When Justice Department lawyer Taylor Stout opened Huawei’s trial in Brooklyn on September 9 with “theft, lies, cover-up,” he was going for the headlines. The current trial is a continuation of the original indictment that began in 2018, when the United States charged Huawei and its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou.
The prosecution alleges Huawei’s 20-year pattern: trade-secret theft, bank fraud, sanctions violations, concealment. Huawei has pleaded not guilty and its position, delivered by lead trial counsel Brian Heberlig, is that this is “competition, not conspiracy. Innovation, not theft,” and that prosecutors have cherry-picked isolated incidents and recast ordinary competition, plus misconduct by a handful of employees, as an institutional conspiracy. The trial is expected to run about three months, but the reputational battle will be longer and harder to salvage.
So how did Huawei get here? The Commerce Department put…
