A federal appeals court has overturned the conviction of a researcher who was accused of concealing work he conducted in China while employed on the University of Kansas.
Feng “Franklin” Tao was sentenced in April 2022 on three counts of wire fraud and one count of constructing a cloth false statement. U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson kick out the wire fraud convictions a couple of months later, but left the conviction for making false statements standing. Later sentenced him to a jail sentence he had already served.
But the tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Kansas City, Missouri, ruled Thursday that the federal government had not presented enough evidence to indicate that Tao's failure to reveal his potential conflict of interest was actually relevant and ordered the lower court to acquit him on that only remaining count.
The case against Tao was a part of the Trump administration’s efforts to China Initiativewhich was launched in 2018 to stop what the Justice Department said was the transfer of original ideas and mental property from U.S. universities to the Chinese government. The department ended this system after public criticism and a number of other failed prosecutions.
Tao was a tenured professor within the University of Kansas' chemistry and petroleum engineering departments from 2014 until his arrest in 2019. The appeals court found that while the case began as an espionage case, the FBI ultimately found no evidence of espionage.
However, the professor was accused of failing to reveal, when completing an annual “institutional responsibility form” under the university's conflict of interest policy, that he had traveled to China to establish a laboratory and recruit staff for Fuzhou University, where he hoped to secure a prestigious position. Federal prosecutors argued that through his activities, Tao defrauded the University of Kansas, in addition to the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, which had awarded Tao grants for research projects in Kansas.
Tao's lawyers argued of their appeal that the case against Tao was a “breathtaking case of prosecutorial overreach” aimed toward turning a university personnel matter right into a federal crime.
Appeals Judge Mary Beck Briscoe dissented, saying that Tao's failure to reveal his time spent in connection along with his potential position at Fuzhou University was of concern to each agencies because, of their role as stewards of taxpayers' money, they desired to know who was chargeable for the trustworthiness of the research results.
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