The Bureau Podcast

CALGARY — In this episode, I sit down with Brian Lilley to break down one of the most troubling moments in recent Canadian parliamentary history — Liberal floor-crosser Michael Ma’s attempt to discredit University of Ottawa China expert Margaret McCuaig-Johnston during a Commons industry committee hearing, and what happened in Beijing hours after the cameras stopped rolling.Chinese state-linked media didn’t just celebrate Ma’s performance. Within hours they published a detailed biographical attack on McCuaig-Johnston with a level of institutional knowledge about her career that raises an uncomfortable question: was this a coordinated operation, and does it trace back to Beijing?I also walk Brian through my prior reporting linking Ma to a political organization identified by the Jamestown Foundation as one of 575 United Front Work Department-affiliated groups operating in Canada — a group with a history of targeting Conservative leaders Erin O’Toole and Pierre Poilievre. To be clear: Ma’s connections to that group are not illegal, and they are not proof of wrongdoing. But when you set those connections alongside his stunning assault on one of Canada’s most prominent China scholars — and the speed with which Chinese propaganda apparatus amplified and weaponized that assault — you are left with very significant questions about whether Michael Ma is acting in Canada’s interest. That conversation is next.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA — In this conversation with BNN's Jason James, I wrestle with the central confusion surrounding the United States-Israel campaign in Iran. Is the objective regime change, the retrieval of enriched uranium, Israel's own objectives, or something deeper and more indirect — the culmination of a pivot from the Middle East, and a strategic warning to Xi Jinping and his axis partners in Russia and North Korea? My view is that the United States military would not have launched this campaign without a rigorous analysis of what it means for Taiwan.I open by recounting a reporting trip to Taiwan in 2023 — the same year, we now know, that the Central Intelligence Agency director privately warned Silicon Valley executives that Xi could move on Taiwan by 2027. I left that trip with several firm convictions.Xi Jinping was not a popular leader among his Red princeling cohort, and has vulnerabilities little understood in the West, including a coup-like challenge from within, prior to 2020. The current military upheaval under Xi has only deepened that assessment.And in 2023, I gathered that the United States, likely supported by Japan, Taiwan, and Australia, will not allow Beijing to blockade or invade Taiwan — and the U.S.-led coalition believes it can defeat China’s military, a conviction that holds regardless of who occupies the White House.The conversation ranges widely, from confusion surrounding Prime Minister Mark Carney’s position on Iran, to a potential trade resolution between Washington and Ottawa.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

LONDON — Jason Pack has spent his career advising Western governments and corporations on the Middle East, running a Libya oil-and-gas consulting firm, and briefing United Nations bureaucrats. Now a fellow at RUSI, the storied British defense and security think tank, his career has sometimes crossed paths with actors in the Western intelligence alliance.That background provides solid fundamentals for understanding the world Jeffrey Epstein operated in — and the known knowns and known unknowns surrounding the recent US government disclosures. While the disclosures have led to new revelations, such as Bloomberg’s scoop on a DEA investigation into allegations that Epstein laundered money for organized crime while trafficking in synthetic narcotics and Eastern European women, Epstein’s sex crimes were an open secret covered up for too long, according to Pack.“There has been a cover-up both at the governmental level and at the media level,” Pack told The Bureau podcast. “The media one outrages me even more.”Pack’s explanation of Epstein’s origin story and accumulation of power is logical and grounded in the available evidence. A secular, middle-class kid from Long Island, Epstein got a teaching job at Dalton, the elite Manhattan private school, and used those connections to land at Bear Stearns. From Bear Stearns, he reached powerful clients. From powerful clients, he reached billionaires. At each rung, he found leverage — insider trading networks, offshore tax schemes, then something no amount of money could buy.“He was a provider of non-monetary assets,” Pack said. “You can’t buy underage women. You can’t buy tax evasion. You can’t purchase, ‘I want to be invited to this party where there are models and media elites.’ That instantly crosses over into intelligence.”The sex trafficking, Pack argues, was not primarily about gratification. It was about domination and psychological manipulation — a tool Epstein wielded over the powerful the same way he wielded it over teenagers. Pack calls it a revision of his own theory of power. Lord Acton’s famous formulation — power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely — may have it backwards. “What if people sought power because they were already twisted?”On why Epstein was never reined in, Pack offered a framework he calls “too big to fail.” Once Epstein held compromising material on enough Democratic donors and Republican elites alike, prosecution became politically suicidal. “Biden couldn’t release information on Epstein because so many Democratic donors would be made to look bad,” he said. Neither political party could deploy the material as a weapon without the collateral damage destroying its own base.Intelligence agencies, Pack argues, had their own calculus. He pointed to “The Rest is Classified” podcast’s reporting that CIA director William Burns helped rent an apartment for Epstein’s brother, at which young women were brought to associates — suggesting Epstein represented a collection asset too valuable to burn. “Every side thought it was beneficial for the guy to exist so long as they were in on it.”Jason Pack hosts the Disorder Podcast, available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

The Bureau has been covering the war against Iran’s Islamic regime largely through American political and military sources — the strategic calculus, the intelligence assessments, the geopolitical reverberations reaching from Beijing to Moscow. But there is a different angle that comes from standing in a city under bombardment, and that is what Adam Zivo has been delivering from Tel Aviv.We last talked when he was in Israel during the 12-day war last June. He returned to Tel Aviv roughly a week before this current campaign began, because his sources — political and journalistic — told him that what was coming would be severe.What he has found since arriving is something that might surprise people who have never spent time in Israel, much less during a war. People at the beach. People at the cafes. An entire society that had made its psychological peace with the fact that conflict with an Islamic regime that has pledged to eradicate the state of Israel is inevitable, a matter of when, not if.Adam walks us through the first day of incoming bomb warnings, to an increasing sense of normalcy and expectation of complete military victory for Israel and the United States. What comes next for the people of Iran is the big unknown.He also walks us through the information war running parallel to the kinetic one — artificial intelligence-generated footage of a bomb-ravaged Tel Aviv that wildly distorts reality, the bot farms, the monetization structures on social media that reward emotions over accuracy, and the specific role of Qatar, a state that has long tried to play both sides of the civilizational divide and is now discovering what it means to be bombed by the regime it has been financing.And we get into the deeper question — the one that will define the next decade of Middle Eastern politics: what comes after? Is there a democratic Iran on the other side of this? What is the role of exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi? And where does China fit in an alliance of authoritarian states that Israel and the United States are now, whether Washington says it plainly or not, confronting as a unified bloc?Adam Zivo reports from Tel Aviv.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA — In this episode, former senior Mountie Garry Clement joins Sam Cooper to answer a question that should unsettle every Canadian: how does a figure like Ryan Wedding — an Olympic athlete from Coquitlam — end up becoming one of the most feared Sinaloa Cartel operatives in North America? The answer, Clement argues, has less to do with Wedding himself than with the country that made his rise possible.Clement spent 34 years in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, including deep-cover undercover operations in British Columbia and an extraordinary posting to Hong Kong in the early 1990s, where he and immigration control officer Brian McAdam came face to face with the top tier of Chinese transnational crime — Stanley Ho, 14K Triad leadership and elite businessmen like Li Ka Shing, whose shipping entities were recently barred from the Panama Canal under US pressure — while watching Canadian diplomatic officials accept red envelopes of casino cash and look the other way. Clement watched a system designed to stop dirty money instead absorb it. He is now watching history repeat itself, at industrial scale.On Wedding specifically, Clement is blunt: the former Olympian had the profile of every major trafficker he ever investigated — the ego, the drive, the early dabbling with no consequences, a prison stint that functioned as a graduate seminar in criminal networking. Wedding’s athletic psychology, Cooper suggests, may have been an accelerant rather than an anomaly — the same ruthless focus that puts an athlete on a podium, possibly the unbound ego of a sociopath that never faced correction while pushing boundaries in pot-permissive British Columbia at a young age, now applied without correction to a criminal enterprise.One of the episode’s most arresting moments comes when Clement, a veteran of hundreds of undercover operations, describes buying three kilos of cocaine in the 1970s from a young woman who had rescheduled their meeting because she was singing in a church choir. She drove up alone, no protection, product on the front seat. “That’s how people that are really egotistical believe they’re untouchable,” he says. “Ryan Wedding was that magnified by a thousand.”Cooper connects Wedding’s rise to a longer arc of institutional failure that Clement traces back decades: the dismantling of port policing in Vancouver in the early 1980s, which he says opened the door to Chinese-linked criminal control