Huawei Racketeering Trial Opens in Brooklyn Court
Is Huawei a criminal enterprise or a legitimate foreign business unfairly targeted?
Above: The Huawei logo during the 2026 Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Shanghai, China. Image credit: Long Wei/VCG/Getty Images
The Spin
Pro-establishment narrative
Huawei isn't some misunderstood telecom firm — two decades of stealing American technology, lying to banks and helping Iran spy on its own citizens is exactly what a criminal enterprise looks like. Blaming a handful of rogue workers out of 200,000 employees doesn't wash when the pattern stretches across 170 countries.
Establishment-critical narrative
Stringing together stale intellectual property squabbles and one engineer's dumb stunt with a phone-testing robot into a mob statute is prosecutorial overreach. Eight years of legal siege, a CFO held in Canada and a case surviving three administrations show a target hunted in search of a crime. If routing dollars through a U.S. bank makes any foreign company prosecutable, nobody is safe.