[theold]

The case against Tao was part of the Trump administration's China Initiative, which started in 2018 to thwart what the Justice Department said was the transfer of original ideas and intellectual property from U.S. universities to the Chinese government.

Tao was a tenured professor in the chemistry and petroleum engineering departments at the University of Kansas from 2014 until his arrest in 2019. 

The appeals court noted that while it began as an espionage case, the FBI found no evidence of espionage in the end.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/cour...-111911217