Harvard professor did not lie about Chinese ties, lawyer says Reuters at US trial

Author: Nate Raymond

BOSTON (Reuters) – A lawyer for Harvard University accused of hiding ties to a Chinese-led recruitment program on Wednesday accused U.S. prosecutors of “inventing something” while a carefully watched trial was underway.

Jurors heard initial statements from prosecutors and defense attorneys at the trial of Charles Lieber, a nanotechnology pioneer and former chairman of Harvard’s chemistry department, on six criminal charges including making false statements, making false tax returns and not denouncing foreign bank accounts.

Lieber, 62, briefly confronted the jury in Boston’s federal court, defense attorney Marc Mukasey said, investigators tried to “grind” or “create” evidence to try to show the accused that he lied to authorities.

“If there was a Nobel Prize for inventing something out of nowhere, the government’s lawsuit would win,” Mukasey told jurors.

In an initial statement from the prosecution, U.S. Assistant Prosecutor James Drabick told jurors that Lieber was involved in China’s Thousand Talent Program, prosecutors said China uses to attract foreign researchers to share their knowledge.

The trial is a test of the US Department of Justice’s “China Initiative” in 2018 to combat China’s economic espionage and trade secret theft. Critics say the initiative is detrimental to academic research and is racially profiling for Chinese researchers.

Drabick said Lieber participated in the Thousand Talents Program from 2011 to 2015 affiliated with Wuhan University of Technology in China, which paid him tens of thousands of dollars to boost his reputation.

Lieber denied his involvement in response to questions from the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. National Institutes of Health that he was given $ 15 million in research grants and hid his income and a Chinese bank account, Drabick said.

Drabick said Lieber’s emails prove that he was involved in the program and, after his arrest in 2020, admitted in a recorded FBI interview that he “should not have a deal and accept the money.”

“You’ll hear him explain when he was younger and stupid that he did it,” Drabick said.

Defense attorney Mukasey said investigators did not write down exactly what Lieber said before his arrest and tried to answer the FBI’s “confusing” interrogation after the arrest.