09/10/2026
Opening statements in the criminal prosecution of Huawei Technologies began this week in the Eastern District of New York, before Judge Ann Donnelly, eight years after charges were first brought. Twelve counts are before the jury — racketeering, bank fraud conducted through a Hong Kong entity called Skycom, export-control violations under IEEPA, and trade-secret misappropriation from five American technology companies. Huawei has pleaded not guilty. The trial is expected to run approximately three months.
The commentary has organised itself around the question of whether the government will secure a conviction. I would suggest that is the less interesting question, and that the risk in this proceeding is distributed almost entirely opposite to how it is being described.
Consider what a conviction would actually deliver. The policy objective this prosecution was constructed to serve — the removal of Huawei equipment from American and allied telecommunications infrastructure — was achieved years ago through entirely different instruments: Entity List designation, Federal Communications Commission equipment authorisation bans, and federally funded rip-and-replace programmes. Those are administrative and regulatory mechanisms. None of them required a criminal verdict, and none of them is contingent on one. A guilty verdict in December would not exclude Huawei from any market from which it is not already excluded.
Nor would it automatically trigger further consequence. A conviction does not place a company on the Specially Designated Nationals list, does not sever access to correspondent banking, and does not activate secondary sanctions. Each of those remains a discretionary executive-branch decision available today without a jury.
The financial remedy is similarly constrained. Statutory maximums permit $500,000 per count or twice the gross gain, whichever is greater, alongside criminal forfeiture. Analysts have estimated exposure in the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, though no figure has been publicly specified by the government and quantifying benefit would itself require substantial post-verdict litigation. More materially: Huawei's assets are overwhelmingly located in China. There is no extradition mechanism for a corporate defendant and no significant domestic seizure target in a company already barred from the US market.
Set against that limited upside is a genuine and asymmetric downside. The Department of Justice's two most recent attempts to convict a large Chinese corporate defendant at trial both failed. Fujian Jinhua was acquitted outright by Judge Maxine Chesney in the Northern District of California in February 2024 — the flagship trade-secrets prosecution of the same China Initiative that produced this indictment. In July 2026, the government dismissed its economic-espionage case against the Pangang Group with prejudice, days into trial, ending a fifteen-year prosecution.
