Federal prosecutors accused executives of the Chinese tech giant Huawei of participating in a massive crime spree as the company’s unprecedented criminal trial in New York kicked off.
Huawei, which manufactures and sells cutting-edge technology to support AI and 5G, was first charged by U.S. law enforcement in 2019, not long after its CFO Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Canada. Though criminal proceedings against the company stalled under the Biden administration, President Trump’s DOJ has pressed ahead with a prosecution.
A US prosecutor described China’s Huawei as a criminal enterprise that stole from US companies to build its telecommunications empire, as the trial against the tech company kicked off in Brooklyn federal court on Wednesday.
“Theft, lies, cover-up,” Taylor Stout, a trial attorney from the US Department of Justice, said in the government’s opening statement. “For 20 years, that’s how Huawei, a massive Chinese telecommunications company, victimized American companies and abused the American financial system, all in an effort to dominate the telecommunications industry around the world.”
Huawei stands accused of a laundry list of charges, including racketeering, bank fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, stealing trade secrets, and violating sanctions against Iran and North Korea.
The trial will test broader allegations that Huawei is a tool of the Chinese state and part of a larger strategy of espionage against Americans and American companies. The U.S. government considers Huawei a national security threat. The FBI has warned it could be trying to disrupt the American nuclear arsenal.
The trial will provide Huawei’s alleged victims with an opportunity to have their say. Samuel Rubenfeld reports:
A former T-Mobile executive told a US jury Tuesday about three incidents in 2013 involving Huawei Technologies employees violating agreements surrounding access to the company’s testing labs, and the theft of a key part of a robot system nicknamed “Tappy.”
Exactly how closely Huawei is tied to the Chinese state isn’t known. All tech companies in China are required to cooperate with the intelligence services and provide personal data upon request. Chinese president Xi Jinping has consistently championed Huawei while retired Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro was also a fan.
President Trump has been pushing back against Huawei’s influence for some time. In 2019, his Department of Commerce added the company to the so-called Entity List, preventing American companies from doing business with them. Trump also banned Americans from using Huawei’s equipment and implemented new export controls that prevent Huawei from buying semiconductors and other machinery that employs American components.
In his second term, Trump furnished loans for American companies providing 5G to challenge Huawei on its own turf. He also approved a merger between U.S. tech companies Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks on the advice of his intelligence agencies explicitly to provide Huawei with globally scaled competition. Left-wing attorneys general, like California’s Rob Bonta and Colorado’s Phil Weiser, did their best to block it, but a federal judged ruled in August that the merger is in the public’s interest.
Still, the headline trial stands out even for a president known for his showmanship. China has been accused of infiltrating American institutions for years, most recently when the FBI revealed an unprecedented Chinese hack against the U.S. power grid. Individual Chinese citizens have been charged, but never before has an entity like Huawei had to defend itself in front of a jury.
The trial is expected to last about three months, including during President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington to meet with Donald Trump.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.