The China Initiative, begun by Donald Trump’s D.O.J., was the first program dedicated to the espionage of a single country. “Almost every student that comes over to this country is a spy,” Trump reportedly said, of people from China.
From the beginning, university officials worked closely with the F.B.I. At one point, the head of global security at Kansas, Carl Taylor, sent a text to an agent that said, “A possible different source emailed me,” then noted, “Actually rereading the message I think it is the same source.” The F.B.I. traced the I.P. addresses and found that they had all come from the Bay Area—some from the San Francisco airport, others from the Berkeley campus.
Several agents met again with Liu, this time prepared with even more pointed questions: “What state official directs him and how does he communicate with them?” “Does she have ANY of these communications?” “Will she testify?” They had her log in to Tao’s Fuzhou e-mail on a clean F.B.I. laptop, and idly reviewed the messages. It seems that they had second thoughts about this warrantless search, however, and wiped the log-in credentials from the laptop.
Nathan Charles, who worked on the case with the D.O.J.’s counterintelligence unit, was less sanguine. He had been pushing hard to indict Tao under Section 951, but, he told me, “I got my peepee slapped for it.” According to a lawsuit Charles subsequently filed against the department, his two supervisors—both career Justice officials—“declined to support the prosecution because they could not identify a legitimate national security concern.
It’s a common prosecutorial strategy to bring lesser charges for more serious offenses. In these cases, however, there was no clear rationale for the initial investigation, which lends credence to the idea that the China Initiative was merely a formal gloss on a racialized moral panic.
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