Such losses often fuel the Chinese propaganda machine and hurt U.S. interests. “Every case that goes south, especially one that concerns a minority community, discredits the Justice Department in the minds of the American people,” said David H. Laufman, an official in the department’s national security division during the Obama administration. In announcing changes to the China Initiative, Mr. Olsen is expected to say that the Justice Department will treat some grant fraud cases as civil matters going forward, reserving criminal prosecution for the most egregious instances of deception, according…
Tag: Justice Department
How the Huawei Case Raised Fears of ‘Hostage Diplomacy’ by China
WASHINGTON — The talks between the Justice Department and a top executive from Huawei Technologies, the Chinese telecommunications giant, had stretched over more than 12 months and two presidential administrations, and boiled down to one overarching dispute: whether Meng Wanzhou, daughter of Huawei’s founder, would admit to any wrongdoing. Since her arrest in 2018, Ms. Meng had refused to admit that she had misled the global banking conglomerate HSBC about Huawei’s dealings with Iran a decade ago, even though that was the key to her release from detention in Canada,…
U.S. Reaches Agreement to Release Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou
For its part, the Chinese government has underwritten the cost of installing Huawei gear, in an effort to dominate networks from Latin America to the Middle East. Ms. Meng came to personify that effort. Her determination to wire up Tehran, at a time in which the West was seeking to contain Iran’s nuclear program, attracted protests among American officials. For that reason, some China hard-liners objected on Friday to news that the charges were being dropped. “It sends the wrong message to Chinese business executives around the world that it’s…
Spies for Hire: China’s New Breed of Hackers Blends Espionage and Entrepreneurship
One posting from Hainan Xiandun stood out. The ad, on a Sichuan University computer science hiring board from 2018, boasted that Xiandun had “received a considerable number of government-secret-related business.” The company, based in Hainan’s capital, Haikou, paid monthly salaries of $1,200 to $3,000 — solid middle-class wages for Chinese tech workers fresh out of college — with bonuses as high as $15,000. Xiandun’s ads listed an email address used by other firms looking for cybersecurity experts and linguists, suggesting they were part of a network. Chinese hacking groups are…