The lawyers for a disgraced former Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist who pleaded guilty to lying about his involvement with a Chinese talent-recruiting program said his client should not be sentenced to prison on the technical grounds that the deception did not amount to perjury, which under federal sentencing guidelines could carry harsher penalties than other lies.
It was part of a formal objection filed late last week in U.S. District Court for New Mexico by Turab Lookman’s attorneys, Paul Linnenburger and Marc Lowry.
That was just one of defense counsel’s complaints about the U.S. Probation Office’s pre-sentencing report — a briefing for the judge scheduled to sentence Lookman on Aug. 26.
Linnenburger’s team also said it unfairly characterized all of Lookman’s work at the laboratory as classified, exaggerating the amount of national security information he could have transferred to China.
The document further paints the false picture that the broad scientific community had reached consensus in the years prior to 2019, when Lookman was busted, that the Thousand Talents program was merely a facade for Chinese intelligence gathering and technology poaching, according to the filing.
“[M]any within the broader scientific community, particularly throughout 2017 and 2018, viewed the Thousand Talents Program as an attempt to foster scientific advancement, collaboration and cooperation with the scientific community of China (including Chinese ex-pats),” Lookman’s attorneys wrote.
Linnenburger and Lowry also filed with the court a copy of Lookman’s application to Thousand Talents.
The Justice Department in May 2019 unsealed the indictment charging Lookman with three counts of lying to federal investigators, during routine clearance interviews, about his connection with Thousand Talents.
The government’s indictment said he accepted a position in Thousand Talents some time before Nov. 14, 2017, for personal compensation. Lookman worked at Los Alamos until around the time of his 2019 indictment.
Lookman initially pleaded guilty before seeking a plea deal in which the U.S. attorney in the case dismissed two of the charges. For the remaining charge, Lookman could receive up to five years in prison, three years of supervised release, and a fine as large as $250,000. However, court papers show he is likely to receive a sentence at the low end of that range.
