IT STILL HASN’T BEEN ACTED ON, SO MAYBE THIS IS HAVING AN EFFECT: Asian American groups urge rejection of nominee for U.S. Attorney in Tennessee’s Eastern District: Casey Arrowood prosecuted University of Tennessee professor now cleared of spying charges.
The Biden administration in August nominated Arrowood for the top job at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Knoxville despite his role in the wrongful prosecution of University of Tennessee professor Dr. Anming Hu as part of former President Donald Trump’s “China Initiative.”
In an exclusive interview with the Tennessee Lookout earlier this month, Hu called the nomination “ridiculous” and shocking and has since penned a letter to President Joe Biden urging him to withdraw Arrowood’s name from consideration.
After the story was published, a slew of advocacy groups, including APA Justice, Asian American Scholar Forum, Tennessee Chinese American Alliance and United Chinese Americans, have teamed up with Hu to try to defeat Arrowood’s nomination. . . .
Armed solely with a Chinese press released translated on the fly via Google, Sadiku in 2018 falsely accused Hu of being a spy, tried to press the UT professor into spying on China for the U.S. government and, when Hu refused, spent more than a year surveilling Hu and his teenage son, trial testimony showed.
When that surveillance turned up no evidence of espionage by Hu, testimony showed, Sadiku and other federal agents convinced UT leaders to help ensnare Hu by approving his proposal for a NASA research grant — without telling Hu the project could run afoul of an obscure provision of the law that the university had repeatedly insisted did not apply to Hu or any of its professors.
Arrowood then mounted a wire fraud case against Hu in 2020. When Hu refused to plead guilty in the case, Arrowood took it to trial. The case proved so weak a jury in U.S. District Court deadlocked. When Arrowood threatened to retry Hu, U.S. District Judge Tom Varlan stepped in and tossed the case out of court last year.
Flashback: Trial reveals federal agents falsely accused a UT professor born in China of spying.
And this was an ordinary case, not a politically charged one. And it gets worse.