of the docks; the penetration of government databases by organized crime through corrupt officers; and an immigration system in Hong Kong that, Clement alleges, effectively sold Canadian passports to figures including Stanley Ho — who Jeffrey Epstein’s files, Cooper notes, identified as the boss of the Chinese mob. Clement says he was personally forbidden from interviewing Ho. Shortly afterward, Ho received what Clement flatly calls “a passport of convenience.”The conversation turns to North Toronto — Willowdale, Thornhill, the corridor above Highway 401 — which Cooper identifies as a node of Iranian Revolutionary Guard money laundering, a claim he says has now been punctuated by recent shootings at a boxing gym and a synagogue. Clement recalls walking that stretch with Iranian currency trader sources in the 1990s, watching unregistered traders transfer money directly to Iranian banks while enforcement looked the other way.The thread running through all of it, Clement argues, is the same: a country that repeatedly chose not to look. Not at the casinos. Not at the ports. Not at the politicians photographed beside organized crime figures — including, he says, a then-mayor of Vancouver standing with the father of the head of the Sun Yee On Triad Society, a photo that ran on the front page of the South China Morning Post the next morning. “They don’t do this because they want to be seen as in the hands of the politician,” Clement says. “They’re doing it because they want to earn credibility.”The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA — In this episode, I dug deeper into the Epstein network revelations with Jason James.Building on our earlier conversation in the Christmas special—where we explored the global networks that can bridge Western leaders and bankers, including Mark Carney, with Chinese Communist Party–linked investment funds—I said the late-2025 and early 2026 picture of Jeffrey Epstein had come into sharper focus: not only as a potential intelligence asset of any single nation, but as a fixer and facilitator moving among elites worldwide.I will develop this thread in the coming days, as additional evidence emerges suggesting Epstein had been introduced into the orbit of CITIC Group—described as a Chinese military- and intelligence-connected global investment ecosystem with deep ties to Canadian Liberal Party business backers and former prime minister Jean Chrétien—and tentacles that reached back into the 1990s-era “Clintongate” Chinese influence scandal.On the China theme, we also dug deeper into turmoil inside General Secretary Xi Jinping’s domain. We discussed how a purge or potential counter-coup involving respected PLA leader Zhang Youxia appeared to be unfolding in recent weeks, and what that kind of internal instability could signal for Beijing’s decision-making and external posture.All of it, I told Jason, pointed to a simple conclusion: over the past month as Mark Carney and Keir Starmer traveled to Beijing—with photo-op diplomacy projecting the wisdom of leadership and solidity of statesmanship—there were mounting signs that something more volatile could have been boiling underneath. I said that, in that environment, the most plausible explanation was not that these leaders lacked good intelligence and advice as they dove deeper into relationships with a fragile superpower, but, more likely, that they disregarded notes of caution from CSIS and MI6 respectively.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA — I sat down with author and researcher Cheryl Yu to unpack her groundbreaking new report on the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department—a sweeping mapping project that identifies more than 2,000 linked organizations operating across democratic societies, with a focus on the United States, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom.Yu’s work helps explain what The Bureau has been reporting through a series of explosive investigations: that United Front networks are not an academic concern, but a practical system for building access—inside politics, business, diaspora organizations, and civic institutions—while preserving the appearance of community leadership. The Bureau’s analysis of Jamestown’s findings suggests Canada has become a strategic platform for Beijing’s efforts to penetrate U.S. technology sectors, supply chains, and influence networks—exploiting Canada’s deep, yet comparatively less secure, integration into North America’s economic architecture.In our conversation, I also ask Yu about Canada’s “saturation”—what it means, how it manifests, and why the patterns she identifies in the Linda Sun case appear to echo inside Canadian political ecosystems as well—potentially deeper, higher, and more structurally embedded.We drill into the Linda Sun case in New York, where only two people are charged, but Yu’s research points to a much wider constellation of relationships—involving more than 20 potential access agents with documented United Front ties in New York political circles.Yu also traces how similar characteristics appear in Canadian cities including Vancouver and Toronto—where individuals tied to United Front-linked agencies simultaneously cultivate relationships with elected officials and, in some cases, seek office themselves. Her methodology focuses on what the Party values: identifying who United Front organs treat as important, and then tracking how those relationships intersect with democratic institutions.As Yu tells it, the Party can patiently cultivate United Front groups and leaders, waiting until trusted insiders secure critical access. At that point, clandestine intelligence handlers can operationalize United Front assets—tasking them to advance objectives, whether political goals, criminal activity, or sophisticated influence campaigns.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA/TORONTO — In this episode, I catch up with columnist Brian Lilley to unpack Prime Minister Mark Carney’s emerging trade and cooperation agenda with the People’s Republic of China — and why I argue these agreements could accelerate Canada’s decline on multiple fronts.Before we get into Ottawa’s electric vehicle deal — which I argue risks introducing foreign surveillance platforms onto Canadian roads while aggravating our most important trade partner, the United States — we step back and ask: what is Carney really trying to accomplish?I lay out my view that Carney is rewarding key business backers with deep commercial ties to Chinese Communist Party–linked entities, in ways I compare to the Lord Peter Mandelson playbook: elite influence, insider networks embedded with investors aligned with Chinese intelligence interests, and a political strategy designed to look pragmatic and beneficial to all Canadians in the “new world order,” as Carney calls it, while primarily benefiting party backers behind the scenes.We also examine the domestic politics driving the moment — including the argument that helped win support before: positioning Carney as a steady “adult in the room” against a polarizing and unpredictable United States president — and why I believe the real maneuver is more complicated. As Carney asks Canadians to believe the country can “pivot away” from the United States, I argue he also knows Canada cannot survive without a serious trade arrangement with Washington, because our deepest economic and security partnership remains our most powerful asset.I argue that Carney is trying to thread the needle for a domestic audience while pleasing Beijing, the Liberal Party’s business wing, and Washington — a balancing act that is not transparent and will be difficult to pull off.We also discuss Carney’s “media cooperation” deal.In a threat environment where Chinese-language media ecosystems have been tied to intimidation, narrative control, and election interference — and where Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai has been imprisoned for challenging Party rule — I argue this is the wrong lesson at the worst time: Ottawa is treating propaganda infrastructure like normal journalism. I point to intelligence reporting that, as The Bureau has reported, describes clandestine operations on Canadian soil, including Chinese police paying Chinese-language journalists to track dissidents and coercing targets not to cooperate with Canadian law enforcement.And that’s why I frame the judgment as reckless: Carney widened access for a Party-state media apparatus — and expanded information-sharing with Chinese police and the RCMP — without publicly detailing safeguards, enforcement, or even acknowledging the documented threat, effectively expanding the very channels through which intimidation, manipulation, and Chinese clandestine police operations already manifest in Canada.Finally, we discuss the stunning Toronto Police organized-crime corruption scandal — a set of allegations I tell Brian shows hallmarks of Mexican-cartel penetration also alleged in Washington’s case against former Olympian Ryan Wedding, including allegations in the same Ontario jurisdiction of bribery, penetration of police databases, and an alleged conspiracy to murder a United States federal witness involving a Toronto lawyer and numerous other alleged conspirators.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA/LOS ANGELES — On the Bureau Podcast’s second episode on the extraordinary political turmoil in China, I’m joined again by former U.S. official and veteran China watcher Chris Meyer to walk listeners through what we can say about the reported purge swirling around General Zhang Youxia in Beijing.Known knowns: Zhang is not a mid-level casualty—he is the most senior and respected military figure associated with the Central Military Commission, and his removal or neutralization is a major signal about the state of control, cohesion, and fear inside the People’s Liberation Army. This event increasingly appears to revolve around Zhang’s view that the PLA is not ready to invade Taiwan by 2027, which is the order that President Xi has publicly issued. At the same time, Xi Jinping has continued to appear in public and host visiting leaders, a reminder that the regime is trying to project stability at the top even as the system appears to be shaking underneath.Known unknowns: Beyond the official acknowledgement of Zhang’s arrest, the information environment turns murky fast. Online reporting and diaspora chatter have pushed dramatic claims about a coup attempt, counter-moves, internal armed standoffs, injuries, arrests, and family detentions. Chris is careful: he cannot confirm the most sensational accounts, and he cautions listeners against treating viral narratives as settled facts simply because they appear in Western headlines. One of the strangest features, he notes, is what he describes as an unusually heavy silence—the absence of the kind of coordinated denunciations and public bandwagon messaging that often follows a top-level takedown in China. Whether that reflects uncertainty, fear, or an operation still unfolding behind closed doors remains unclear.Chris credits diaspora channels with surfacing fragments that sometimes align with later signals—especially the shape of unrest: elite anxiety, hesitation, and the sense that loyalty inside the PLA may not be as automatic as Beijing wants the world to believe. What can be seen and heard from Beijing currently is enough for him to conclude this is not being experienced inside China as a routine corruption case. It’s being felt as a power event.