Anming Hu, a Chinese-born scientist who is now a citizen of Canada and previously employed at the University of Tennessee, was arrested last year by the FBI for wire fraud and making false statements. The Department of Justice (DOJ) charged Hu with engaging in espionage-related crimes because some of his research was funded by a grant from NASA that was similar to research projects that he was working on in China. Reading stories about Hu, the most charitable explanation for the DOJ charging him with a crime is that it’s a simple case of bureaucratic misunderstanding where University of Tennessee administrators and Hu didn’t understand disclosure requirements that prohibited him from working on projects in the United States and China while receiving government research funding.
Other than a simple misunderstanding, there is a far more sinister reason why Hu is on trial: FBI and DOJ pressure to find spies and make double-agents out of them. According to a report from The Hill:
An FBI agent admitted in an ongoing trial to falsely accusing a Chinese-born Tennessee professor of being a Chinese spy, using baseless information to get have him placed on the federal no-fly list and spying on him and his son for two years … FBI agent Kujtim Sadiku admitted last week to falsely accusing former University of Tennessee, Knoxville, professor Anming Hu of being a spy. Sadiku also admitted to using the false information to pressure Hu to become a spy for the U.S.… No evidence was ever discovered that suggested Hu, an internationally recognized welding technology expert, is a spy.
The jury just started deliberating, but the evidence against Hu is weak. As I warned about in my Cato policy analysis on immigration and espionage, charges of wire fraud and false statements are usually a red flag that there is no evidence of espionage. If prosecutors can possibly charge somebody with espionage, they will do so to pump up their statistics and to get a get a better plea deal from defendants. When they don’t, they fall back on minor crimes like false statements.
Furthermore, FBI and DOJ officials have a political incentive to find Chinese spies ever since the DOJ launched its China Initiative in 2018. My policy analysis counting spies on U.S. soil acknowledges that it’s hard to get a decent estimate of espionage because spies don’t want to be caught. I cautioned, however, that there are incentives and motivations to find spies even where they don’t exist:
Overcounting of spies, espionage, and espionage‐related crimes could also be a problem. Spies usually must be discovered and rarely announce their presence, so the discovery of spies is based on government and private‐sector investigations of espionage. Political mandates to discover and prosecute spies could lead to an overidentification of spies. Mark Rasch, former computer‐crime prosecutor, said, ‘If you’re looking everywhere for spies, you will find spies everywhere, even where they don’t exist. For instance, prosecutors who are empowered and pushed to discover spies would likely result in marginal individuals being convicted of espionage‐related crimes, such as making false statements or tax fraud, that were discovered in the course of an espionage investigation that wouldn’t otherwise be prosecuted.
The more I read about Chinese espionage, the more it seems that I may have overcounted the number of Chinese spies. Hu didn’t make it into my analysis because it covers 1990 through the end of 2019 and he was arrested in February 2020. Although the jury hasn’t reached a verdict yet, the government admits that Hu wasn’t a spy and that it was trying to make him become one by relying on some weak evidence and paperwork errors. This is neither the last time nor the first time that bad political incentives lead to shambolic prosecutions of non-spies for espionage-related offenses.
