A federal appeals court has overturned the conviction of a researcher accused of concealing work he did in China while employed by the University of Kansas.
Feng “Franklin” Tao was convicted in April 2022, three counts of wire fraud and one count of making a materially false statement. U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson threw out the wire fraud convictions a few months later, but let the false statement conviction stand. They later sentenced him to the time he had already served.
But the 10th U.S. Court of Appeals in Kansas City, Missouri, ruled Thursday that the government had failed to prove that Tao’s failure to disclose his potential conflict of interest actually mattered. The court ordered the lower court to acquit him of the only remaining charge.
The case against Tao was part of the Trump administration China Initiativethat began in 2018 to thwart what the Justice Department called the transfer of original ideas and intellectual property from American universities to the Chinese government. The department ended the program amid public criticism and several failed prosecutions.
Tao was a tenured professor in the University of Kansas’s chemistry and petroleum engineering departments from 2014 until his arrest in 2019. The appeals court noted that while the FBI began as an espionage case, it ultimately found no evidence of espionage.
But the professor was accused of failing to disclose on an annual “institutional responsibilities form” under the school’s conflict-of-interest policy that he had traveled to China to work on setting up a lab and recruiting staff for Fuzhou University, where he hoped to secure a prestigious position. Federal prosecutors alleged that Tao’s activities defrauded the University of Kansas, as well as the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, which had awarded Tao grants for research projects in Kansas.
Tao’s attorneys argued in their appeal that the case against Tao was a “staggering example of prosecutorial overreach” that attempted to turn a university personnel issue into a federal crime.
In a 2-1 ruling, the majority found that there was insufficient evidence for the jury to conclude that Tao’s failure to disclose his relationship with the Chinese university influenced the Department of Energy or the Science Foundation’s decisions regarding his research grants, and therefore could not be considered a “materially” misstatement.
Appeals judge Mary Beck Briscoe disagreed. He said Tao’s failure to disclose his time spent on his potential role at Fuzhou University was of interest to both agencies. After all, as stewards of taxpayers’ money, they want to know who is responsible for ensuring the reliability of research results.