Huawei racketeering trial opens in Brooklyn after eight years of pretrial fights

Jury selection began on 8 September in the Eastern District of New York in the United States government's criminal case against Huawei Technologies. Judge Ann M. Donnelly told potential jurors that China and the Communist Party are not on trial and that the war with Iran should not shape their judgment. Opening statements were not expected before 9 September. The company has pleaded not guilty to all remaining counts.

Prosecutors describe a decades-long racketeering scheme that they say started as early as 1999. The indictment, now trimmed, still includes bank fraud, wire fraud, theft of trade secrets from U.S. firms, sanctions violations involving Iran and North Korea, money laundering, racketeering and obstruction. One core allegation is that Huawei used a Hong Kong shell company, Skycom, to sell equipment to Iran and then misled HSBC and other banks about that business. Another is that Huawei-linked surveillance gear helped Iranian authorities watch protesters in 2009. A third is that the company plotted to steal secrets from five American technology firms.

Donnelly last year denied a motion to dismiss 13 of 16 counts in a 52-page opinion. She found the government had adequately alleged that Skycom functioned as Huawei's Iranian arm and routed more than $100 million through U.S. banks. In a 4 September filing prosecutors dropped two export-control counts under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and pulled a trade-secret predicate involving a firm widely identified as Motorola. Fourteen counts remain on the public description of the trial.

Huawei called the government's overarching narrative demonstrably false. It said last year's $126 billion in global sales, its strongest figure in nearly five years, came from its own research. Defence lawyers have argued that the case is too vague and that it tries to stretch U.S. criminal law across borders. Chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou was charged in the same universe of facts and later reached a deferred resolution in Canada. The company itself is the defendant in Brooklyn.

The calendar is political as well as legal. The trial is expected to run about three months and to overlap with a planned 24 September meeting in Washington between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump. Jurors filled out 27-page questionnaires that asked about their views of the Chinese and Iranian governments. Donnelly's instruction on 8 September was an attempt to wall the courtroom off from that noise.

A conviction on the Iran counts would give the 2019 U.S. trade blacklist a criminal verdict to stand on. An acquittal would hand Huawei a public finding that the original narrative did not persuade twelve people in Brooklyn. Either result will be read in Shenzhen and in Washington as a proxy for the larger technology fight. The only fact the first day settled is that a jury is now being built.