US professor Feng ‘Franklin’ Tao wins reversal of conviction in Trump-era China probe

A US appeals court on Thursday tossed the conviction of a former University of Kansas professor for making a false statement related to work he was doing in China, marking a new setback for the Department of Justice in a Trump administration-era crackdown on Chinese influence within American academia.

The Denver-based 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals on a 2-1 vote held that prosecutors offered insufficient evidence at trial to support the sole remaining count on which jurors convicted Feng “Franklin” Tao in 2022.

Peter Zeidenberg, Tao’s lawyer, in a statement called the case a misguided prosecution that authorities pursued despite having no evidence that Tao engaged in espionage. He said the case had virtually bankrupted Tao’s family and led to his firing.

“Dr Tao is grateful that this long nightmare is finally over,” Zeidenberg said.

The Justice Department declined to comment.

Tao was among about two dozen academics who were charged as part of the “China Initiative”, which launched in 2018 during Republican former US president Donald Trump’s administration and aimed to counter suspected Chinese economic espionage and research theft.

The Justice Department under Democratic President Joe Biden in 2022 ended the China Initiative following several failed prosecutions and criticism that it chilled research and fuelled bias against Asians, although the department said it would continue pursuing cases over national security threats posed by China.

Prosecutors said Tao, who worked on renewable energy projects, concealed his affiliation with Fuzhou University in China from the University of Kansas and two federal agencies that provided grant funding for his research.

Tao was indicted in 2019. A jury in April 2022 convicted him of four of the eight counts against him, but a trial judge later overturned three wire fraud convictions, citing a lack of evidence, and sentenced him to time served.

That left a single conviction for making a false statement by failing to disclose his affiliation with Fuzhou University on a form submitted to the University of Kansas. Prosecutors said that information was relevant to the funding decisions of the agencies, the US Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

But US Circuit Judge Nancy Moritz, writing for the majority, said Tao’s statement was incapable of influencing an actual funding decision. She said that was because neither agency had any proposals before them to consider from Tao when he made his statement.

Moritz, writing for the majority, said that meant prosecutors failed to prove the statement was material.