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA/LOS ANGELES — The weekend delivered a jolt from Beijing that underscores a theme Chris Meyer and I have explored across multiple podcast discussions: Xi Jinping’s regime can look strong yet be brittle.China’s Defence Ministry says it has opened investigations into senior military figures including Gen. Zhang Youxia, a vice chairman of the Central Military Commission—an escalation that is shaking the top ranks of the People’s Liberation Army and fuelling fresh questions, inside and outside China, about whether this is an anti-corruption purge, a political power struggle, or both.On Saturday, Chinese state media reported that Zhang is under investigation for alleged “serious violations” of Party discipline and state law. But as Chris Meyer argues in this episode, the announcement may be only the visible edge of a much larger rupture unfolding inside China’s opaque military and political system.The Wall Street Journal reported that Zhang is accused of leaking information related to China’s nuclear weapons program to the United States and accepting bribes, including in connection with a senior promotion. The Journal said the allegations were raised during a closed-door briefing held Saturday morning with senior officers, shortly before the formal announcement.As Chris and I note in this episode, those WSJ claims—sourced to internal Communist Party accounts—may not ultimately be borne out, and could even serve Xi’s interests as a narrative frame. What is clear is that Zhang sits at the apex of the Party’s military command structure, and his reported downfall signals an extraordinary level of turmoil at the top.Chris and I also discuss the obvious: Prime Minister Mark Carney’s new strategic engagement with Beijing, already questionable to many critics of China’s hybrid warfare efforts in the West and especially targeting Canada, now looks increasingly dubious as questions hover over the stability of Xi’s regime.As Meyer explains in the episode, social media and dissident sources have circulated dramatic claims about what really happened. According to these accounts, there was a planned operation to arrest Xi Jinping at an elite CCP leaders’ hotel on the outskirts of Beijing around January 18th. Meyer heard reports that approximately 20 people—split between Xi loyalists and Zhang faction members—were killed in a confrontation when Xi received advance warning and turned the tables on Zhang.There is no verified evidence of violence, mass arrests beyond senior officers, or an active coup attempt. Claims of shootings and widespread detentions remain unconfirmed and trace back to social media posts and opposition-linked outlets. Analysts caution that China’s opaque political system often fuels speculation, and such reports should be treated carefully until independently confirmed.What we do know is that China’s military command structure is in unprecedented disarray. Whether this represents a foiled coup or an anti-corruption purge, the result is the same: China’s military leadership has been gutted. As Meyer outlines in the episode, since Xi came to power in 2012, he has systematically installed loyalists throughout the PLA’s top ranks. Now, those same appointees have been systematically removed.The Central Military Commission has been left almost entirely vacant, with only Xi and Zhang Shengmin, who heads the anti-corruption committee, remaining. Every uniformed commander appointed to the commission in 2022 has been removed.The purge extends beyond Zhang. Since summer 2023, more than 50 senior officers and defense industry executives have been ousted. In October 2024 alone, nine generals were dismissed, including another vice chairman of the Central Military Commission. The Communist Party expelled He Weidong, the other vice chair of the commission, in October 2024.Meyer notes that PLA Daily published a series of articles in December 2024—one per week—that were highly critical of Xi Jinping. Zhang was urging the civil servant class that opposed Xi to get involved, according to Meyer. The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA — In this podcast interview with Jason James of BNN, taped shortly before Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Beijing trip, I lay out why I expected the visit to deepen long-running elite commercial ties between Chinese Communist Party-aligned networks and Canadian industries — relationships that have shaped Liberal Asia policy for decades. We cover a lot of ground, including heightened tensions over Greenland; Elbridge Colby’s “strategy of denial”; the United States’ race to prepare for potential conflict with China and Russia; and the parallel race to secure critical minerals in the Western Hemisphere—aimed at breaking Beijing’s decades-old effort to dominate rare-earth supply chains essential for munitions and advanced weapons. We discuss how the fast-moving headlines and heated rhetoric of 2026 have convinced many Western citizens that President Trump is the biggest threat to world peace. I understand where those concerns come from, but I don’t believe that is the right interpretation of world events. A better reading, I tell Jason, comes from a 2023 clip in which President Xi Jinping, after meeting President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, is heard saying: “Right now there are changes—the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years—and we are the ones driving these changes together.”The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

VANCOUVER-OTTAWAIn this Bureau Podcast breaking episode, I’m joined by my former colleague Negar Mojtahedi — now a Canadian investigative journalist with Iran International English — to unpack a revolt in Iran that was moving at internet speed abroad until the regime shut down networks last night, making Negar’s on-the-ground sourcing all the more crucial — especially as major broadcasters, from the BBC to the CBC, have appeared reticent to cover this monumental story.We begin where both Negar and I share expertise: exposing the Iranian regime and the organized-crime national security story hiding in plain sight here in North America. Negar’s reporting has found “hundreds, potentially if not thousands” of regime-linked officials and intermediaries living freely in Canada — often not uniformed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps figures, but family-linked networks and financial middlemen who can move money, facilitate influence, and in some cases monitor dissidents.We discuss how this threat extends beyond the Iranian diaspora, reaching into the Jewish community as well — including lethal threats against former Canadian justice minister Irwin Cotler. Later in the episode, I return to the point that even if Western citizens think they don’t care about the Iranian regime’s harms abroad, they should understand the dangers they face at home — including how organized crime networks can traffic fentanyl one day and take Iranian intelligence-linked hit contracts the next.From there, we move into how this uprising began in an unexpected place and metastasized into something larger and more dangerous for the clerical state. We discuss how the first sparks appeared in the bazaar’s electronics and phone sector — a modern pressure point where merchants live and die by currency volatility and market shocks — before widening into a protest movement not anchored to one grievance. We discuss how the breadth of complaints matters as much as the size of street protests — and how what stands out is where the revolt has taken root: smaller and religious cities the regime traditionally counted on, including Mashhad, alongside multi-ethnic participation from Kurds, Baluch, and Azerbaijanis. As Negar frames it, the regime’s legitimacy is eroding across constituencies it once relied on.We also discuss the day-by-day escalation and the accelerants outside Iran’s borders. A major theme, Negar says, is the “Trump factor”: we discuss how President Trump’s warning that if the regime kills its people “we’re locked and we’re loaded” appears to have shifted the psychological environment for protesters, even if the threat so far remains rhetorical. We discuss why that message lands differently given Trump’s history of action — including the killing of Qasem Soleimani, strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, and this week’s stunning special forces extraction of Iranian regime ally President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela — and how Trump’s at-times chaotic, unpredictable approach may be shaping how regime officials calculate risk now, even as he has publicly kept his options open.Against that backdrop, we discuss reports of mounting deaths and mass arrests as the internet goes dark, and why the blackout itself becomes part of the story — cutting off real-time verification, restricting organizing, and enabling harsher repression away from the cameras.On the ground, we discuss whether state coercive power is cracking and what signals analysts watch in a true revolutionary moment. We discuss protests targeting symbols of control, including isolated attacks on Revolutionary Guard assets, reports of some security personnel withdrawing rather than confronting crowds, and — most striking — scenes described as police in smaller towns cheering protesters. We also discuss the regime’s use of outsourced repression, including Iran International reporting that “more than 800 members” of an Iran-backed Iraqi militia have entered Iran, alongside accounts of Arabic being heard on the streets, buses transporting detainees, and people disappearing into prisons without family notification.