DOJ Urges Court to Reject Hytera’s Renewed Motion to Compel Discovery

U.S. District Judge John Tharp for Northern Illinois in Chicago should reject Hytera’s renewed motion to compel discovery from the government and to convene a Classified Information Procedures Act hearing to probe the company’s allegations that the government is withholding information from the defendant (see 2405010046), said DOJ’s response Wednesday (docket 1:20-cr-00688). Hytera’s renewed motion “fails for the same reasons as its last motion” in that it rests on “misinformed speculation” and on an “unprecedentedly broad scope of what constitutes discoverable information in this case,” it said. The “purported developments” to which Hytera points “do not advance its meritless claims,” said DOJ. The government “continues to abide by” its discovery obligations, it said. Hytera contends it has “incontrovertible evidence” that the government is conducting a classified national security investigation into the company’s relationship with the Chinese government, including the surveillance and questioning of its chief in-house attorney, and seeks the disclosure of information gleaned from that investigation. A grand jury in May 2021 returned an indictment listing multiple counts of trade secret theft against Hytera and seven of its engineers who developed digital mobile radios for Motorola in Malaysia beginning in 2004 (see 2301260060). The engineers quit Motorola in 2008 and 2009 to go to work for Hytera in Shenzhen, and the government alleges they took Motorola’s DMR trade secrets with them when they left.