Huawei's criminal racketeering trial opened in New York eight years after the charges were brought, and the company it is being tried in front of has almost no US business left to lose.
The usual remedy in a corporate criminal case is exclusion from the American market. Eric Talley's point is that US trade policy already did that, which changes what a conviction is worth.
"Most of Huawei's margin is generated outside the United States, and most of those assets are held outside the United States as well."
Talley teaches business law at Columbia, where he works on corporate transactions and the law that governs them, and he has been on this programme through the case's earlier stages.
The full segment is covered here so you can skip it. 16 minutes of audio, 9 minutes of reading.
Here are the 7 takeaways that matter.
👤 Guest: Eric Talley, Professor of Business Law at Columbia Law School
🎙️ Host: June Grosso, who presents Bloomberg Law for Bloomberg Radio
🧩 Other segments: Chris Strom, Bloomberg legal and national security reporter, on the Justice Department's grand conspiracy investigation
📰 Published: 16 September 2026 on the Bloomberg Law podcast feed
🟣 Apple Podcasts | ⏱️ 16 min | ✅ Time saved: 7 min
Key Takeaways
The indictment is three clusters: sanctions-related bank and wire fraud, trade secret theft, and a racketeering count tying them together
The racketeering charge adds no new conduct; it requires proving the first two were a pattern
The government's strongest material is physical, not financial
Source code for routers, user manuals, antenna technology — and an employee who broke off part of a T-Mobile test robot to take home
Huawei's defense is that the industry is competitive and the government has cherry-picked anecdotes
Talley says both sides have a reasonable argument, which is why it is going to trial
A government win puts nobody in prison: there are no individual co-defendants
The standard corporate remedy is unavailable because Huawei is already blacklisted in the US
Most of its margin and most of its assets sit outside American jurisdiction
The real prize for the Justice Department is Huawei's market share outside the US
Which depends on allies who, Talley notes, have been drifting closer to China as tariffs land on them
He does not expect Beijing to pull back from Huawei if it is convicted
1. Three Clusters of Charges
Grosso opened on the substance of an indictment that has been sitting for eight years, and Talley broke it into parts.
"The government's trial against Huawei basically has three clusters of allegations."
The first is bank and wire fraud tied to business with sanctioned countries — he named Iran and North Korea.
The second is trade secret theft, which he described as industrial espionage.
The third he called a throw-in: "It's a racketeering charge that basically is a conspiracy theory that ties all three of these claims together, the first two with the third."
2. What RICO Requires
Grosso asked whether the racketeering count lets prosecutors put in more or different evidence. Talley's answer is that it mostly raises the bar rather than lowering it.
The trigger conditions do not change: "RICO basically requires what's sometimes known as a predicate offense, that there's got to be some underlying wrongdoing that is then sort of part of an overall strategy that is about a continuous organized pattern of criminal activity." The predicates here are the same trade secret and bank and wire fraud allegations.
What it adds is a second thing to prove. The government has to show the episodes were not one-offs but, in his words, part of a continuous, organized, orchestrated pattern — "and not just, spot, cherry-picked examples."
3. Anecdotes or a Pattern
Grosso put the two opening statements side by side: the Justice Department's account of two decades of theft and corruption against Huawei's framing of competition rather than conspiracy. She asked which side has the harder job.
Talley's answer is that neither, which is why there is a trial: "Well, one of the reasons this is going to trial is that both of these types of arguments are actually reasonably good."
He gave the defense its due without qualification: "Huawei is 100% correct that this is an incredibly competitive industry in which different manufacturers are essentially trying to one-up one another." A small edge converts into a large share, and employees, business dealings and trade fairs move information around, which produces exactly these claims.
"But Huawei's, overall claim is that this is a really, really competitive industry, and it's unfair to look at specific anecdotes as a way to lay out some kind of a systematic pattern. They're just anecdotes."
The government's counterweight is evidence a jury can picture. "On the other hand, the government's got some decent anecdotes, particularly on the trade secret dimension."
His list of it: "Examples of unauthorized stealing, of source codes for routers, user manuals, antenna technology, and they even have some evidence of one Huawei employee physically breaking off a piece of T-Mobile's phone testing robot to take back home and to study it."
The question he says decides the case is whether those episodes carry the racketeering count. Vivid evidence of individual thefts is one thing; persuading a jury that they are a pattern rather than a selection is another, and he noted that prosecutors can usually find one or two examples that look sketchy in any large organization.
Huawei's answer, in his summary: "Huawei is basically going to say, look, you just cherry picked some of the worst possible situations involving individual isolated employees, former employees, contractors, Huawei, but that was never part of our corporate strategy."
4. 8 Years, Two Presidents
Grosso raised the obvious objection — that this administration has moved away from criminally charging corporations — and asked why a months-long trial is happening at all.
"I understand that the Trump administration has moved away from criminally charging corporations."
Talley's answer is that the case has outlived the politics around it: "Well, it's an interesting political setting because this case started under the first Trump administration. It was then inherited by President Biden, and now it's being tried in a broader sort of U.S.-China technology race and competition under the second Trump administration."
