Ashley Tellis, Mumbai-born US thinktanker under Justice Department lens for China links

TOI correspondent from Washington: Washington DC think-tank community was rocked on Tuesday after the accused , prominent US analyst of Indian-origin, of illegally possessing classified documents and meeting with Chinese officials.

In court filings, the Justice Department said a federal court had issued a search warrant for Tellis’s home in Vienna, outside Washington DC, and a raid by the FBI had located thousands of pages of classified documents in the house.

The development shocked the city’s think=tank community given the respect Tellis commanded for his work in the US-India-China domain as a scholar, most recently at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Tellis had also served as a senior adviser to Robert Blackwill when he was the US ambassador to India and as a special assistant and senior director to President George W. Bush in the National Security Council.

The Justice Department also identified him as a contractor with the Office of Net Assessment at the Department of Defense, now Department of War.

“I first met Ashley Tellis in 2002 and he has been unfailingly polite and thoughtful in couss interactions since that time, even when we have disagreed on substantive matters. I wish him fairness and compassion as the legal process unfolds,” Christopher Clary, a non-resident fellow at the Stimson Center, said on X.

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Mumbai-born Tellis, 64, is a graduate of St Xavier's College, Mumbai and later earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His has been a familiar face on the US-India-China talking heads circuit for years with scholarly work that was closely read in Washington DC, New Delhi, and Beijing.