal charges against Chen was a result of their continued investigation into the matter. They claimed that recently obtained information provided new context about his failure to disclose these connections and foreign bank accounts, meaning that they could no longer meet the burden of proof at the trial.
Robert Fisher, Chen’s attorney, claimed that his client has always been innocent.
“Our defense was never based on any legal technicalities,” he claimed, adding that his client always disclosed everything he was supposed to disclose and never lied to the government. He was also defended by his colleagues at MIT in a letter published in January of last year.
Assuming the information is accurate, it could be that this case was a mistake – but several other cases are ongoing as part of former President Donald Trump’s “China Initiative.” The project was started in 2018 and is designed to find academics with undisclosed links to China.