"It's relevant to note that even the Biden administration pushed the ball forward on this case."
The continuity produced a specific evidentiary asset. The Huawei executive who was living in Vancouver — Meng Wanzhou, the company's chief financial officer — was subject to extradition orders and entered a deferred prosecution agreement, and the statements of fact she signed have been accepted publicly by the trial judge.
That makes them hard to attack, because they come from one of Huawei's own. Talley's questions for the defense: do they argue she misstated the facts, or put up other people with more direct knowledge to correct the record?
His broader read is that the case was mostly built before this administration inherited it, and that the US-China theme running through it did most of the work of keeping it alive.
5. No One Faces Prison
Grosso asked whether the case would land better with a jury if individuals had been charged alongside the company. Talley's answer cuts both ways, and the second half is the part that matters for what a conviction is worth.
"So success by the government isn't necessarily mean that someone's gonna go to prison. There aren't individuals who are basically co-defendants along Huawei here."
He argued that charging an individual can backfire. Juries in corporate misconduct cases sometimes push back on the idea that one person should carry an organization's fault, and the prospect of prison time for that person can make them less willing to convict.
The cost of leaving individuals out is that success becomes less concrete than it would be against a natural person.
He reads the choice as jurisdictional and strategic: the government wants this to be about Huawei, and wants the jury to treat the company as an example of competition that skirts both intellectual property rules and international sanctions.
On the length — the trial runs until December — he said that is what suing a well-capitalized defendant buys you: good legal teams and protracted litigation.
The government's presentation problem is the financial half of the case. Tracing which companies Huawei dealt with that in turn dealt with Iran and North Korea, and what it knew, is "a highly detailed, technical, and heavily kind of number-laden form of claim."
"I think the trade secret and IP claims, they're just a little bit more vivid and are likely going to catch people's attentions because they actually involve, actions that you can observe and see, and in some cases, quite tangible alleged acts of theft."
6. The Margin Is Offshore
Grosso pointed out that with Huawei already blacklisted, financial penalties look like the only remedy left, and asked whether any of them would hurt.
"Most of Huawei's margin is generated outside the United States, and most of those assets are held outside the United States as well."
He allowed that there are recoverable assets, but said the offshore concentration makes a financial penalty harder to pursue.
The usual corporate remedy is already spent. "And Huawei is already heavily restricted in terms of its presence in the US market." The most potent sanction against a convicted company is normally exclusion from the American market; US trade policy got there first.
"And as you noted, Huawei is not going to be in a position where suddenly it's going to lose a bunch of customers in the U.S. since it currently doesn't have many customers in the U.S. since it's been blacklisted."
So the value of a conviction is extraterritorial. "So my sense is the real grab that a successful outcome for the Department of Justice would have is in effectively trying to throttle back Huawei's market share outside of the U.S."
The mechanism is pressure on trading partners — told that continuing to deal with a criminally convicted enterprise carries consequences for their own access to US markets. He noted that "the Trump administration has wielded that club many times thus far with tariffs and other contexts."
The caveat he attached is the important one for anyone modeling the outcome. Several historical US allies appear to be moving closer to China as tariffs land on them, so it is an open question whether that pressure keeps them away from Huawei or pushes them toward its products.
7. What China Does Next
The closing question was about Huawei's standing at home, and Talley's answer is that a US conviction does not change it.
"Significantly important company in China, one of the leading companies in China."
He does not expect Xi Jinping's government to pull back, precisely because the company has been effective at competing with US manufacturers, in a market that is large both externally and internally.
"Huawei has been very much aggressively trying to expand its market footprint in just about every country but the United States."
"I would expect that they're going to continue to get support, either implicit or possibly explicit, from The Chinese government, particularly if a conviction is accompanied by kind of expanded rhetoric about the China versus U.S. competition in technology."
Bonus Insights
Grosso framed the defense's opening in its own words: "Huawei's defense was it's about competition, not conspiracy, innovation, not theft, ordinary business dealings, not criminal conduct."
On witnesses, Talley said Meng's signed statement is a partial centerpiece rather than the whole case, and that some of the actual participants may emerge as the star witnesses instead. She is not expected to be brought to the United States to testify.
Talley's own teaching test for the financial allegations was self-deprecating: he said a set of his own students would struggle to stay with the sanctions-list forensics halfway through.
On the government's record against Chinese companies, he said there have been some successes, but that Huawei's size makes this a different order of target — and that the company is mounting a steep defense because the stakes are large.
Talley's bottom line is that this trial is being fought over something other than money: the financial remedies are weak because the assets and the customers are offshore, so what the Justice Department is really pursuing is a criminal conviction it can show to allies and suppliers who still buy from Huawei.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Huawei (The defendant: the world's largest supplier of telecommunications network equipment, already blacklisted in the US, with most of its margin and assets held abroad)
T-Mobile (Owner of the phone-testing robot the government says a Huawei employee broke a piece off to take home and study)
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