A long-delayed criminal trial against Huawei Technologies opened this week in federal court in Brooklyn, with Justice Department prosecutors laying out a racketeering case that accuses the Chinese telecommunications giant of stealing technology from American companies, deceiving banks about its business in Iran, and helping Tehran surveil its own citizens. Jury selection began Tuesday, September 8, before U.S. District Judge Ann Donnelly, and opening statements followed a day later. Huawei has pleaded not guilty to all remaining counts and denies wrongdoing.
The indictment describes a pattern of conduct stretching back roughly two decades, including allegations that Huawei and its subsidiaries did business in North Korea in defiance of U.S. sanctions and installed surveillance equipment that helped Iranian authorities identify and detain demonstrators during the 2009 anti-government protests in Tehran. Huawei is the world's largest supplier of wireless network equipment, yet it remains barred from selling gear to U.S. carriers over national security concerns and has also been blacklisted by Canada and the United Kingdom.
Skycom, HSBC and a Case Seven Years in the Making
At the heart of the government's financial fraud allegations is Skycom Tech Co., a Hong Kong-registered company prosecutors say functioned as a disguised Huawei subsidiary in Iran. According to the indictment, Skycom's dealings routed more than $100 million through the U.S. banking system, misleading HSBC and other institutions about the true nature of Huawei's presence in a sanctioned country. In a July 2025 ruling, Judge Donnelly rejected Huawei's bid to dismiss most of the case, finding the government had adequately alleged that Skycom operated as Huawei's Iranian subsidiary and ultimately stood to benefit, in a roundabout way, from those transfers.
The Skycom allegations are what first drew global attention to the case in December 2018, when Huawei's chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou — daughter of company founder Ren Zhengfei — was arrested in Vancouver on a U.S. extradition request, triggering years of diplomatic friction between Washington, Ottawa and Beijing. Meng was released in September 2021 as part of a prisoner exchange that also freed two Canadians detained in China. She acknowledged that statements she had made to HSBC about Huawei's Iran business were untrue, and the U.S. subsequently withdrew its extradition request and the fraud charges against her personally; she is no longer a defendant in the case now before the Brooklyn jury.
Trade Secrets From Six American Companies
A separate strand of the indictment accuses Huawei of a long-running campaign to misappropriate intellectual property from six U.S. technology firms in order to cut its own research and development costs. Court filings describe stolen source code and manuals for internet routers, cellular antenna technology and robotics, and people familiar with the case have identified the alleged victims as including Cisco Systems, Motorola Solutions, Fujitsu, Quintel Technology, CNEX Labs and T-Mobile. The T-Mobile allegations center on "Tappy," a robotic device T-Mobile used to stress-test smartphones, which the company separately won a $4.8 million civil verdict over in 2017.
The case has narrowed considerably as it approached trial. In a September 4 filing, prosecutors told Judge Donnelly they would no longer pursue two counts under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the law underpinning U.S. sanctions enforcement, and dropped a trade-secret theft episode tied to an unnamed "Company 2" — widely identified as Motorola — as a basis for the racketeering charge. That leaves 12 of the 14 counts in the indictment for the jury to weigh, in a trial prosecutors and defense lawyers expect to run roughly three months.
Dueling Openings Before the Jury
Taylor Stout, the Justice Department attorney who delivered the government's opening statement, told jurors Huawei had committed crimes spanning two decades. Defense attorney Brian Heberlig pushed back forcefully, arguing prosecutors had built their case on a handful of anecdotes and isolated misconduct by a small number of Huawei's roughly 200,000 employees across 170 countries, telling the jury that the government's claims don't add up.
Heberlig pointed to prosecutors' plan to show jurors that a Huawei employee had once photographed a competitor's product at a trade show, arguing that the government left out the fact that the company dismissed the employee immediately afterward and that a single lapse by one worker was no evidence of a broader scheme. He credited Huawei's growth to sound engineering and business decisions rather than misconduct, and suggested some witnesses testifying against the company were motivated by personal history rather than the facts.
A Trial Unfolding Amid Wider U.S.-China Tech Tensions
The Brooklyn trial arrives as Washington continues a broader, separate campaign to push Huawei equipment out of American networks and choke off its access to advanced chipmaking. As of a semiannual status report the Federal Communications Commission sent to Congress in June 2026, the agency's "rip and replace" program had funded the removal of Huawei and ZTE equipment from 53 of 126 approved projects — about 42%, up sharply from just 13 projects six months earlier. Congress authorized the FCC in December 2024 defense legislation to borrow from the U.S. Treasury to close a roughly $3.08 billion funding shortfall in the program, and the agency drew that funding down in April 2025, with repayment tied to a 2026 spectrum auction. Separately, the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security issued guidance in May 2025 restricting the use, sale and servicing of Huawei's Ascend AI chips worldwide under its export-control authority.
The timing carries its own diplomatic weight: part of the roughly three-month trial could overlap with a planned September 24 meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Donald Trump at the White House, confirmed for that date after Trump's own trip to Beijing in May. The prosecution traces back to indictments first unsealed in 2018 and 2019 under the Justice Department's China Initiative, an effort to counter alleged Chinese corporate espionage that the Biden administration formally wound down in February 2022, though this case continued on its own track. Huawei has long maintained that the prosecution is part of a broader U.S. effort to slow China's technological rise, while Beijing has repeatedly criticized similar cases as politically motivated.
