An immigration judge has found the U.S. government’s initial deportation case against Kseniia Petrova, a Russian-born Harvard scientist held in ICE detention, to be legally deficient, her attorney said, raising questions about whether the case can move forward.

The preliminary immigration hearing, held in Jena, Louisiana, included three trial attorneys and a deputy chief counsel from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Petrova’s attorney Greg Romanovsky described their presence as unusual for an early-stage proceeding.

The French government’s claim that a scientist was denied entry into the United States because of an opinion he expressed about the Trump administration is “blatantly false,” a U.S. official has said.

A scientists with close ties to China and the U.S. government is now saying that risky experiments he proposed—which some experts believe could have led to the creation of SARS-CoV-2—may have been done, deviating from earlier statements.

Another scientist involved in the proposal also says he doesn’t know if the work was done.

“To the very best of my knowledge ... the work hasn’t been done,” Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, told a congressional panel this week.

In 2015, Ralph S. Baric, arguably the world’s most accomplished coronavirologist, published groundbreaking research with Shi Zhengli, the leading coronavirus researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

China is investing more than $1.4 billion in a new institute run by former scientists at the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory, part of an ambitious program to hire top U.S. scientists and obtain advanced American technology, according to an investigation by The Washington Times.