After Guilty Verdict, Lieber to Face Sentencing

It will be sometime in spring before Charles Lieber, former chairman of the Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department at Harvard University, is sentenced after a jury found him guilty last month on six felony charges he faced in connection with income and other support he received from Chinese organizations but did not disclose. After a six-day trial, a jury on Dec. 21 found Lieber guilty of two counts each of making false statements, failing to report foreign income and other financial information, and filing false tax returns. Lieber was “a contractual participant in China’s Thousand Talents Plan from at least 2012 through 2015,” and as a result, he was paid a “salary of up to $50,000 per month, living expenses of up to $150,000” and given $1.5 million to establish a research lab at Wuhan University of Technology, the Department of Justice said. He also received “more than $15 million in federal research grants between 2008 and 2019.”

Lieber faces up to 26 years in prison and a fine of $1.2 million; a sentencing date has not yet been scheduled. In court documents filed Dec. 28, his attorneys and the government established a schedule for post-trial motions that would occur before sentencing. Lieber’s filings are due Feb. 1, and government “opposition” briefs are due March 1; Lieber must reply to these by March 14. His is the first trial in the government’s “China Initiative” to result in a guilty verdict. In September, a federal judge acquitted Anming Hu, a NASA-funded, former tenured professor of engineering at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, on charges of failing to disclose ties to a Chinese university.

Link to Department of Justice announcement of guilty verdict