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA — In this episode, I speak with Canada’s top political columnist Brian Lilley to unpack the fast-moving opening days of 2026 — a week that has redrawn the Western Hemisphere’s security map. We trace how the Trump administration’s dramatic extraction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and the Justice Department’s superseding indictment are part of what I see as a wider strategy to counter hybrid warfare — the fusion of narco-states, cartel finance, terrorism, and authoritarian state influence stretching from Caracas to Beijing and Moscow.Our conversation also takes in this morning’s U.S. military interception of a Russian-flagged oil tanker in the North Atlantic, a vessel linked to Venezuela’s sanctions-evasion “dark fleet.” We then turn to the terrain covered in The Bureau’s Monday report: a deeper dive into the U.S. indictment against Maduro, Cilia Flores, and their military-security inner circle, which alleges a 25-year enterprise trafficking “thousands of tons” of cocaine northward under state protection. Prosecutors describe a system that fuses diplomatic cover, armed colectivos, and National Guard airlifts enriching political and military elites while empowering insurgent groups such as the FARC and ELN. Notably, I tell Brian, the indictment recounts drug shipments routed through Margarita Island involving generals, Maduro’s son, and flights tied to Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA, citing recorded DEA meetings and other evidence.We also discuss striking commentary from senior Canadian Conservative figures. Jason Kenney revealed that, while in cabinet, he was briefed by a foreign intelligence service on a Venezuela–Hezbollah–Iran pipeline using Quds Force logistics to move cocaine through Beirut and finance terror operations, and that he was shown “receipts” linking these flows to Canada-based laundering channels and lax immigration controls.And Senator Leo Housakos argued that Beijing is “leading the way” in a broader bloc in Latin American states — including Russia, Iran, and Turkey — that exploits drug trafficking, migration, and information warfare to undermine Western democracies, calling the environment “a threat we haven’t seen since the Second World War.”I also brief Brian on my breaking TD Bank story: a bank insider admitting to helping Chinese networks launder nearly half a billion U.S. dollars in drug proceeds through New York branches. I argue it reflects a broader laundering model involving Chinese underground-banking cells taking over Latin cartel finance, with Canada functioning as a key command-and-control hub — a pattern I first reported through the British Columbia casino money-laundering surge.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA — For The Bureau’s 2025 Holiday Special, I sat down once again with Jason James for a long-form, two-hour conversation—our second holiday edition—to answer his questions about the elite networks surrounding Prime Minister Mark Carney and the China connections that have quietly defined his ascent.Perhaps presciently, during the federal election campaign The Bureau published a network-mapping model outlining the key figures orbiting Carney, including Dominic Barton, Jin Liqun, Mark Wiseman, and Evan Solomon. Months later, that exercise looks well founded. Wiseman has now been appointed Carney’s ambassador to the United States—a critical position as Canada tries to steer a course between the world’s two rival superpowers. And Solomon, the former CBC host once caught up in an art-dealing scandal involving Carney, is now Minister of Artificial Intelligence—another portfolio that sits squarely between U.S. and Chinese competition over advanced technology, critical minerals, and energy security.In the episode, I tell Jason that the pattern isn’t coincidental. It reflects the same constellation of influence The Bureau mapped before Carney ever took office: long-standing relationships of trust shaped through finance, global governance, and shared ambition—often paired with a marked propensity to favour deeper trade and engagement with Beijing, an authoritarian regime built on the subjugation of hundreds of millions of Chinese nationals. That context is central to how I assess Carney’s rise, including analysis I have previously provided in testimony at a Parliamentary ethics hearing.A review of corporate records showed that Brookfield—the influential Canadian investment fund from which Carney stepped away to replace Justin Trudeau as Canada’s leader—maintains many billions in politically sensitive investments with Chinese state-linked real estate and energy companies, alongside a substantial offshore banking presence. One major venture included a $750 million entry into high-end Shanghai commercial property in 2013 with a Hong Kong tycoon affiliated with the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference—an entity U.S. intelligence and national-security analysts have described as central to Beijing’s united front ecosystem.As that market later deteriorated—vacancies rising in Shanghai and credit conditions tightening—Brookfield secured hundreds of millions of dollars in loans from the Bank of China to refinance its Shanghai commercial holdings. The Bureau’s reporting has also noted the broader continuity: a decade earlier, Carney, as Governor of the Bank of England, publicly advanced policies designed to expand China’s financial footprint, including support for renminbi clearing in London. In a 2013 speech, UK at the Heart of Renewed Globalisation, Carney said: “The Bank of England [has] signed an agreement with the People’s Bank of China … Helping the internationalisation of the Renminbi is a global good.”In this episode, Jason adds a finding about Mark Carney’s promotion of Beijing’s Belt and Road plan—another massive boost, I argue, to President Xi Jinping’s global ambitions.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

TORONTO — In this breaking news episode for The Bureau, I speak with political columnist Brian Lilley about the diaspora pressure networks now surfacing around Michael Ma, the Conservative MP who crossed the floor last week and left Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals one seat short of a majority. Brian says his sourcing points to a straightforward explanation. Tim Hodgson, the minister of energy and the MP for Markham–Thornhill, played a key role in persuading Ma to switch sides, drawing on the pair’s business-network affinities.I tell Brian that is likely true — but it may not be the only dynamic at work. Diaspora pressure groups that have repeatedly aligned themselves with Beijing’s interests and intervened in Conservative Party politics could be operating in parallel. In both scenarios, actors advocating expanded trade with Beijing could be a shared underlying motivation.A second layer concerns the pro-Beijing ecosystem embedded in Hodgson’s riding. The Liberal executive head in Hodgson’s riding, a senior Liberal organizer and former leader of the Jiangsu Commerce Council of Canada, has already come under scrutiny after Prime Minister Mark Carney falsely denied meeting the group during his January leadership campaign. The episode is one of many concrete data points emerging from a years-long Bureau investigation into the Jiangsu council’s structure and leadership, documenting direct ties to Beijing’s United Front Work Department, and significant overlap between this pro-Beijing business network and Liberal Party organizing.Against that wider backdrop, I walk Brian through the core findings of my new reporting on Ma. Chinese-language records reviewed by The Bureau show he was part of the Chinese Canadian Conservative Association, a controversial diaspora organization that urged Erin O’Toole to resign after the 2021 election over what it called his “anti-China” stance, later urged Chinese Canadians to “vote carefully” ahead of the 2025 election, and resurfaced after the vote to call for Pierre Poilievre to step down.None of this is proof of wrongdoing by Ma, I tell Brian. But taken together, it suggests he should answer questions about the pro-Beijing supporters who endorsed his Conservative campaign this year.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA — In this investigative conversation, sinologist Chris Meyer and I start with Chinese threats against Japan’s new prime minister, Sanae Takaichi—and advance the argument that Beijing’s “diplomacy” is increasingly inseparable from criminal subversion operations worldwide, and should be treated as such.The trigger is simple. Newly elected Takaichi reiterates a strategic reality Japan has been forced to confront for years. An attack on Taiwan would represent a grave threat to Japan. Chris, who writes for Wide Fountain, notes this was not some wild new doctrine, but a restatement of what former prime minister Shinzo Abe had already made public. The response from Beijing, however, does not resemble conventional state-to-state disagreement. Chris describes how China’s consul general in Osaka replied with language that reads like a street-level threat—saying that if Takaichi “sticks her dirty neck out,” it will have to be “sliced off.”What follows matters even more than the threat itself. Chris explains how Beijing then moved to the United Nations with a concerted effort to discredit Japan’s prime minister and pressure her to retract her comment—an example of how international institutions can be leveraged as tools of coercion and narrative warfare. I frame it as gaslighting: the familiar move in which Beijing provokes, threatens, and escalates, then turns around and casts the democratic target as the aggressor.Chris offers a theory for why the intimidation is so brazen. He says there is constant chatter in Beijing that Xi Jinping has been losing leverage internally—over military networks and provincial factions—while his external apparatus, especially diplomatic channels, may be less disturbed. In that scenario, Chris argues, foreign intimidation becomes one of the few levers still available. Louder, uglier, and more reckless precisely because it is meant to compensate for weakness elsewhere.From Japan we widen to the United Nations not as an abstract symbol, but as a venue where Chris and I argue the line between “diplomacy” and “criminal enterprise” has been blurred before—and where Beijing nonetheless demands to be treated as an arbiter of international law. Chris references the cases of Ng Lap Seng and Patrick Ho as part of the backdrop—figures he describes as operating around the UN ecosystem while pursuing corrupt influence projects. His core point is that China cannot plausibly posture as the guardian of international legal order while, in the same era, actors linked to Beijing were accused of bribery and covert influence schemes tied to Belt and Road ambitions.From there, the conversation becomes less about one diplomatic incident and more about a recurring operating system: intelligence-linked influence, organized-crime logistics, and the laundering of legitimacy through formal titles and institutions. The most sprawling and contemporary case we examine is Cambodia’s Prince Group. Chris describes it as an industrial-scale scam ecosystem — a network of “prison factories” where coerced workers are forced to run global fraud operations under threat of violence, their passports confiscated to prevent escape.What distinguishes Prince Group, Chris argues, is that it appears to function not merely as a criminal enterprise but as a Chinese intelligence-directed operation designed to destabilize Western nations — and it is far from the only one of its kind operating across Southeast Asia. We also note that U.S. Treasury sanctions and recent indictments highlight that players linked to Prince Group, including a United Front figure named Rose Wang and sanctioned “Hongmen” Triad boss Broken Tooth Koi, perform diplomatic functions for Beijing.Near the end, we return to North America with a detail that we both treat as chilling. I reference CBC/Radio-Canada reporting about a Chinese operative known as Eric—someone whose phone records reportedly suggested lethal targeting of dissidents, including a Vancouver-based Chinese dissident who later died in a suspicious kayaking incident.All of that sets up the ending. Canada’s leadership has spoken about re-engaging China as a strategic partner. After what we have just mapped—threat diplomacy against Japan, coercive lawfare at the UN, criminal-corporate influence systems in Southeast Asia, triad-linked “patriotic” networks, and North American beachheads that, in my view, were never checked—what does “strategic partner” even mean? Chris’s answer is unambiguous. In his assessment, there is no reset available with Xi Jinping’s system in place.