Huawei Technologies went on trial in a Brooklyn federal court on Tuesday, facing a 14-count criminal indictment that spans bank fraud, wire fraud, trade secret theft, and racketeering. The proceedings mark a milestone in a legal battle with the U.S. government that has stretched across eight years.
Jury Selection Begins Before Judge Donnelly
Jury selection kicked off Tuesday afternoon before U.S. District Judge Ann M. Donnelly of the Eastern District of New York. Opening statements in the high-profile criminal case were not expected to begin until Wednesday at the earliest, according to reporting by the Associated Press. The Shenzhen-based telecommunications giant has entered a plea of not guilty to all charges brought against it.
The trial gets underway following a series of pretrial decisions that narrowed the scope of the government’s case. Federal prosecutors told Judge Donnelly in a September 4 filing that they dropped two export-control counts tied to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, alongside a trade-secret theft predicate involving Motorola, as reported by Fierce Network and cited by Hoodline. Last July, Judge Donnelly rejected Huawei’s broader motion to dismiss 13 of the 16 original counts, ruling that prosecutors had sufficiently alleged that the Hong Kong shell company Skycom operated as a Huawei subsidiary and funneled upwards of $100 million through U.S. financial institutions.
Decade-Long Allegations and Sanctions
The indictment lays out a pattern of alleged criminal conduct dating back to 1999. Prosecutors assert that Huawei utilized Skycom to execute transactions in Iran in direct violation of U.S. economic sanctions. Additional allegations claim that Huawei and certain subsidiaries conducted business in North Korea despite prohibitions, and that surveillance equipment linked to the firm helped Iranian authorities monitor anti-government demonstrators during the 2009 protests.
Trade secret allegations remaining before the court include a 2013 incident where a Huawei engineer allegedly photographed and stole a robotic testing arm known as “Tappy” from a T-Mobile laboratory in Bellevue, Washington. That dispute previously resulted in a 2017 civil judgment ordering Huawei to pay T-Mobile $4.8 million.
Huawei’s defense team previously argued that the government’s claims were impermissibly extraterritorial and too vague, but those dismissal efforts were rebuffed. In a public statement regarding the litigation, Huawei called the narrative pushed by U.S. prosecutors “demonstrably false.” The company stated, “Long-term investment in innovation, backed by the utmost respect for intellectual property, has been the driving force behind Huawei’s business success.”
The Fallout for Huawei and the Executive Branch Backdrop
The criminal case was originally unsealed in 2018 under the Trump administration’s Justice Department initiative targeting Chinese corporate espionage—an effort the Biden administration formally terminated in February 2022. During Donald Trump’s first term, Washington raised national security alarms over the company’s equipment and lobbied Western allies to bar Huawei from next-generation wireless networks. Consequently, countries including Britain and Canada blacklisted the firm from supplying gear to domestic carriers.
The corporate prosecution is now entirely separate from the legal saga of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer and the daughter of the company’s founder. Meng was arrested in Vancouver in late 2018 on a U.S. extradition warrant accusing her of misleading HSBC bank regarding Huawei’s business dealings with Skycom in Iran. She returned to China in September 2021 as part of a high-stakes prisoner swap that simultaneously secured the release of two Canadians detained by Beijing. Under a deferred prosecution agreement, the U.S. formally dropped all personal fraud charges against Meng in December 2022.
While blocked from major Western telecommunications markets and cut off from most American processor chips due to sanctions, Huawei has pivoted heavily. The restrictions forced the company to ramp up domestic chipmaking operations and expand its consumer electronics footprint as global demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure accelerates.
