Hacker News Reader

Comment by neither_color | Hacker News Reader

Last week, the government dismissed the case against Dr. Chen, which alleged that he had concealed seven Chinese affiliations in applications for $2.7 million in grants from the U.S. Energy Department. Prosecutors announced that they had received new information indicating that Dr. Chen had not been obliged to disclose those affiliations, undercutting the basis of the case.

I feel like this part could use more details. The charges were for not disclosing his affiliations, but those affiliations existed nonetheless? Edit: I'm not implying there's anything shady he did or that he wasn't falsely accused, just trying to parse this.

View on HN

Not sure what is unclear about this part you quoted:

> Prosecutors announced that they had received new information indicating that Dr. Chen had not been obliged to disclose those affiliations

He had affiliations, but they were of the kind that he was not required to disclose, so the government was harassing him for no reason.

The “none of your business” kind. Why is there a whole thread of this reasoning here? You have read the article, he was totally innocent, and now you’re questioning his “Chinese ties”. I guess he was right in that his image was tarnished permanently. What a sad world that such an accomplished person has been ruined. Imagine the awesome impact he could have had. His research area could have revolutionized many things in energy.

Maybe they updated the article. The archived link suggests they found out that he was not obligated to reveal any such ties. This is subtly different than finding he has none at all.

The "ties" are his own business, in this case. What I'm saying is that a subtle jab about his "ties" is basically tainting him as somehow still guilty to some degree as a Chinese spy, even though all charges were dropped and it was admitted that there was no base to even charge him to begin with. This is the damage that was done to this man's reputation, even though the "ties" could and probably are very benign and normal for his type of work. The continual push to label all things Chinese as evil is today's McCarthyism.

> Prosecutors had floated the idea of a deferred prosecution agreement, which would have allowed him to return to work and apply for government grants in the future. In return... he would have to admit to having some ties to China, none of them a violation of the law.

I'm a little confused as well. It reads to me as if they offered him a deal to get out of this by saying what they eventually found out anyway.

One of these so-called affiliations was.. serving as an external grant reviewer for some proposal for the Chinese equivalent of the national science foundation (basic/ theoretical science). Which is of course ridiculous.. we scientists review proposals all the time and the government, in fact, doesn't want to know about it because it's extraneous pointless information. This was a rushed, and very dumb, effort by a US attorney in the final days of the Trump administration.

Agreed. It seems like the details matter here.

Were the affiliations suspect but not reportable?

Or were the affiliations unremarkable and not reportable but prosecutors screwed up?

> were the affiliations unremarkable and not reportable but prosecutors screwed up?

Yes, the prosecutors royally screwed up.

From the article:

"Prosecutors had floated the idea of a deferred prosecution agreement, which would have allowed him to return to work and apply for government grants in the future. In return, said his lawyer, Mr. Fisher, he would have to admit to having some ties to China, none of them a violation of the law."

So why would Chen have to declare them if they aren't illegal?

Sounds like a prosecutor was afraid to get sued into oblivion/have his future political ambitions ruined by this affair, and strong-armed the good doctor into signing a document to avoid this going to court, where outcomes are pretty much random.

* tried to strong-arm. He didn't accept the deal.

>Sounds like a prosecutor was afraid to get sued into oblivion

Federal prosecutors cannot be sued:

https://fedsoc.org/events/prosecutorial-immunity

Chen has to declare foreign conflicts of interest if he takes federal grants.

The prosecution themselves have said that there was no reporting requirement for that.

I got my initial understanding of the reg. from an article on Charles Lieber’s case, which boiled them down to “must report conflicts of interest.” The reality (https://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/coi/index.htm) is more nuanced and up to the courts to decide, but as a one sentence summary I think it’s fair.

There was no such legal requirement on this grant.

>"What tipped the scale, the people said, was an interview by prosecutors this month of a senior Energy Department official who is considered an authority on what disclosures are material on grant forms. The official confirmed that the 2017 form did not require disclosures of Chen’s ties to the technology university or other Chinese government organizations and programs, one person said"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/mit-gang-ch...

> he would have to admit to having some ties to China, none of them a violation of the law.

What's the point?

According to the article the State discovered, way late, that the kind of ties he had with China were not of the kind they assumed guilt of and heavily publicized when they went to destroy his professional life, but instead of the kind people have when they are born elsewhere.

When they did find out about this, they instead tried to make him admit to some other non criminal kind of ties to justify their ruining of his life, and when that failed they simply bailed out.

It's heartbreaking.

What people don’t realize is that a prosecutor is like any other job - pressure from the boss to deliver, long hours, “sunk cost fallacy” and all the other crap you see in big corporates.

Not to excuse the behavior, but more highlighting what contributes to it.

Once a prosecutor thinks he has a case against you, you’re pretty fucked to be honest because it rare for them to ever admit fault or back down.

I don't know how the senate is set up in the US, but prossecutors are supposed to decide freely. The "boss" is in the worst case just another layer in the prossecution, that's not just a job but an institution.

The general attourney from Germany denied the NSA case because he found no evidence. He's also bound by orders from the justice department ("weisungsgebunden")

It's just like any other job, except that the job is to destroy people's lives.

sounds indeed like mistrial rather that the allegations having no validity at all. The NYT doing quality reporting as usual in a long piece of fluff.

Not a mistrial. The government agency that issued the grants told the prosecutors that he hadn't mislead them. Hard to prosecute someone for wire fraud when the supposed victim is saying that not only is the defendant innocent, no crime happened at all.

> In recent weeks, however, officials at the Department of Energy have told prosecutors that Dr. Chen had no obligation to declare the seven affiliations, calling into question the basis of the charges.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/20/science/gang-chen-mit-chi...

I still have a lot of questions about how this prosecution happened and how it took this long for it to be dropped...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com