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA — In this episode of The Bureau Podcast, I chat with Canadian author, historian and former national security analyst Dennis Molinaro to unpack Under Assault: Interference and Espionage in China’s Secret War Against Canada — the book The Bureau has reviewed in three pieces, and which covers a vast array of cases revealing how Beijing has shaped Canada’s trajectory for more than half a century.One of the central themes of the conversation is Molinaro’s insistence that you cannot understand the evolution of Canada–China relations by looking only at diplomatic files or security reports.“We can’t just detach security from diplomacy and from relations,” he says. “So I wanted to try to tell that complete story as best I could.”That fuller picture includes a re-assessment of Pierre Trudeau and the 1970 recognition of the People’s Republic of China. Molinaro is careful with his evidence, but blunt about the pattern it reveals. On the recognition decision, he tells me: “I would say that the recognition of China, I’m comfortable in saying that likely looks like it was a foreign interference operation by the PRC … because of Paul Lin.”Molinaro walks listeners through the previously obscure figure of Paul Lin, an academic who moved between the West Coast, the United States, China and finally McGill University. Newly released RCMP and allied intelligence files show Lin under heavy surveillance and flagged as a likely Chinese Communist Party influence operator. In Molinaro’s words, the Mounties “flat out say that this is part of his task of being an agent of influence is to get China recognized.”At the same time, Beijing’s internal language about Canada’s leaders was far from neutral. Drawing on the testimony of defector Chen Yonglin, Molinaro explains how Chinese internal documents categorized Pierre Trudeau, Jean Chrétien and Henry Kissinger as “old friends” of the regime. As he tells me: “Old friends… it’s this category of an individual that is very close to the PRC in supporting the CCP… the CCP views them as a close ally, in a sense… even generations later, which is quite a substantial thing, I would say.”I push the conversation further, asking whether Molinaro’s work is forcing a broader re-evaluation of Pierre Trudeau’s ideological legacy and the way Canada’s elites still “see” China. Molinaro argues that the Hogue Commission hearings themselves became an example of how much Canada’s political class has preferred a comforting story over a harder look at Chinese Communist Party power.The discussion then turns to the Canada–China Business Council, Power Corporation and the Desmarais network of political relationships. I note my own reporting on how Power Corp, the Desmarais family and Jean Chrétien have been intertwined with senior Chinese state–investment bodies. Molinaro adds a deeper origin story, explaining that Paul Lin helped midwife the business council itself and then became a gatekeeper to “curated” deals inside China.For Molinaro, the problem is not legitimate business in 2025, but the origins and intent: “The problem becomes Paul Lin… his central interests were the CCP… it brings into all kinds of questions… mainly, if the government’s getting briefed on this guy… what was done about this?”Winnipeg, Wuhan and the lab-leak debateMidway through the episode, Molinaro and I shift to the Winnipeg Level 4 lab and the contested origins of COVID-19 — a chapter Molinaro says “was all about… Canada being this place where the PRC is just actively somehow operating … as it will.”We walk through the now-public documents on Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, Thousand Talents applications, the transfer of Ebola and other high-consequence pathogens to Wuhan, and the proposed “bat filovirus” gain-of-function project linking Winnipeg and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Molinaro is explicit that the lab-leak hypothesis is not fringe: “I see this as probably more likely than having a virus that emerges so fast, basically overnight, that can infect humans on scale, just on a mass scale.”‘Canada is overrun’: how Washington now sees its northern allyIn the final third of the conversation, Molinaro reveals what senior United States officials told him when he asked how they now view Canada’s China file. One line that stuck with me: “I don’t want to say joke,” one official told him, “but the saying you get a lot of times here is, look to Canada if you want to see what could happen here.”Another was even starker: “Canada is overrun.” Molinaro interprets that as a quiet warning about intelligence sharing: “What they were trying to essentially say as nice as possible was we’re going to have to start thinking about how we share intelligence with you if you don’t clean up your PRC problem.”The episode closes with prescriptions. Molinaro says Canada must finally pass and use a meaningful foreign-agent registry. It needs RICO-style anti-racketeering laws: “You need a structure of laws that will target the people who are running these organizations

In today’s Bureau Podcast, I reconnect with my former journalism colleague Jesse Ferreras. We both came of age as reporters in Vancouver and worked together at Global News, including on an investigation into some of the most significant figures in what became known as the Vancouver Model. We don’t walk through those cases in detail on the tape, but I’ve long believed some of the people we examined could and should be the focus of deportation orders from Canada — if Ottawa’s border and security agencies fully exercised their mandates. Quietly resolving those long-ignored files would, in my view, go a long way toward rebuilding trust with Washington, where officials remain deeply concerned about certain actors embedded in Vancouver’s financial and real-estate systems.Our conversation turns on two main threads. First, we explore Jesse’s new work of fiction — a gothic horror story set in Vancouver real estate, a kind of clash-of-civilizations tale rooted in the city’s housing market. Second, we talk about how both of us, as reporters, leaned heavily on the data and analysis of B.C. urban planner Andy Yan to understand how foreign capital has dominated and distorted Vancouver’s housing market. Yan’s work on glaring income-to-home-price “incongruities” helped me see that what I once called the Vancouver Model had grown into something much larger: the “Canada Model.”The podcast goes deeper into Jesse’s story. Here in the notes, I want to unpack a bit more of Andy Yan’s seminal research, and how it intersected with confidential datasets and banking disclosures I later obtained. Two years after my 2023 investigation, the U.S. Treasury has now identified the same global Chinese underground money-laundering typologies I reported on, in a major dataset that tracks roughly $300 billion in Chinese money laundering for Mexican narco-cartels over the past four years—including more than $50 billion tied to real-estate laundering.Yan’s earlier Vancouver mortgage work supported my deep dive in Toronto, showing that the same suspicious Chinese real-estate mortgage patterns he identified in Vancouver had also become deeply embedded in eastern Canada, inside Canada’s largest banks, with virtually no enforcement response. My reporting also drew on FINTRAC’s release of a sweeping analysis of 48,000 transactions involving members of the Chinese diaspora. That study revealed massive wire transfers from Hong Kong and Mainland China moving through “money mule” accounts held by students, homemakers, and shell companies—including law firms. In a nutshell, FINTRAC found that during the pandemic, massive money laundering through Vancouver-area government casinos evolved into Canadian bank accounts, law office accounts, real-estate developer accounts, and more complex electronic transaction paths. For me, the findings showed that FINTRAC, a division of Canada’s Ministry of Finance, had complete visibility into how Canada’s banking system was being exploited at scale by Chinese transnational crime networks. At the same time, this raised serious alarms about Canada’s banking oversight, because FINTRAC’s data led to no Canadian police prosecutions and only a few minimal fines in the range of millions against several banks, including TD Canada. FINTRAC’s patterns overlapped neatly with the U.S. Justice Department’s US$3-billion TD Bank case, where international students from China and Beijing-linked United Front networks played central roles in laundering drug proceeds, according to former U.S. investigator David Asher.At the heart of my exclusive story on mortgage fraud was reporting sourced from an HSBC Canada whistleblower, who uncovered dubious Toronto-area mortgages propped up by fabricated, high “remote-work” salaries from China. The types of mortgages the whistleblower discovered—fake job titles, faked massive incomes, failed banking due diligence—in my analysis, explained the patterns behind the data that Andy Yan first uncovered in Vancouver, that FINTRAC examined in 2023, and that the U.S. Treasury flagged again in 2025.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA — In this conversation with Canada’s highest-profile political columnist, Brian Lilley, I dive into how I first uncovered the improbable rise of Ryan Wedding — and how he turned Canada into a conduit for the world’s most powerful and dangerous Mexican cartels, working alongside state-adjacent actors from Iran, China, and beyond.Brian, a veteran Toronto Sun reporter, will also be sharing this videocast on his rapidly growing Substack. I recently highlighted his deep reporting on Mark Carney’s gambit for a majority through Conservative floor-crosser recruitment in a Bureau op-ed, so you may see some interesting conversations between us in the future too.