U.S. DROPS CASE AGAINST MIT SCIENTIST

Federal prosecutors on Thursday dropped the government’s charges against Gang Chen, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a high-profile setback to the China Initiative, a nearly three-yearold government effort intended to stop scientists from passing sensitive technology to China.

Chen was arrested on Jan. 14, 2021, during President Donald Trump’s last full week in office, and charged with a form of grant fraud, hiding his affiliations with Chinese government institutions in applications for $2.7 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Energy in 2017. He pleaded not guilty to all the charges.

Prosecutors submitted a motion to dismiss those charges on Thursday morning, stating that the government “can no longer meet its burden of proof at trial.” Judge Patti B. Saris of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts allowed the dismissal shortly before noon.

Chen’s arrest was frontpage news in Boston, a hub of scientific research. It was met with protest from many of Chen’s colleagues in academia, who said prosecutors had overreached, blurring the line between grant disclosure violations and more serious crimes like espionage or intellectual property theft.

In recent weeks, officials at the Department of Energy have told prosecutors that the department would have awarded the grant money to Chen even if he had disclosed the Chinese ties, calling into question the basis of the charges, according to people familiar with the matter.

“Today is a great day,” said Chen’s lawyer, Robert Fisher. “The government finally acknowledged what we have said all along: Professor Gang Chen is an innocent man. Our defense was never based on any legal technicalities. Our defense was this: Gang did not commit any of the offenses he was charged with. Full stop.”

Fisher credited witnesses who “came forward and told the government how badly they misunderstood the details surrounding scientific and academic collaboration,” saying “without them this case would likely still be ongoing.”

The move for dismissal comes as the Justice Department

is reviewing the China Initiative, an effort launched under the Trump administration which has come under criticism for singling out scientists of Chinese heritage and for chilling the atmosphere for collaborative research.

The Justice Department has dismissed seven cases against researchers in recent months.

The case against Chen, a naturalized U.S. citizen since 2000, is the most prominent one to be dismissed to date, targeting an elite scientist who had robust support from his university.