A Chinese national locked in federal custody without bail in Southern California since his December arrest after attempting to transfer restricted military technology to the People's Republic of China (PRC) confessed this month.
Exactly what Jian Dai (a.k.a. “Michael Tan”) admitted isn't known because U.S. Department of Justice officials sealed huge portions of the case, including the terms of Dai's April 4 guilty plea.
According to one government document that is public, Dia repeatedly tried in 2013 to ship to the PRC “a TGA2517 power amplifying integrated chip, which is a '16 Watt X Band Power Amplifier' used in, among other things, applications for space and military communication jamming capabilities.”
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Assistant United States Attorney Allen W. Chui reports that such technology cannot be transferred out of the country without permission.
“At no time did defendant Dai have authorization in the form of a license from the U.S. Department of State to export the TGA2517 Integrated Chip from the United States to the PRC,” Chui wrote in a court document.
The scheduled May 13 trial will now be abandoned, but what punishment Dai faces is unknown given the secrecy surrounding the case.
Dai–who was born in 1986–controls Shenzhen City Qian Hua Tai Technology Co. in China, Xingya Communication PTE Ltd. in Singapore and New Star Technology in Hong Kong.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.