MIT professor alleges misconduct by US prosecutors

Gang Chen, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor who was prosecuted under the China Initiative, has accused the FBI and prosecutors with misconduct and is demanding an apology.

The Chinese-born mechanical engineer and nanotechnologist was arrested in January 2021 on charges of failing to disclose contracts, appointments and awards from various entities in China to the US Energy Department. Last month, the Justice Department dropped all charges against him after realizing that it "can no longer meet its burden of proof at trial".

Chen said he considered himself "lucky", "because I'm painfully aware there are still so many people under investigation and unfairly prosecuted". He shared his experience fighting for his innocence at a recent webinar hosted by the Asian American Scholar Forum.

"On Jan 14 (2021), around 6:30 am, I was making coffee and I saw about 10 to 20 federal agents rushing to my home. My immediate reaction was 'this is stupid' because I knew I was under investigation," he said.

Chen became a target under the China Initiative, a program launched in 2018 to combat economic espionage, in 2020, a year prior to his indictment.

Chen and his family were held at an airport for a few hours when returning to the US from China. The border agents seized all his electronics, including his MIT laptop computer, his MIT phone and his personal phone, and they asked him about his collaboration with China.

"They (the border agents) interrogated me and asked my password (to the MIT laptop)," said Chen, who refused to give them the password.

Recalling his experience with the FBI agents and prosecutors, Chen summarized a few "patterns" of their misconduct in investigating researchers under the China Initiative.

"They distort and alter facts; they interpret normal professional activity as crime; they rushed the case and they did not do their job; they hide the truth; they never admit mistakes," he said.

For example, the criminal complaint used an email as evidence that Chen had ties with China. It was an email Chen sent to himself when he attended a meeting where MIT hosted an official from China's Ministry of Science and Technology.

Chen said he used his cell phone to take notes and then sent the notes to his own email address. In the criminal complaint, the prosecutors copied every word in the email except the last sentence, which was a sentence the Chinese official said to an MIT official: "Let's work together".

The prosecutors cut off the last sentence and claimed that the email was Chen's "to-do list" and that it showed his loyalty to China.

"What's even more outrageous was in the court hearing, the chief prosecutor said, 'This could be his note and it could also be his state of mind.' That was a legal terminology I learned that was basically saying that was my motivation," said Chen.

The prosecutors also accused Chen of serving as a review expert for China's National Science Foundation and interpreted that as his service for China.

"This is part of our regular professional activity. As a professor, we do reviews for many organizations, including foreign organizations," said Chen, "yet they interpret this as my service for China."

Since the case was dismissed, Chen said, "They never admit mistakes. Nobody has the courage to officially apologize to me. They want to hide; they want to get away."

Though the dismissal of the case was "a great result", Robert Fisher, Chen's attorney, said Chen and his family suffered from two years of anxiety, particularly the last year, as a federal indictment "is a very serious matter". "Your house is basically subject to seizure if you violate pretrial conditions," he added.

"What happens here is that the China Initiative, really, became a drift from its original purpose," he said. "It had nothing to do with classified research, trade secrets or espionage. But it was a way to drum up statistics in cases that they were then shoehorning into the China Initiative."

The trial of Anming Hu, a former professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, was the first of dozens of prosecutions under the China Initiative. He was charged with wire fraud and making a false statement in February 2020 and was acquitted of all charges in September 2021.

"We now see a China Initiative that has actually made things worse. You have cases like Professor Hu, who, again, was completely brought up on charges that should never have been brought to him," said US Congressman Ted Lieu of California at the webinar.

In both Hu's and Chen's cases, Lieu said the FBI agents made either "misleading statements" or "outright lies", and that the charges against them had nothing to do with espionage.

"It's important to know that these cases have nothing to do with spying or espionage," he said. "Cases being brought by the Department of Justice simply would not have been brought if the defendants were not Asian."