The former Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist is set today to change his plea of not guilty to charges that he lied about alleged connections to a Chinese-sponsored talent-recruiting program, a new court filing shows.
Turab Lookman’s plea-change hearing is slated for 10 a.m. local time in U.S. District Court for New Mexico in Albuquerque. The hearing notice did not say how Lookman, indicted in May 2019 and essentially confined to his home and the surrounding locale since, planned to alter his plea.
Lookman formerly worked at Los Alamos’ Theoretical Division and had worked at the lab since at least 1999, according to his LinkedIn profile. He is a co-author on some recently published, non-classified papers about solid materials science and machine learning.
The federal government said Lookman lied about contact with the Chinese-sponsored Thousand Talents Program beginning in 2017, when he still worked at the U.S. Department of Energy nuclear-weapon facility.
The Donald Trump administration characterizes Thousand Talents as an organized effort to steal U.S. intellectual property by providing American citizens with prestigious positions in Chinese institutions, lush living quarters in China, travel expenses, and research funding.
In a hearing last year, the Associated Press reported that George Kraehe, the U.S. attorney prosecuting the case, said Lookman could have accessed national security secrets at Los Alamos, and passed them to China. Lookman’s attorney, Paul Linnenburger, countered that the government had yet to prove Lookman had any such access, or any intention to steal classified secrets, AP reported.
It is unclear exactly what Lookman stood to gain from participating in the Chinese program. The government’s indictment said only that he accepted a position in the program some time before Nov. 14, 2017, for personal compensation.
Lookman’s trial is scheduled for June. He faces three counts of fraud and false statements for allegedly lying to the Department of Energy and the National Background Investigations Bureau within the federal Office of Personnel Management.
Each count of lying to the government carries a fine and a prison term of up to five years — or up to eight years, if the court finds Lookman’s alleged false statements involved international or domestic terrorism.
Lookman’s first alleged lie was on an electronic form, the Electronic Questionnaires for Investigations Processing, or e-QIP. Filling out the form as part of a routine background check, Lookman answered “no” to the question “Has any foreign national in the last seven (7) years offered you a job, asked you to work as a consultant, or consider employment with them?”
In June 2018, Lookman allegedly lied again, this time telling a Los Alamos National Laboratory counterintelligence officer that he hadn’t been recruited by Thousand Talents.
After the Justice Department threw the book at Lookman, the Department of Energy banned its employees and contractors from working with Thousand Talents.
