AASF Webinar: Reflecting on Professor Gang Chen’s Case and Looking Ahead to the Future of the China Initiative

Time: January 30th (Sunday) 11 AM-12:30 PM EST 

This webinar is sponsored by:

Asian American Scholar Forum
Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC
Asian American Academy of Science and Engineering
APA Justice
Brennan Center for Justice

Keynote Speaker

Ted W. Lieu

Ted W. Lieu represents California’s 33rd Congressional District in the United States House of Representatives.  Ted is serving in his fourth term in Congress and currently sits on the House Judiciary Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He was also elected by his Democratic Colleagues this Congress to serve as a Co-Chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee for a third time. Ted is a former active duty officer in the U.S. Air Force. Following active duty, Ted served in the Air Force Reserve, retiring with the rank of Colonel in 2021. In Congress, Ted has established himself as a leader on the environment; cybersecurity; civil liberties; government ethics and veterans. He is also an outspoken proponent of more effective government oversight. Following the Jan. 6 insurrection, Ted co-authored the Article of Impeachment advanced by the House and subsequently served as an Impeachment Manager for the second Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.

In addition to government reforms, Congressman Lieu is a champion of measures to reduce the harms of climate change. The first bill Ted introduced after coming to Congress was the Climate Solutions Act, which aims to make California’s ground-breaking renewable energy goals and climate emissions reduction targets a national model. In 2019 and again in 2021, Ted introduced an aggressive version of the legislation in order to tackle society’s most pressing issue. Ted is also a founder and co-Chair of the California Coastal Caucus, which advocates for issues that impact California’s coastal communities.

Speakers

Dr. Gang Chen (Impacted Person)

Gang Chen is the Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering and the director of the MIT Pappalardo Micro/Nano Engineering Laboratory. His research interests center on nanoscale thermal transport and energy conversion phenomena and their applications in energy storage and conversion, thermal management, and water treatment and desalination. He has made important contributions to the understanding of heat transfer in nanostructures and exploited them to develop energy conversion, storage, and water technologies. Chen is fellows of the US National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Robert Fisher

Rob Fisher is an accomplished trial lawyer and legal strategist who represents clients facing bet-the-company government investigations or charges brought by agencies such as the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), and the various state attorneys general.

Rob served as an Assistant United States Attorney for almost a decade and during that time handled some of the federal district’s most complex and high-profile white-collar fraud cases. He has received numerous awards for his work as a federal prosecutor including the U.S. Department of Justice Director’s Award. Rob was recently retained as an expert witness in the management and defense of government and regulatory investigations and was also nominated by Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker to serve as a member of the Commonwealth’s Task Force on the Preservation of Evidence. Based upon his work as a defense attorney and prosecutor, Rob has been interviewed by Anderson Cooper for CBS’s 60 Minutes, has been featured in two Netflix documentaries, and is frequently quoted in numerous national publications such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe.

Margaret K. Lewis

Margaret K. Lewis is Professor of law at Seton Hall University. Her research focuses on law in China and Taiwan with an emphasis on criminal justice and human rights. She has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar at National Taiwan University, a visiting professor at Academia Sinica, a Public Intellectuals Program Fellow with the National Committee on United States-China Relations, and a delegate to the US-Japan Foundation’s US-Japan Leadership Program. She is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Her publications have appeared in academic journals including the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, NYU Journal of International Law and Politics, Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, and Virginia Journal of International Law. She has participated in the State Department’s Legal Experts Dialogue with China, has testified before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, and is a consultant to the Ford Foundation. Her recent publications include Criminalizing China and Time to End the U.S. Justice Department’s China Initiative

Moderator

Michael German

Michael German is a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty & National Security Program, which seeks to ensure that the U.S. government respects human rights and fundamental freedoms in conducting the fight against terrorism. A former special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, his work focuses on law enforcement and intelligence oversight and reform. Prior to joining the Brennan Center, German served as the policy counsel for national security and privacy for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington legislative office.

German is the author of Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide: How the New FBI Damages Democracy. The book chronicles how the FBI transformed itself after the 9/11 attacks from a law enforcement agency famous for prosecuting organized crime and corruption to arguably the most secretive domestic intelligence agency the country has ever seen. A 16-year veteran of federal law enforcement, German served as an FBI special agent, where he specialized in domestic terrorism and covert operations. He left the FBI in 2004 after reporting continuing deficiencies in FBI counterterrorism operations to Congress. German served as an adjunct professor of law enforcement and terrorism at National Defense University. He joined the ACLU’s Washington legislative office in 2006 and the Brennan Center in 2014. His first book, Thinking Like a Terrorist: Insights of a Former FBI Undercover Agent, was published in 2007.

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