The Department of Justice dropped a sizable case against a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor it had accused of hiding millions of dollars in contracts with China while he was getting paid to do research for the U.S. government.
Gang Chen, who came to the United States from China in 1989 and was naturalized in 2000, was arrested a year ago and charged with wire fraud, failing to file a foreign bank account report, and making a false statement in a tax return in connection with undisclosed contracts from “various entities in the People’s Republic of China to the U.S. Department of Energy.”
But the Justice Department filed a dismissal “in the interests of justice” with the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts on Thursday, and Judge Patti Saris signed off on it.
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“Today’s dismissal of the criminal charges against Gang Chen is a result of our continued investigation into this matter,” U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins said. “Through that effort, we recently obtained additional information pertaining to the materiality of Professor Chen’s alleged omissions in the context of the grant review process at issue in this case. After a careful assessment of this new information in the context of all the evidence, our office has concluded that we can no longer meet our burden of proof at trial.”
Chen was the director of the MIT Pappalardo Micro/Nano Engineering Laboratory and was funded by more than $19 million in grants and awards from the Department of Energy, Pentagon, and other federal agencies, according to charging documents. The DOJ contended that Chen and his research group received at least $29 million in foreign funding, including $19 million from China’s Southern University of Science and Technology.
Robert Fisher, an attorney for Gang Chen, told the Washington Examiner that his client has always been innocent.
“The government finally acknowledged what we have said all along: Professor Gang Chen is an innocent man,” Fisher contended. “Our defense was never based on any legal technicalities. Our defense was this: Gang did not commit any of the offenses he was charged with. He was never in a talent program. He was never an overseas scientist for Beijing. He disclosed everything he was supposed to disclose, and he never lied to the government or anyone else.”
Dozens of Chen’s MIT colleagues quickly defended him in a January 2021 letter.
“Questioning his loyalty is an outrage, and reminds us of dark periods in history,” the letter stated. “We therefore felt it imperative to step up to defend our colleague and, more broadly, to protect the fundamental freedoms of scientific research and open education.”
The Chen prosecution was part of DOJ’s China Initiative, which is part of the department’s National Security Division. Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen, who recently announced the creation of a new domestic terrorism unit, is currently reviewing the initiative.
In a similar reversal, the DOJ dropped a half-dozen cases against Chinese military researchers in July after it had accused them of lying on their visas. A DOJ spokesman said that move also was “in the interest of justice.”
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The China Initiative, started by the Trump DOJ in 2018, has a particular focus on rooting out academics who conceal their ties to China. The Chinese Communist Party has long condemned the initiative and has seized on U.S.-based efforts by professors and activists to end it.
Despite setbacks in some cases, numerous people have been convicted through the China Initiative, including Harvard professor Charles Lieber, who was found guilty in December of all federal charges related to concealing his ties to a Chinese university and the Chinese government’s Thousand Talents Program while receiving U.S. government funding.
