A Criminal Case Against a Huawei Executive by David Ignatius

Political Crossfire A Criminal Case Against a Huawei Executive Poses a Test for the Biden Administration

By David Ignatius

China is politically unpopular in Washington these days, and for good reason: Thursday’s celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party featured a strident threat from President Xi Jinping that China’s enemies will be impaled on a “Great Wall of steel” if they challenge Beijing.

The Biden administration’s counter to such bombast is to argue that it seeks the rule of law, contrary to Xi’s fulminations about “insufferably arrogant lecturing from those ‘master teachers’” in the United States. But making good on this promise of a rules-based order isn’t easy when China so routinely ignores legal standards at home and abroad.

An interesting test of this problem is a criminal case that has been pending for more than two years against Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei, the global telecommunications giant. She was arrested by Canadian authorities, at the request of the Justice Department, as she arrived in Vancouver, British Columbia, on December 1, 2018. The United States sought her extradition to face charges that she had concealed evidence from Huawei’s banker, HSBC, about the company’s activities in Iran that allegedly led HSBC to violate U.S. sanctions against Iran.

A Canadian court has been weighing the U.S. extradition request ever since. A judge there is expected to finish reviewing the evidence in August and rule by the end of the year. Meng has been detained in Vancouver, while her legal team maneuvers in Canada and the United States.

Was this a political case, a bargaining chip in the ongoing U.S. effort to combat Huawei and other big Chinese telecommunications companies? The Chinese certainly treated it that way. Nine days after Meng’s arrest, Chinese authorities detained two Canadians, former diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor, on charges of espionage. The “two Michaels,” as they’re known in Canada, are seen there as hostages in a Chinese attempt to force Meng’s release.

President Donald Trump unfortunately gave the Chinese ample reason to regard Meng as a pawn in a larger power play. Asked by Reuters during a December 11, 2018, interview whether he would intervene with the Justice Department in Meng’s case, Trump answered: “Whatever’s good for the country, I would do.” He said that if he decided her release would produce a big trade deal with China, “I would certainly intervene.”

That doesn’t sound like the rule of law but like the transactional power politics that Trump and Xi share as a guiding philosophy. This impression is reinforced by former national security adviser John Bolton, who writes in his memoir, “The Room Where It Happened,” that Trump described Meng as “the Ivanka Trump of China” and seemed sympathetic to releasing her if he could get concessions from the Chinese.

Now, President Joe Biden’s Justice Department is managing the extradition case, and it remains a political hot potato. Lawyers for Meng have talked with Biden Justice officials about the case, but there’s no sign of movement toward a settlement. Meanwhile, China becomes more unpopular every day on Capitol Hill because of its heavy-handed tactics against Hong Kong, Taiwan and its own Uyghur minority.

When it comes to Huawei, though, it’s important to avoid blurring issues. It seems clear that the company itself poses a potential national security threat to the United States and its allies if it dominates global 5G telecommunications. The Biden administration has been right to follow Trump in denying Huawei access to sensitive U.S. hardware and software. Maintaining U.S. primacy in key technologies is an absolute priority for whatever administration is in power.

The case against Meng should stand or fall on its own legal merits, rather than as proxy in this larger contest. Her lawyers raise some good questions about the Justice Department’s case. John Bellinger, a former State Department legal adviser retained by Huawei as an expert witness, argued in a May 2020 affidavit that the charge that Meng lied to HSBC about Huawei’s activities in Iran was “unsupported” by facts and that the bank-fraud charges against her were “unprecedented” in their reach.

Could a prosecutor be confident of winning a conviction in a U.S. court on the available evidence? Meng’s attorneys shared with me a 2013 PowerPoint presentation she made to the bank in which she explained Huawei’s operations in Iran and asserted that it operated there “in strict compliance with applicable laws, regulations and sanctions.” The Biden Justice Department will need to prove to a court that Meng committed fraud. That is as it should be.

We face a long contest with China. If that devolves into a battle of tit-fortat realpolitik, we’re likely to lose. The United States’ strength is that, in a lawless world, we play by the rules.