Renowned Harvard chemistry professor charged with lying about ties to China
World-renowned Harvard University chemistry professor Charles Lieber appeared in court on Thursday in handcuffs, ankle chains and an orange jumpsuit as he was charged with lying about his ties to China.
The bail for Lieber, head of Harvard’s Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department, was set at $1 million as he was formally accused, along with two Chinese nationals, of illegally “aiding the People’s Republic of China” by the US Justice Department.
A DOJ press release issued on Tuesday, the day the 60-year-old Lieber was arrested at his office, said that the Harvard department chair was being criminally charged “with one count of making a materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statement.”
Harvard University professor Charles Lieber, right, follows his attorney Peter Gelhaar (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
The cases against the Chinese nationals are separate from Lieber’s. Yanqing Ye, 29, currently in China, was charged with one count each of visa fraud, making false statements, acting as an agent of a foreign government and conspiracy. Zaosong Zheng, 30, was arrested on December 10, 2019 at Boston’s Logan International Airport and charged with attempting to smuggle vials of biological research into China. On January 21, 2020, Zheng was also indicted on one count of smuggling goods from the US and one count of making false, fictitious or fraudulent statements. He has been held in jail since December 30, 2019.
The crux of the case against Lieber is the claim that he lied about his involvement with a program called the Thousand Talents Plan, a program that is alleged to be aimed at luring people with knowledge of foreign technology and intellectual property to China.
The DOJ statement says “Unbeknownst to Harvard University beginning in 2011, Lieber became a ‘Strategic Scientist’ at Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China and was a contractual participant in China’s Thousand Talents Plan from in or about 2012 to 2017. … Under the terms of Lieber’s three-year Thousand Talents contract, WUT paid Lieber $50,000 USD per month, living expenses of up to 1,000,000 Chinese Yuan (approximately $158,000 USD at the time) and awarded him more than $1.5 million to establish a research lab at WUT.”
The DOJ document states further that Lieber, during an interview with investigators in April 2018, stated that he was never asked to participate in the Thousand Talents Program, but “wasn’t sure” how China categorized him. Oddly, the criminal complaint also states that, in November 2018, Lieber caused Harvard to “falsely tell NIH that Lieber ‘had no formal association with WUT’ after 2012, that ‘WUT continued to falsely exaggerate’ his involvement with WUT in subsequent years, and that Lieber ‘is not and has never been a participant in’ China’s Thousand Talents Plan.”
If convicted, Lieber faces up to five years in federal prison and a maximum fine of $250,000. The university has placed him on paid administrative leave.
A sense of the political motivations behind the aggressive treatment of Lieber was provided by US attorney Andrew Lelling who called the charges against the professor a, “small sample of China’s ongoing campaign to siphon off America’s technology and know-how for its country’s gain.”
Boston FBI agent Joseph Bonavolonta provided further insight into the motivation for the charges against the Harvard professor, “No country poses a greater, more severe or long-term threat to our national security and economic prosperity than China. China’s communist government’s goal, simply put, is to replace the US as the world superpower, and they are breaking the law to get there.”
The New York Times reported in November 2019 that there were at that time 180 open investigations at 71 universities across the US into potential intellectual property theft, including most of the top medical schools. Almost all of the individuals targeted are of Chinese descent, including naturalized American citizens.
Dr. Lieber’s biography shows that he is a leading international authority on nanoscience and nanotechnology with over 400 papers published on these topics. Nanotechnology deals with the manipulation of matter at the atomic and molecular level and it is a new scientific frontier with vast implications for the future of multiple disciplines and across industries. Lieber is the principle inventor on over fifty US patents and applications of nanotechnology and nanodevices in materials and biology.
Additionally, a review of the top nanotechnology research organizations in the world shows that the US--at the University of California, Berkeley--ranks at number seven behind China, Russia, France and Japan in this area of study and far behind South Korea and Japan in the category of commercial patents.
The arrest and charges against Dr. Lieber come in the context of the Trump administration’s trade war Beijing and preparations for open war with the second largest economy in the world. The DOJ case against Lieber bears unmistakable characteristics of an extreme response by the American ruling elite to its declining position in relation to significant areas of scientific research and development internationally. There can be no question that the case against Lieber is intended to intimidate American scientists from engaging in any way with their Chinese colleagues on scientific projects.
Biden for President
A high-profile U.S. senator with professional and personal ties to
China — including once employing one of its spies — is backing former Vice
President Joe Biden amid mounting questions over his son’s business dealings
with the communist regime.
FEINSTEIN
HAS SPENT HER POLITICAL LIFE STALKING THE HALLS OF CONGRESS SNIFFING OUT DEALS
THAT PUT HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS IN HER POCKETS.
SHE HAS
AVOIDED PROSECUTION BY VOTING AGAINST ANY ETHICS BILLS AND HER HUSBAND, RICHARD
BLUM'S HANDING OUT "CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION" BRIBES TO EVERY DEMOCRAT
OUT THERE!
IN THE
November 2006 election, the voters demanded congressional ethics reform. And
so, the newly appointed chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, Dianne
Feinstein, D-Calif., is now duly in charge of regulating the ethical behavior
of her colleagues. But for many years, Feinstein has been beset by her own
ethical conflict of interest, say congressional ethics experts.