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA — In a recent episode of The Shawn Ryan Show, former Navy intelligence specialist Chase Hughes laid out what a psychological operation really is — and how to recognize one. He describes a psyop as a narrative-driven effort to control perception in order to shape behaviour, with the ultimate goal being identity change: getting a population to see themselves as a certain kind of person (“people like us believe X, support Y, reject Z”) and then act accordingly. His FATE model — Focus, Authority, Tribe, Emotion — shows how attention-grabbing stories, trusted voices, tribal identity and fear-driven messaging can be woven together into a sustained campaign.In this conversation with Jason James, I explain why I’ve come to believe that Canada’s last federal election carries many of the hallmarks of a successful political psyop. Mark Carney’s Liberals didn’t just win on policy; they won by persuading a critical mass of older voters that Donald Trump was determined to turn Canada into the “51st state.” That storyline — Canada as a besieged, decent nation in need of Liberal protection from an unhinged America — operated as an identity script, inviting voters to decide what “people like us” do at the ballot box.If you want visible evidence of behaviour change, look at the “Elbows Up” slogan — a deliberate nod to old-time Canadian hockey players like Gordie Howe, meant to trigger memories of hard-fought victories in Canada’s national game among an aging voter base. We saw Canadian actor Mike Myers seated rinkside with Mark Carney in hockey jerseys, talking through these themes, then later throwing his elbow in the air during a Saturday Night Live cast gathering. After that bombardment of imagery and messaging through the campaign, rallies ended with crowds literally jutting their elbows into the air in awkward, almost chicken-like poses — physically acting out the identity they were being sold.As I tell Jason, we also know from government election-threat disclosures that Chinese propaganda was pushing a parallel line, promoting Carney as the preferred champion to stand up to Trump. And I worry that this campaign hasn’t ended. Carney is now trying to convince Conservative MPs to “cross the floor” so he can secure a majority without going back to voters. I argue that would be dangerous, especially as his government promises deeper ties with Beijing as a “strategic partner” — at the very moment the United States and Japan are drawing closer militarily and politically in response to China’s growing threats against Taiwan.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

In this episode, Charles Burton recounts his 2018 detention by China’s secret police — an ordeal that included hours of interrogation by MSS officers and a covert escape from Shanghai aided by friends who feared for his safety. One of his interrogators, Burton later discovered, resurfaced in Taiwan working with Buddhist groups tied to Beijing’s United Front network — a revelation that adds new weight to The Bureau’s reporting on transnational influence operations.Burton also delves into newly surfaced RCMP intelligence from historian Dennis Molinaro’s book Under Assault, confirming that UBC academic Paul Lin — described in those files as an alleged senior Chinese agent — “certainly influenced Pierre Trudeau.” Drawing from his own diplomatic experience in Beijing, Burton provides rare context on how Lin’s access to Zhou Enlai and Trudeau shaped Canada’s early China policy, setting patterns of engagement and elite capture that persist to this day.The conversation spans Burton’s personal confrontation with Chinese intelligence, his critique of Ottawa’s complacency in his new book The Beaver and the Dragon, and his warning that the same influence machinery that once shaped Trudeau’s worldview continues to operate across Canada’s political and cultural institutions.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA — In this episode, I join Jason James of BNN to unpack The Bureau’s latest findings on the Westminster espionage scandal that has sent shockwaves through British politics — and to draw the lines connecting that case to Canada’s own national-security crisis.In the case, President Xi Jinping’s powerful ally and reported spymaster, Cai Qi, is alleged to have overseen a covert Ministry of State Security operation inside the U.K. Parliament. According to British parliamentary records and corroborating media leaks, Cai’s network cultivated a young British teacher while he was living in China, recruiting him through a front company run by the MSS. The recruit allegedly secured access to Westminster through another young Brit — a researcher and adviser who was reportedly tasked with gathering real-time intelligence on Conservative MPs critical of Beijing’s human-rights abuses in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Taiwan.The explosive Cash and Berry prosecution was pursued under Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government, but was later quietly abandoned by Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government. Documents and sources cited in London suggest that senior political advisers close to Starmer, including a former banker known for pro-China trade advocacy, may have influenced the decision to collapse the case — raising profound questions about ethical interference in Britain’s judicial process.I argue that this transnational case is not just a scandal but a systemic warning: the same dynamic of political suppression, elite capture, and economic dependency that has compromised the United Kingdom’s response to CCP influence has already unfolded in Ottawa. As I said in my testimony in Parliament earlier this week, similar patterns that troubled Justin Trudeau’s government on Chinese election interference could persist under Mark Carney’s leadership. And in the case of Starmer, the powerful U.S. House Select Committee on the CCP has directly lodged concerns with the British Ambassador, questioning whether the Cash and Berry case was cancelled due to pressure from China or trade and development considerations between Beijing and London.We also discuss The Bureau’s reporting from Vancouver and Toronto, where Chinese and Mexican cartel networks have built a global hub for synthetic-opioid production and shipment. These networks, operating through Canadian ports and logistics channels, are now targeting Australia and New Zealand, demonstrating how the same state-linked criminal and intelligence systems driving espionage in Westminster are simultaneously fueling a deadly global trade in fentanyl and methamphetamine.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA/AUSTIN — In today’s episode of The Bureau Podcast, former U.S. Border Patrol agent Ammon Blair traces his path from military service to the front lines of America’s border—and explains why he believes Mexican cartels now function as a parallel power with expanding operations in Canada and in more than 60 countries worldwide.Blair says U.S. military sources have for years classified cartels as hybrid-war operators threatening American citizens, but only recently has Washington begun to respond to the threat as such—one he argues is greater than ISIS and, in little-understood ways, connected to Hamas and Hezbollah.The hybrid-warfare model he describes blends violence, intimidation, and corruption with corporate-style supply chains and control of legal economies, allowing these networks to move people, drugs, and money with industrial efficiency.“Their influence,” he says, “extends into sectors most citizens never associate with organized crime—agriculture, telecommunications, and financial services.” Blair adds that alliances with Chinese nationals—from precursor chemicals to laundering and human-smuggling pipelines—have tightened the system and complicated investigations on both sides of the border.The discussion then turns north. Blair warns that similar dynamics are visible in Canada—perhaps at an earlier stage of infiltration—where permissive legal gaps, vast terrain, and strategic infrastructure can be exploited for cross-border trafficking. In his view, the cartels’ footprint and financial power demand a national-security response in both countries, not a narrow criminal-justice lens.Three lines capture the scale of the problem as Blair sees it: “They control every facet of society.” “They are a non-government government.” And: “They make more than nation-states.”For policymakers, the takeaway is clear: if cartels operate like insurgent conglomerates, the response must be integrated—intelligence-led policing, financial targeting, cross-border enforcement, legal coordination—and, where necessary, integration—between the United States and Canada on special cases involving Mexican, Chinese, and Middle Eastern hybrid-warfare networks, and the political will to close the gaps that criminal organizations have mastered. Recognizing the cartels as an evolving strategic threat, Blair argues, is the first step toward containing their reach.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA — In this episode, I sit down again with BNN’s Jason James to unpack one of the most powerful and underexamined networks shaping Canadian policy: the enduring influence of McKinsey & Company and Dominic Barton — former global managing director of McKinsey, former Canadian ambassador to China, and architect of the Canada Infrastructure Bank (CIB).Through meticulous reporting and newly obtained government documents, I trace how Barton’s deep connections to McKinsey form part of the mysterious backstory surrounding the CIB’s $1-billion loan to BC Ferries — a deal to purchase four vessels from a Chinese shipbuilder tied to the People’s Liberation Army’s military-civil fusion system.I explain how Barton’s long history with Chinese state-owned enterprises, through McKinsey contracts, and his advisory role with senior Liberal officials beginning with Justin Trudeau, have effectively continued to shape Ottawa’s decision-making through both formal and informal networks — long after Barton’s formal exit from the Liberal government.Jason poses the central question: is this the face of an unelected shadow government behind the more theatrical government of Justin Trudeau — a leader whom multiple former Liberal cabinet ministers, most recently Catherine McKenna, have described as almost entirely uninterested in substantive policy and preoccupied instead with appearances and tokenism in governance?Jason asks: if that’s true, wouldn’t figures like Barton — and, Mark Carney, both acknowledged advisers to Trudeau — be closer to the true centers of power, a kind of “deep state” operating within Canada’s economic and foreign-policy apparatus?That’s a loaded concept and term, no doubt. My answer draws directly from evidence — parliamentary testimony, freedom-of-information records, and the BC Ferries loan saga — to respond to Jason’s questions and let listeners make up their own minds about Barton, McKinsey, the CIB, and Carney.