Huawei's U.S. racketeering trial opens as Trump's date with Xi remains unconfirmed

A Justice Department lawyer told a Brooklyn jury on Wednesday that Huawei Technologies spent two decades committing crimes. Huawei's lawyer told the same jurors there was no blueprint for crime: only anecdotes, a few bad employees, and old grudges.

Taylor Stout, for the government, opened a racketeering case that has been in the pipeline since the first Trump administration. Brian Heberlig, for Huawei, said prosecutors were trying to turn scattered misconduct among some of the company's roughly 200,000 staff in 170 countries into a companywide conspiracy. "The government's claims don't add up," he said. Some of the testimony against the company, he told jurors, was fueled by "old grudges." He pointed to a Huawei employee who photographed a rival's product at a trade show: a "foolish act," he said, that the company answered by firing the worker, not by running a conspiracy. Huawei has pleaded not guilty.

Huawei is not a public company. It has been barred from selling equipment to U.S. carriers for years, and Canada and Britain have blacklisted it too. What changed on Wednesday is the forum. Allegations that used to live in indictments, export rules, and diplomatic talking points are now in front of a jury, before U.S. District Judge Ann Donnelly, in a trial expected to last about three months. That calendar runs through September 24, the date President Donald Trump has invited Xi Jinping to the White House. China has not confirmed the trip.

Skycom, Iran, and a narrower case

Prosecutors say Huawei used a Hong Kong company, Skycom, as an unofficial Iranian subsidiary: selling telecom gear in breach of U.S. sanctions, moving money through the dollar system, and helping Iranian authorities watch protesters during the 2009 demonstrations in Tehran. They also say Huawei and some subsidiaries did business in North Korea, using internal code names ("A2" for Iran, "A9" for North Korea). The indictment covers alleged conduct from about 1999 to 2020.

The money trail is the part a Brooklyn jury can be walked through with bank records. The government says Skycom-related dollar transactions of about $100 million cleared through the U.S. banking system, including $7.5 million for Iran-based contractors. Subsequent reporting identified the principal bank as HSBC.

That is the same story that produced the 2018 arrest in Vancouver of Huawei's then-chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of founder Ren Zhengfei. In September 2021 she admitted making material misrepresentations to HSBC about Huawei's control of Skycom, as part of a deferred prosecution agreement. Washington dropped its extradition request. She is not in the dock. The company is.

The other half of the case is intellectual property. The 2020 charging papers said Huawei conspired to steal trade secrets from six U.S. technology companies: router source code and manuals, cellular-antenna technology, robot-testing technology. The firms were not named, and they are not named here.

The docket in front of the jury is not the 16-count case unsealed in 2020. In July 2025, Donnelly denied Huawei's motion to dismiss 13 of 16 counts then pending, finding the Skycom banking allegations sufficient to go to a jury. A fourth superseding indictment in April 2026 left 14 counts. Then, in a September 4 filing, prosecutors told Donnelly they would not proceed on two counts under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the statute behind U.S. sanctions enforcement, and dropped a trade-secret episode as a racketeering predicate. That leaves 12 of 14 counts from the April indictment before the jury.

A conviction on this docket would still be a racketeering verdict. It would not be a verdict on the two IEEPA counts the government walked away from days before openings, or on the 16-count indictment it first defended before Donnelly.

The Entity List already did the commercial damage

A guilty verdict would be a political event. It would not, on its own, be a new export-control order.

The Commerce Department put Huawei on the Entity List in 2019, with a presumption of denial for U.S. items, and tightened the foreign-produced direct-product rule in 2020 so that many chips made abroad with U.S. software or tools faced the same license wall. Those are administrative rules at the Bureau of Industry and Security. This trial is a criminal case in the Eastern District of New York. Nothing in the 2019 listing says a later conviction automatically changes it, and nothing in the criminal statute automatically writes a new Entity List entry.

Huawei's U.S. carrier business is already gone. The live commercial question sits outside the United States, where Huawei still sells network gear against Nokia, Ericsson, Cisco, and Ciena. In the first half of 2025, Huawei accounted for 31% of worldwide telecom-equipment revenue, ahead of Nokia at 13% and Ericsson at 12%. A Brooklyn jury does not award those companies Huawei's foreign contracts, and you cannot own Huawei in a U.S.-listed fund.

Trump's September 24 invitation, still unanswered

Trump invited Xi to the White House on September 24 during a state banquet in Beijing in May. If the visit happens, opening week of a Huawei racketeering trial will still be in the rearview, and the jury will still be sitting.

Beijing has long called the prosecution economic bullying and a pretext for suppressing Chinese firms. The trade conversation the two governments are trying to hold is separate, and already strained. As of July, average two-way tariff rates were about 36.5% on Chinese goods entering the United States and 31% on U.S. goods entering China, excluding some sectoral actions. Officials have been discussing cuts on "nonsensitive" products; they have not agreed on the scope. A public racketeering trial does not rewrite those rates. It does put the most sensitive commercial dispute between the two countries on a witness stand while the rates are still on the table.

For about three months, a Brooklyn jury will hear evidence the two governments have been arguing about since 2018, including on a day Trump has already put on Xi's invitation. The collision is a jury seated while two governments negotiate around it.