Ex-Georgetown Researcher Claims School Has Withheld Support amid Chinese Biotech Firm’s Threats

A former Georgetown University researcher is claiming that the school has so far refrained from supporting her against legal threats brought by a Chinese military-linked biotech firm. She says the school’s handling of the situation reveals China’s “elite capture” of American institutions.

Anna Puglisi, a former counterintelligence official, said at a congressional hearing on Thursday that she received letters this summer from biotech company BGI, and an entity linked to it, MGI, threatening legal action. That followed her publication of a report in May focused on the Chinese government’s support of BGI — which the U.S. government describes as a “Chinese military company” — in her previous job at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET). Neither entity has brought a lawsuit yet, though the letters could precede one. Georgetown said that it will defend her with its legal counsel if the companies sue.

“What has happened to me can happen to anyone that conducts research that China’s state-supported entities and the government in Beijing does not like,” she said.

In a lengthy statement to National Review on Friday, meanwhile, BGI attacked Puglisi’s research and waved away reporting on its ties to China’s military. It did not directly address its legal threats against her.

In her testimony before the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, Puglisi said it was troubling that “my story also highlights our country’s own elite capture that aids China and silences or tempers the work of many others, as I have not received the support I need from and was promised by Georgetown University to respond to BGI’s threats of lawfare.”

She said Georgetown “has to this point refused to indemnify my defense to the lawfare brought by these Chinese companies I have criticized.”

An academic’s invocation of legal indemnity could include a request to receive compensation for one’s own legal counsel distinct from counsel retained directly by a university itself, which could have interests that differ from those of its employees. Puglisi was once a senior fellow at CSET, though the report, published in May, refers to her as formerly a senior fellow, indicating that she left the organization before its release. She is now a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.

CSET’s executive director, Dewey Murdick, in a post to LinkedIn that followed the hearing, wrote that both the research center and Georgetown “stand fully behind the report” and are “prepared to defend the report and its authors should the letters lead to formal legal action.” He said that “this was communicated to Anna and any insinuation otherwise is false.”

Murdick added: “Anna thus far has chosen to hire her own lawyer, as is her right, and has declined legal assistance offered by Georgetown. At any time, Anna may accept Georgetown’s standing offer to have its legal counsel represent her in any litigation that arises from her scholarship at Georgetown—an essential protection that Georgetown offers to all of its academics and researchers.”

The dispute — and the revelations about the alleged pressure campaign by Shenzhen-based BGI — came as the House committee examined Chinese government-linked firms’ weaponization of the U.S. legal system against American critics. Lawmakers and experts explored ways to close existing gaps in law that allow such entities to exploit the U.S. legal system.

The letters, Puglisi told the House panel, came from “established American law firms here in Washington, D.C.” The first one came from BGI in June, followed by a second from MGI Tech, a company that was purportedly spun off from BGI. MGI claims that it is independent of BGI, though Puglisi alleged in her research report that it was still a subsidiary of BGI. Each entity demanded that Puglisi alter the contents of the report, she said, with BGI’s counsel calling it defamatory and demanding a full retraction. The letter from MGI took issue with her characterization of the two firms’ Chinese-government ties.

In its statement last week, BGI doubled down on its campaign against Puglisi. It claimed that her report “distorted publicly available financial information and mistakenly claimed that BGI is government controlled,” claiming that Chinese-government investment in BGI is more akin to how U.S. federal and state pension funds buy stock in publicly traded companies. “This does not make the companies government controlled. BGI Group is a private company held by its founders and executives, and our work is undertaken for civilian and scientific purposes only,” BGI asserted in the statement, delivered via an unsigned email.

Last year, the Pentagon added BGI to its blacklist of Chinese military companies, owing to its ties to the People’s Liberation Army. Reports in Reuters documented BGI’s work with the PLA on genetic analysis to improve the performance of Chinese soldiers in high-altitude environments. The newswire service also reported that BGI harvests the genetic data from pregnancy tests administered across the world, which it also uses in research alongside the PLA.

In written testimony submitted to the committee, Puglisi said the report received “scathing opposition” internally at the Center for Science and Emerging Technology “despite having five peer reviewers, and a fact check completed without issue.” Puglisi added that comments from the internal review “are unfortunately, and very curiously, remarkably similar to the points that the lawfare counsel for the Chinese companies make about the paper.”

Murdick said in his post that CSET conducts “difficult” reviews but “so long as CSET aims to produce this kind of work, rigorous reviews are essential.”

BGI seized on the internal disagreement about the report, telling National Review: “As you may have well noticed from her same testimony that Georgetown’s CSET criticized her report and called it a ‘dog-whistle.'”

The company also said: “We also urge you to investigate whether there is connection between Puglisi and the China Committee who sponsored the BIOSECURE Act, or Puglisi and the dominant company in the genomics market.” It did not provide any basis for the claim that these connections might exist.

The statement attacked the sponsors of the BIOSECURE Act, an effective U.S. ban on BGI and other Chinese genomics firms that recently passed the House, claiming that they “have no evidence in their accusations.” It panned them for citing news reports about BGI’s work with China’s military: “The sponsors merely cited some news reports which BGI and other companies have already refuted. News reports are not evidence in any case.” National Review did not receive a response from MGI, which Puglisi and the House committee have both said is still controlled by BGI.

In testimony submitted to the committee, Puglisi also wrote that CSET’s executive director provided her email address to “a Chinese state official” last September as she worked to finish the report, after which the first secretary of the Chinese Embassy wrote her an email criticizing her previous testimony before the U.S. Senate and Canada’s House of Commons about scientific and technology cooperation between the U.S. and China.