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA — In this episode, Sikyong Penpa Tsering, President of the Central Tibetan Administration, joins me for a conversation on Tibet’s global significance.We explore Tibet’s geographical and geopolitical importance as the “water tower of Asia,” where rivers from the Tibetan Plateau sustain nearly two billion people across the region. Tsering explains why Tibet is central to Beijing’s ambitions — and why its fate matters for the international order.The discussion also turns to China’s campaign of transnational repression: from pressuring diaspora communities and intimidating student leaders abroad — including a notorious case at the University of Toronto, where Chinese students were reportedly tasked by the Toronto consulate to flood a Tibetan-Canadian student leader with hostile messages and death threats — to leveraging influence networks and corruption to sway foreign politicians. Tsering details how these tactics, first tested in Australia and New Zealand, have since spread across Europe and North America.Finally, Tsering underscores that Tibet is not only about Tibet: the world must defend Tibetan freedom if it hopes to defend its own. He warns that Beijing’s ultimate objective is to export its authoritarian system globally — a project already underway through United Front operations.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

This week on The Bureau Podcast, I speak with Jason James of BNN about Canada’s almost completely unknown crisis: major transnational drug-trafficking and money-laundering networks that either go uninvestigated or collapse before trial. From E-Pirate to E-Nationalize, Sindicato, Project Brisa, Project Cobra, Project Endgame, and a Quebec fentanyl super-lab network—every one of these high-stakes cases failed to reach conviction, some never prosecuted at all. The fallout from the Falkland super-lab case is still reverberating in President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canada. The collapse of prosecutions in Canadian courts—and the failures of law enforcement and lawyers and legislatures behind them—have left U.S. enforcement partners deeply frustrated with their Canadian counterparts.We examine the roadblocks: Stinchcombe’s sweeping disclosure burdens, Jordan’s strict ceilings on trial delays, and a political reluctance in Ottawa to take on globally networked cartels and their financial enablers. With evidence bottlenecks, under-resourced prosecutors, and defense lawyers weaponizing procedure, the system virtually guarantees collapse for intelligence-driven cases. What would it take—legislative reform, resourcing, specialized courts? My answer: all of the above. But nothing will change until Canadians demand action, and political leaders in Ottawa finally muster the will.The gangs involved in these cases—Mexican cartels, Chinese state-linked Triads, Italian mafias, Middle Eastern state- and terror-linked groups, transnational Indian networks, along with metastasizing home-grown facilitators such as former Canadian Olympian Ryan Wedding’s operation, which worked with all of these foreign-backed threats—have only grown stronger and more deeply embedded because of Canada’s political and legal failures, Canadian policing sources insist.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

TORONTO — This week on The Bureau Podcast, we speak with Toronto lawyer and independent journalist Caryma Sa’d about her explosive claims that Discord — the same chat platform now under FBI scrutiny after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk — is also being used inside Canada by Antifa-aligned networks to coordinate harassment campaigns and share dossiers on political targets.Sa’d describes Discord as a central hub, where tiered servers give vetted insiders access to “dox-style” files that go far beyond what is publicly available. She argues some of this information must come from people in positions of trust — teachers, union members, bureaucrats, even political staffers — who are feeding sensitive details into activist networks.She also connects these practices to the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, a federally funded NGO that she says has “assisted Antifa” and shaped government focus in a way that overlooks the risks of left-wing extremism. Public records confirm CAHN has received more than $900,000 from Ottawa since 2020. Sa’d contends this money is effectively underwriting political targeting in Canada.In our full conversation, she goes further. Sa’d speaks about:* Her own targeting: how she was profiled after declining to work with CAHN, and how swarming campaigns have tried to undermine her legal practice.* Police reluctance: her frustration that even when harassment is “verifiable and documented,” law enforcement often shrugs off complaints as political disputes.* The protest ecosystem: how Antifa-aligned cells blend with movements for Indigenous rights, migrant rights, trans rights, encampment occupations, and pro-Palestine rallies — creating what she calls a “solidarity banner” that can rapidly pivot narratives.* Amplification abroad: her concern that hostile states seize on Canadian protest footage, using it in information operations that echo broader foreign interference campaigns.“The Canadian Anti-Hate Network. I think this is the most obvious and in my view, shocking example. It is an NGO that purports to document and fight against specifically far right hate. And in having such a narrow focus, they're obviously ignoring everything else that happens. And, you know, they would probably say that it's not equivalent. The real dangers, the real threats, the real risk of violence, comes from the right, not from the left. And I think that that has created almost a vacuum of focus and interest that has allowed the far left to metastasize in the way that it conducts itself. The Anti-Hate network has been found by an Ontario court to have assisted the Antifa movement, which that same court decision recognizes has been violent. Anti-Hate in practice takes public money to put targets on private citizens and its base then gets riled up to act on the articles that they put out, whether that's mobilizing to try and cancel events, mobilizing to try to get people fired, so on and so forth. But it is sort of a smear factory, especially, and I say this because I've been the target of one of those hit pieces.” — Caryma Sa’dThe Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

Today on The Bureau Podcast: unpacking my reporting on an explosive Justice Department watchdog report that confirmed the worst kind of national security malpractice. A senior FBI counterintelligence official leaked case-critical information from the agency’s multi-year probe into CEFC China — the energy conglomerate that bribed United Nations officials while simultaneously attempting to draw the Biden family into a $100-million natural gas project in Louisiana, through a web of companies tied directly to a close associate of President Xi Jinping.On this episode I speak with Chris Meyer of Widefountain. Chris has spent years tracing CEFC’s global influence network — the money flows, the murky intermediaries — and he frames the new inspector-general findings as the latest revelation in a Chinese military intelligence operation that Chris calls a “shadowplay”: a deliberate, many-armed campaign that mixes kompromat and targeted interference aimed at dividing and distracting the U.S. government. The brilliance of China’s successful campaign — which succeeded in appropriating U.S. military technology — involves fracturing political institutions and inserting spies into those divisions to make the plunder of sensitive information easier, Chris argues.We’ll connect senior FBI agent Charles McGonigal’s leaks to the larger criminal tapestry. The CEFC probe in New York and at the United Nations touched figures charged in the Southern District — Patrick Ho and other CEFC executives — and it intersected with allegations of arms brokering, sanctions evasion, and influence peddling that prosecutors later tied to an accused operator now indicted as Gal Luft, the so-called “Target 3” in related filings. Chris ultimately links the CEFC case — in which James Biden was implicated in efforts to determine whether Patrick Ho, central to the CEFC influence play targeting the Bidens, would be arrested if he returned to the United States — to the earlier “Chinagate” scandal, which targeted the Clinton White House, and the GOP’s election fundraising networks during Newt Gingrich’s comeback era.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

VANCOUVER — In today’s Bureau podcast, Sam Cooper joins Jason James of BNN to probe the causes of RCMP non-cooperation before a U.S. Treasury sanction forced Canada’s police to investigate the Falkland superlab. The massive site in British Columbia contained enough precursor chemicals to manufacture 95 million lethal doses of fentanyl, exposing Canada’s deep links to Chinese and Mexican cartel networks.Sam traces how the case connects to decades of failures in Ottawa: RCMP resistance to joint investigations and U.S. intelligence sharing; entrenched cartel financiers from China working with Mexican lab operators and distributors; Iran-linked laundering and trafficking and terror-financing actors; and Indian crime groups dominating Canada’s transportation infrastructure.The discussion turns to the Cameron Ortis scandal, where the former RCMP intelligence chief was convicted of selling Five Eyes secrets to some of the very Vancouver-based Sinaloa Cartel and Iranian threat networks tied to the Falkland case. For Washington, the broader concern goes beyond legal loopholes — it points to possible corruption or high-level cover for foreign threat actors operating inside Canada.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA—LOS ANGELESIn today’s Bureau podcast, Sam Cooper and Chris Meyer of Widefountain dig into the dramatic escape of Zhi Dong Zhang — code-named “Chino” — from house arrest in Mexico City just as U.S. courts unsealed a 30-page detention memo. Born in Beijing in 1987, Zhang is alleged to have commanded both Chinese and Mexican wings of cartel operations, controlling 150 companies and 170 bank accounts, training operatives on U.S. soil, and bridging fentanyl precursor supply for both Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels.Sam and Chris compare Zhang’s role to Chi Lop Tse, the Toronto-based architect of Sam Gor, and Zhenli Ye Gon, the Mexico City meth baron with $207 million seized from his mansion. The discussion highlights how CCP-linked actors shaped these figures by controlling precursors, finance, and cartel connectivity — and how U.S. intelligence now openly states Beijing subsidizes fentanyl production abroad.The episode closes with reflections on Xi Jinping’s tightening but fragile grip on power. Chris details the reformist challenge inside the Party, the seaside conclave without a clear successor, and the unforgettable scene of Hu Jintao being escorted out of a Party Congress meeting. Together, Sam and Chris suggest Xi’s dominance is showing cracks, even as CCP influence over transnational crime continues to expand.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

