Federal judge rejects Kansas researcher's request for new trial

A federal judge threw out three of four convictions against a Kansas researcher who was accused of illegally concealing work he was doing at a Chinese university while working at the University of Kansas, leaving only a conviction for making a false statement on a form.

In April, a jury convicted researcher Feng Franklin Tao on three counts of wire fraud and one count of false statements. He was accused of not disclosing that he was working for Fuzhou University in China while employed at Kansas University.

U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson ruled that federal prosecutors did not provide enough evidence to support the wire fraud convictions. She upheld the making of a false statement conviction and denied Tao's request for a new trial on that count.

Tao's attorney, Peter Zeidenberg, said in a statement that the defense team was gratified that Robinson found Tao did not intend to defraud Kansas or the federal government, and that Tao was an outstanding researcher and award-winning professor at Kansas.

The final stake in the heart of the China Initiative cases will be in the final, where the government has claimed that the failure to disclose a relationship to China constitutes federal grant fraud, even when the researcher has completed all of the work on the grant to the government s complete satisfaction, Zeidenberg wrote.

The U.S. attorney's office in Kansas said Tuesday it would have no comment on Robinson's ruling.

Zeidenberg said the defense team is considering its next steps related to the filing of a false statement conviction, which could carry a possible sentence of up to five years.

Federal prosecutors argued that Tao disguised his work in China in order to defraud the University of Kansas, the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. Tao Grants were awarded by the federal agencies for research projects in Kansas.

Defense attorneys argued that Tao was merely moonlighting. They said Tao completed all the research he received grants to conduct in Kansas and that his work in China wasn't illegal because he wasn't paid for it.

Robinson said Tao was deceptive in not disclosing his activities at Fuzhou University, but there was no evidence that Tao received money or property for the work, which is required for a wire fraud conviction.

During the time period of the alleged scheme to defraud, Tao continued to receive his salary from KU for his services and continued to successfully perform the research required by DOE and NSF under their research grants, Robinson wrote.

She said Tao made a false statement to the University of Kansas on a conflict of interest statement he submitted to the university in 2018.

The case against Tao was part of the U.S. Justice Department's China Initiative, a program that began in 2018 to crack down on efforts to transfer original ideas and intellectual property from U.S. universities to Chinese government institutions. The department ended the program in February after public criticism and several failed prosecutions.

Tao did not reveal on conflicts of interest forms that he was named to a Chinese talent program, the Changjiang Professorship. As part of the program he traveled to China to set up a laboratory and recruit staff for Fuzhou University, while telling Kansas officials he was in Germany.

During the trial, Zeidenberg noted that Tao listed his affiliation with both schools in some papers, suggesting he wasn't hiding it. He said the university honored Tao for his research efforts in April 2019 just months before his arrest.

Tao was born in China and moved to the U.S. in 2002. He began working as a tenured associate professor at the University of Kansas Center for Environmentally Beneficial Catalysis in August 2014, where he works on research on sustainable technology to conserve natural resources and energy.