It isn’t illegal, that’s the point. For political reasons an initiative was created to “hunt Chinese Innovation theft” and that initiative needed to go after “someone” so they looked through what hints they could find and went after people who were doing nothing wrong, but looked like they could at least be pressured into taking some plea deal, so the politically motivated xenophobic which hunt committee could present a result of “this many people were ‘caught’” and get a nice big bonus for creating a Fox News sound bite.

This was started under Trump, and canned under Biden. It’s a travesty and complete circus of an injustice and a racially motivated assault on the scientific community.