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“This defendant schemed to export to China semiconductors with military and civilian uses, then he lied about it to federal authorities,” charged U.S. assistant attorney general John Demers in a statement this week about Yi-Chi’s conviction.

A source said the U.S. has asked Canada to extradite Ishiang, who retired as a McGill faculty member last year.

But the lawyer who defended the California brother said the whole case involved trumped-up charges and a prosecution strategy that deliberately misled the jury about the facts.

For instance, said attorney James Spertus, the brothers are accused of deceiving a U.S. company into making advanced semiconductors for illegal export to China, yet jurors never heard that the same American firm itself has a large operation in China.

It was never even clear that the chips were actually sent to China, and the suggestion they could have military uses had no real basis, charged Spertus.

“It’s a tragic case,” he said in an interview Thursday. “I don’t think it was an honest prosecution, and it’s very upsetting … It’s really a miscarriage of justice.”

Spertus said he believes the case is designed to send a message to China in the midst of a trade war, and the Shih brothers — natives of Taiwan — were innocent researchers caught in the middle. Western countries have accused Beijing of plundering foreign technology and other intellectual property in various ways to feed its civilian and military industries.