“All in all, it was an
incredible victory for the Chinese government. Feinstein has done more for Red
China than other any serving U.S. politician. “ Trevor Loudon
“Our entire crony
capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy
approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great
country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan AMERICAN
THINKER.com
Senator Who Employed
Chinese Spy Endorses Joe
Biden for President
Win
McNamee/Getty Images
9 Oct 20192,419
5:44
A high-profile U.S. senator with professional and personal ties to
China — including once employing one of its spies — is backing former Vice
President Joe Biden amid mounting questions over his son’s business dealings
with the communist regime.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), a
former chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, announced her
endorsement of the former vice president on Tuesday, claiming to have
witnessed Biden’s “fortitude” and leadership during their overlapping tenures
in Congress.
I’ve worked closely with Vice
President Biden and I’ve seen firsthand his legislative ability, his
statesmanship, and most importantly his moral fortitud. During his time in
Congress and in the White House, Joe Biden has been a tireless fighter for hard
working American families.
The endorsement comes as Biden’s
presidential campaign is besieged by scandal regarding the lucrative business
dealings his youngest son, Hunter, had with foreign governments.
Only hours before Feinstein’s
endorsement, the Chinese government announced it would not
investigate how Hunter Biden ended up at the center of one its top private
equity firms. The Chinese foreign ministry made the decision after President
Donald Trump publicly called for a probe of Hunter Biden’s dealings with Bohai Harvest
RST (BHR). In particular, Trump has noted that the circumstances surrounding
BHR’s creation could have posed a conflict of interest for Joe Biden.
As Peter Schweizer, senior
contributor at Breitbart News, revealed in his bestselling book Secret Empires: How the American Political
Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, Hunter
Biden inked the multibillion-dollar deal that created BHR with a subsidiary of
the state-owned Bank of China in 2013.
The timing of the lucrative deal has
been brought into question as it came only 12 days after Hunter visited China
with his father aboard Air Force Two. Officially, the then-vice president
was visiting the country amid escalating tensions over islands in the South
China Sea and decided to bring his granddaughter and son along. In a March
2018 interview with Breitbart News Tonight,
however, Schweizer detailed the political machinations that preceded Hunter
Biden’s $1.5 billion venture with China:
In December of 2013, Vice President
Joe Biden flies to Asia for a trip, and the centerpiece for that trip is a
visit to Beijing, China. To put this into context, in 2013, the Chinese have
just exerted air rights over the South Pacific, the South China Sea. They
basically have said, ‘If you want to fly in this area, you have to get Chinese
approval. We are claiming sovereignty over this territory.’ Highly
controversial in Japan, in the Philippines, and in other countries. Joe Biden
is supposed to be going there to confront the Chinese. Well, he gets widely
criticized on that trip for going soft on China. For basically not challenging
them, and Japan and other countries are quite upset about this.
Since its creation, BHR has invested
heavily in energy and defense projects across the globe. As of
June, Hunter Biden was still involved with BHR,
sitting on its board of directors and owning a minority stake of the fund
estimated to be worth more than $430,000.
Such dealings at the center of
politics and business, while perhaps not illegal, are not exclusive to the
Biden family alone. As a few noted at the time of Feinstein’s endorsement, the
senator and her husband have their own close ties to the communist country.
During her tenure as mayor of San
Francisco in the late-1970s and early-1980s, Feinstein took advantage of the
newly normalized diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China by
establishing one of the first sister city partnership between San Francisco and
Shanghai. Through that partnership, Feinstein led trade delegations to China in
which she and her husband, Richard Blum, became acquainted with some of the
country’s most prominent political leaders.
As the Federalist noted in August 2018, Feinstein
and her husband leveraged those relationships to boost their own wealth. In
1986, Feinstein and Jiang Zemin — the then-mayor of Shanghai, who would later
ascend to the presidency of the People’s Republic of China — “designated
several corporate entities for fostering commercial relations.” One of those
firms was Shanghai Pacific Partners, which employed Blum as a director. Blum reportedly
had an interest of upwards of $500,000 in a project backed by Shanghai Pacific
Partners.
After Feinstein was elected to the
Senate in 1992, Blum continued profiting off their ties to China. A the same
time, the freshman lawmaker was pitching herself as a “China hand” to
colleagues, even once claiming “that in my
last life maybe I was Chinese.” Through her seat on the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, Feinstein led the fight on a number of initiatives seen as
being favorable to China, including granting the country permanent
most-favored-nation trading status in 2000.
Despite Feinstein and her husband
having a close relationship with Jiang, the Chinese government targeted the senator
as part of its espionage operations. In the early 2000s, the Chinese Ministry
of State Security (MSS) recruited a longtime employee of the senator to gather
information about the inner workings of her congressional and district offices.
Feinstein only learned of the staffer’s duplicity in 2013, after he’d already
been on her payroll for more than 20 years.
“While this person, who was a
liaison to the local Chinese community, was fired, charges were never filed
against him,” Politico reported in 2018,
speculating that because “the staffer was providing political intelligence and
not classified information—making prosecution far more difficult.”
Apart from the convoluted history of
the senator’s ties to China, the political timing of Feinstein’s endorsement
also caught many off guard. The California Democrat, who hosted a
fundraiser on Biden’s behalf last week alongside House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) daughter, is only the most recent figure from the
Democrat establishment to openly pledge support for the former vice president.
Feinstein’s endorsement, however, was not totally expected, especially since
her seamate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), is mounting a bid of her own for the
Democrat nomination. In fact, earlier this year, Feinsten flirted with the
notion of remaining neutral in the 2020 contest out of respect for Harris.
Compounding the political picture is
that most polls show Biden no longer the favorite to win California,
having fallen behind Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).
Feinstein, however, did not address
any of that when endorsing the former vice president on Tuesday. Instead, the
senator offered platitudes about Biden’s work to enhance gun control and how
his campaign was a “fight to restore the soul of the nation.”
No comments:
Post a Comment