Jailed Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai has denied that he promoted hostility towards China by posting online about a speech made by then-US state secretary Mike Pompeo, a Hong Kong court has heard as Lai’s national security trial continued.
Under defence counsel Steven Kwan’s questioning on Thursday, Lai said he only praised parts of a July 2020 speech made by Pompeo at the Nixon Library by quoting select lines on Twitter, leaving out other parts where the top US official called for the United Nations and other international bodies to leverage their economic and military power against Beijing.
Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai (centre) arrives at the Court of Final Appeal in Hong Kong on December 31, 2020. Photo: Isaac Lawrence/AFP.
Lai, 77, stands accused of two counts of conspiring to collude with foreign forces under the national security law and one charge under a colonial-era sedition law, and faces spending the rest of his life in prison if convicted. Lai has been detained since December 2020. Since then, he has been convicted and sentenced to jail for charges relating to fraud and participation in unauthorised demonstrations.
Asked whether he had been “advocating hostility against China” by asking his social media manager and ex-Apple Daily columnist Simon Lee to tweet parts of the speech, Lai said he had not been.
“I did not take the part about the United Nations, only the part about tyranny,” he said.
According to a transcript of the speech shown in court, Pompeo had said: “The United Nations, NATO, the G7 countries, the G20, our combined economic, diplomatic, and military power is surely enough to meet this challenge if we direct it clearly and with great courage.”
Email records presented in court showed that a transcript was forwarded to Lai by former US state department adviser Christian Whiton. The records showed the tycoon thanking Whiton in an emailed reply, but Lai on Thursday said he had not read the attached transcript until after reading news reports about the speech.
People shelter from the rain while waiting outside West Kowloon Law Courts Building on November 20, 2024, for seats in the public gallery to hear detained pro-democracy media mogul Jimmy Lai testify for the first time in his national security trial. Photo: Kyle Lam/HKFP.
Kwan followed up, saying that it could not be ignored that Lai’s tweet contained a link to an Associated Press report with a video of the speech. “Were you indirectly advocating hostile activities against China?” he asked.
“No, otherwise I would have quoted the other words,” Lai answered.
Twitter management
The court on Thursday also heard that Lai’s social media manager Lee had free reign to post the Lai’s text messages on the tycoon’s Twitter account.
After several rounds of questioning over Lai’s text messages and social media presence, judge Alex Lee noted that “quite a number” of Lai’s WhatsApp messages with Lee were posted as tweets without the media mogul expressly giving approval to do so: “From what we see, you do not actually spell out whether you wanted him to tweet or not.”
Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai. File photo: Kelly Ho/HKFP.
Lai was shown messages he sent to ex-columnist Lee, in which the tycoon opined on the possibility of a potential military conflict between the US and China, and another where he praised then-US president Donald Trump’s move to shut down the Chinese embassy in Houston, Texas.
The prosecution has alleged that Lai’s tweets, among other material including his social media livestreams and articles in Apple Daily, amounted to seditious publications under the colonial-era sedition law.
Addressing judge Lee, Lai said he “assumed” that Simon Lee would use his messages as content for tweets. Pressed again as to whether the pair had any “pre-agreed understanding” on how the account should be managed, Lai said he allowed Lee to “judge for himself,” giving him free reign over the Twitter account.
“We had worked together for a long time, to the point that we never questioned what we did, so that is the mutual understanding,” Lai said.
‘Not cautious enough’
The court was shown a text message from Lai to ex-columnist Lee saying that Trump’s decision to close down the Houston embassy demonstrated that “actions were louder than words.” In the WhatsApp message, Lai said the move was a “sanction” against Beijing, though the word was not used in the corresponding tweet, and instead reworded as “different measures”.
“I was not cautious enough,” Lai told Kwan, who asked about the discrepancy between the text message and the tweet. The WhatsApp message was sent on July 23, 2020, about three weeks after Beijing’s national security law took effect.
Apple Daily’s final edition dated June 24. 2021. Photo: Kelly Ho/HKFP.
Lai was also shown tweets and text messages in which he discussed the “urgent” need for Western governments to implement lifeboat policies and grant Hongkongers political asylum.
Addressing Judge Esther Toh, who asked what the protesters wanted to be freed from, Lai replied: “From the encroachment of China, from dictatorship.” Toh then asked: “So you want Hong Kong to be independent?”
“I want Hong Kong to be free under the rule of law,” Lai replied. Asked by Kwan what he expected from the young protesters, Lai said he didn’t know. “But I think it was good for them to have asylum… to give them a safe haven. Having a life of freedom elsewhere is a good thing,” he added.
“And to continue the movement?” Toh asked, to which Lai replied: “If the movement is still there, yes.”
Lai’s continues testifying on Friday.
When Lai’s trial began on December 18, 2023, he had already spent more than 1,000 days in custody after having had his bail revoked in December 2020. Three judges – handpicked by Hong Kong’s chief executive to hear national security cases – are presiding over Lai’s trial in the place of a jury, marking a departure from the city’s common law traditions.
