DONALD WHO?:

U.S. prosecutors will likely urge a judge to drop an indictment against an MIT professor charged a year ago with receiving federal grant money but failing to disclose his ties to China, according to people familiar with the matter.

The reversal in the case of Gang Chen, a nanotechnology expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, comes as the Justice Department is reviewing its policy of investigating and prosecuting cases of economic espionage intended to benefit China. 

That program, launched in 2018, resulted in dozens of prosecutions for hacking, data and trade secret theft and concealing ties to the Chinese government. But last year, the U.S. dropped several cases and a judge ordered an acquittal because of law enforcement errors and prosecutorial overzealousness.

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