Huawei Technologies went on trial in New York on Wednesday in a racketeering conspiracy case that puts one of the world’s biggest suppliers of wireless telecom gear before a Brooklyn jury. Federal prosecutors say the company spent two decades stealing technology from American companies, abusing the U.S. financial system and helping Iran snoop on its citizens.
Taylor Stout opened the government’s case by telling jurors that Huawei committed multiple crimes over two decades. That opening framed the case as a long-running scheme, not a handful of isolated mistakes, and set up a trial that could test whether prosecutors can turn a sprawling set of allegations into one coherent racketeering story.
The case matters now because Huawei is already under heavy U.S. pressure. It has been banned from selling equipment to U.S. carriers over security fears, and Canada and Britain have blacklisted it as well. The criminal charges were announced in early 2019, and the government has expanded the allegations since then, turning the trial into the latest and most visible stage of a fight that has shadowed the company for years.
But the defense moved quickly to push back on the idea of a corporate-wide plot. Brian Heberlig told the jury that prosecutors were leaning on a smattering of anecdotes and bad behavior by a few of Huawei’s roughly 200,000 employees in 170 countries. He said there was no blueprint for crime, that the government’s claims do not add up and that some of the testimony was driven by old grudges. He also pointed to one employee the company promptly fired after taking photos of a rival company’s product at a trade show event, calling it a foolish act rather than proof of a larger scheme.
Parham Baheshti gave the trial its human center. He testified that he became a U.S. citizen in 2000, moved back to Iran in 2003 to be closer to his wife’s family, and later worked in 2009 for a small company bringing the internet to far-flung corners of Iran, where he learned about Huawei. Baheshti said he fed secrets to the U.S. government about his dealings with the company and left Iran in 2011 after he was told he was under investigation. He described work there as infuriating and said some people “didn’t seem to care about that” and “had their own agenda,” while also saying the company used technology “for analyzing the [Iranian] people and their behavior online.”
The trial now turns on proof. Prosecutors will need to show that the allegations add up to a racketeering conspiracy over two decades, not just a collection of disputed episodes and the conduct of a few employees. If they cannot, the defense has already given the jury its argument: this is not a companywide criminal plan, but a case built on fragments.
