Court voids Kansas researcher's conviction in Chinese espionage probe

A federal appeals court has reversed the conviction of a researcher who was accused of hiding work he did in China while employed at the University of Kansas.

Feng Franklin Tao was convicted in April 2022 of three counts of wire fraud and one count of making a materially false statement. US District Judge Julie Robinson threw out the wire fraud convictions a few months later but let the false statement conviction stand. She later sentenced him to time served.

But the 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Kansas City, Missouri, on Thursday ruled that the government failed to provide sufficient evidence that Tao's failure to disclose his potential conflict of interest actually mattered, and it directed the lower court to acquit him of that sole remaining count.

The case against Tao was part of the Trump administration's China Initiative, which started in 2018 to thwart what the Justice Department said was the transfer of original ideas and intellectual property from US universities to t