 The Trump-era China Initiative was a Department of Justice program to root out Chinese spies, and Tao was one of the first scholars to be ensnared. In 2022, a jury found him guilty of four charges that he broke the law to conceal work he was doing for a Chinese university. A judge later that year threw out three of the convictions, and a U.S. Circuit Court ruled that there was insufficient evidence to support the fourth and final conviction.