US scientist falsely accused of hiding ties to China speaks out

Why did they lie then?

The problem as I see it is that people who screech about how "just following orders isn't a defense" when people they don't sympathize with violate this or that regulatory compliance statute without harming anyone are acting as though it's a valid defense when it's someone they sympathize with.

This behavior is made doubly odious because a large subset of these same people are often in favor of strict enforcement of somewhat arbitrary rules (like a disclosure requirement on an application) against people they don't sympathize with.

This inability to have principals and be consistent with them is going to bite our country a lot harder than the occasional foreign scientist lying on a grant application or the occasional foreign scientist getting wrongfully prosecuted.

To be clear, I sympathize with Mr Hu. I think the organization should be getting punished here. He brought the issue to their attention and they advised him to do exactly the wrong thing and the feds screwed him for it. People, especially foreign nationals who cannot be expected to be well versed in US law, need to have a reasonable expectation that they can follow orders from HR/Legal/their boss in matters of mundane statutory compliance without getting personally screwed when the actions they took in confidence violated the law. UT is responsible for what happened to Mr. Hu and in a perfect world that would be a slam dunk tort. But his plight is just a drop in the bucket of a much larger societal problem.

Quite apart from anything else, there should absolutely be someone asking Hard Questions about the role of the university administration here. If lying on a grant application is a fraud, then asking someone to lie on a grant application is procuring a fraud etc.

That said, I have to say that if anyone asks me to lie or omit relevant information on a document that I'm sending to the government, my first response to that is going to be "let me check with my lawyer on that".

Things that make you go "Hmmmmmm".

Like lying during an FBI investigation, even a non issue becomes an issue. Lying on a grant application can get you into serious issues.

You can always be upfront and say your not going to answer a question, or you can disclose connection which is normally fine for most kinds of research.

Should these questions be asked is a bigger issue than just what to do when people lie.

From what I read - he did not disclose his ties to Chinese researcher when applying for grant from NASA as he supposed to. He did it on bad advice from his university, but that came out later, during the investigation.

It seems his employer, the University, owes him something. In US government owes you nothing when they make an honest mistake. Even worse, government has disincentive to exonerate wrongly accused because, as some argue, need for finality of the judgement[0]

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpYYdCzTpps

I think Cold War 2 has already begun. I just don't see how the pre-invasion state of affairs could be restored in any realistic scenario. To hit the undo button Putin would have to stop the invasion, profusely apologize, pay reparations and make other concessions like returning Crimea. And of course he will do nothing of the sort. There's no scenario that I see under which which Putin is still running Russia and it stops being an international pariah.

A far more likely case is that after seeing the discord sown by the DOJ, the Chinese authorities would try and entice the scientists.

The fact that Hu goes back to U of Tennessee to protect his reputation is a bit like battered spouse. I would have sued the university to repair all my equipment and never return to a place that gave shit advice, thrown me under the bus at the earliest opportunity, and didn't even offer an apology.

By antagonize you mean “asking China not to secretly steal our intellectual property”?