In this episode of The Bureau Podcast, investigative journalist Sam Cooper sits down with Chris Meyer of WideFountain to trace the stunning global patterns of cartel, Triad, and Chinese Communist Party–linked networks penetrating legitimate trade structures to launder narcotics proceeds and move fentanyl and meth invisibly around the world.Together, they examine how cartels and Chinese Triads exploit commodities, corporate shells, and international trade routes—controlling entire sectors like oil, seafood, and luxury goods—as part of a new hybrid criminal statecraft that links Mexico, Canada, China, and beyond.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Key Themes in This Episode* Cartel Oil Corruption in MexicoWe break down a new U.S. indictment from Houston, charging Mexican nationals with bribing officials at Pemex. Documents suggest the scheme is one piece of a vast conspiracy in which cartels steal and smuggle crude oil across the U.S. border, refine it, and sell it globally—while laundering fentanyl and meth profits through the same pipelines of trade.* Casino Intel: Triads & Cartels in VancouverA classified Canadian source revealed explosive evidence seized from an underground Richmond mansion casino, where a Triad operative’s phone exposed over a thousand messages with Mexican cartel counterparts. Beyond drug logistics, the communications showed how these groups use commodities—everything from avocados and limes to geoduck clams and lobsters—to wash dirty money through trade-based laundering.* Historic Parallels: The Lai Changxing Smuggling EmpireCooper and Meyer revisit the case that first brought them together—Lai Changxing’s notorious Xiamen-based smuggling syndicate. At its core, Meyer argues, Lai’s contraband empire was not just about oil, narcotics, and luxury goods, but a covert PRC military intelligence operation. The parallels to today’s cartel-Triad partnerships are striking.Why It Matters* Trade-based money laundering (TBML) has become the central node where narcotics, corruption, and geopolitics converge.* The same methods that once fueled Lai Changxing’s empire now enable Mexican cartels and Triads to move fentanyl proceeds at scale, under the radar of Western regulators.* With governments often paralyzed or complicit, these networks function as a “shadow state” embedded in legitimate economies—from Vancouver real estate and casinos, to Mexican energy, to global shipping routes.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

In this sweeping conversation with Jason James of BNN, I discuss some of The Bureau’s biggest investigations of the summer — including the widening pattern of prosecutorial failures in major synthetic narcotics and money laundering cases in British Columbia. We spotlight the recent collapse of charges against a Chinese-state linked scientist accused of importing over 100 kilograms of precursors for MDMA production.I connect the networks involved to entities previously entangled in the RCMP’s infamous E-Pirate probe, then broaden the lens to examine organized crime's penetration of British Columbia institutions — including the province’s auto insurer.We also dig into the geopolitical and financial stakes behind Premier David Eby and BC Ferries’ controversial $1-billion deal to build vessels in China with a military-linked state shipyard — a project reportedly financed through a federal development bank overseen by Canada’s new Housing Minister, Gregor Robertson. As Vancouver’s former mayor, Robertson and his council were previously embroiled in questions surrounding Chinese political influence and real estate investment in British Columbia. The question of foreign investment in Canadian cities has returned to the forefront in Victoria and Ottawa.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA — A prominent former Canadian Special Forces operator who continues to train law enforcement says his former unit, Joint Task Force 2 (JTF2), should be granted the authorities and mandate to target fentanyl superlabs and dismantle the transnational narco-terror networks now embedding across Canada — from Chinese Communist Party proxies to cartel cells crossing the southern B.C. border with grenades and Mexican passports.“This is our problem. It’s on our soil,” former JTF2 member Randy Turner says in an exchange with investigative reporter Sam Cooper of The Bureau. “And our kids are the ones that are going to feel the wrath of it. So we need to do something about it — and do something about it right now.”This unique back-and-forth interview — with Turner questioning Cooper on his expertise and prescription for better national security outcomes in North America, and Cooper in turn questioning Turner — has also been posted to Turner’s Direct Action podcast.Midway through the conversation, Cooper puts the national security question bluntly: now that Ottawa has followed the Trump administration’s lead and designated Mexican cartels operating on Canadian soil as terror entities, should JTF2 be granted clearance and authority to target transnational narco-terror threats inside Canada?Framing the discussion, Cooper notes that — just as U.S. national security officials like Kash Patel have said — it is cartel syndicates working with Chinese Communist Party and Iranian threat networks, particularly in cities like Vancouver, that encapsulate the deadly scourge of fentanyl killing tens of thousands of young North Americans every year.He presses the point: should the cartels and Chinese networks now operating in Canada be considered executable targets for JTF2, which is mandated to counter terror threats on Canadian soil?Cooper points to evidence in court records — including arrests of cartel operatives at a house in Surrey, British Columbia, where police seized grenades, dozens of Mexican passports, and heavy weaponry consistent with open warfare.Turner’s answer is unequivocal. “We have forces and people and professionals and talented individuals that have a solution to these problems. Let them do their work.”“There’s pieces and parts to ensure successful missions like this go off — but it would start with policy change,” he explained. “And it would start with having a legitimate conversation about: what action steps are we going to put into place right now? What can we change? And why have we not yet? There are some things that could have been put in place years ago.”“I think part of that is the public conversation,” Cooper responded. “First, knowing we have the capabilities. Second, admitting we have the problem.Yeah — our borders have been weak.Yeah — we do have fentanyl superlabs.Yeah — Vancouver and Toronto are laundering trillions — over a trillion dollars, my research shows — from these networks.“And it’s impacting every part of your life, and your children’s lives to come. Can they compete for a home?”Throughout the conversation, which traces both of their professional paths, Cooper explains why he sought out Turner for personal defense training. It followed a judicially authorized RCMP warning in July 2023: Cooper had been identified as a target of transnational repression due to his reporting on People’s Republic of China operations in Canada.Like some of Turner’s other private clients, Cooper chose to train with someone who understood the terrain — hostile surveillance, targeted intimidation, and potential conflict.In a wide-ranging exchange covering national security policy and what both described as Canada’s cultural blindness to foreign threats, Turner delivered a blunt message. He criticized what he sees as a passive-aggressive Canadian response to increasingly urgent warnings from U.S. intelligence and law enforcement — and called for a national shift in mindset.“Sometimes I get fired up,” Turner said. “And I will sometimes say things that are, you know, rightfully emotionally driven. It’s because I give a s**t. And I’m also very wide awake to what’s going on.“Until we start, as a Canadian collective, coming together, working together, and sharing these ideas with each other and actually taking a stance — it’s only gonna get worse. And for Canadians out there that believe otherwise, you need to get your head out of the sand, look up, and shake your head a little bit. Take heed to what’s actually happening right here in Canada.”“I’ve said before, let’s apply the passion we do to the hockey playoffs to other things going on in the country,” Cooper responded. “If someone runs your goalie, you don’t let that stand. We’re letting our country be run over.”The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit

OTTAWA / LOS ANGELES — In this discussion with Chris Meyer of Widefountain, we dig deeper into my findings on an explosive narcotics precursor case quietly dropped by Canadian prosecutors—and what it reveals about Canada's growing vulnerabilities to foreign infiltration.We unpack the story of a Chinese chemist, known here as Dr. X, who was charged with importing more than 100 kilograms of PMK ethyl glycidate—a key chemical used in the production of MDMA (ecstasy). Court records in combination with open source findings show Dr. X had direct ties to a bio-pharmaceutical firm affiliated with the University of British Columbia, and was reportedly recruited under Beijing’s “Thousand Talents Plan”—a program U.S. intelligence agencies warn is used to facilitate espionage and the transfer of dual-use technologies.The case forms part of a broader pattern uncovered by The Bureau and Widefountain, pointing to Chinese state-linked facilitation of poly-drug trafficking and money laundering operations across the Western Hemisphere.This episode raises urgent questions about the deepening intersection between synthetic drug networks and foreign interference efforts operating within Canada.We explore new revelations from The Bureau’s reporting, including:* Dr. X’s links to community groups operating under the CCP’s United Front Work Department, Beijing’s overseas influence arm.* Her affiliation with Zhejiang University, an institution flagged for ties to China’s Ministry of State Security.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA/LOS ANGELES — Chris Meyer of Widefountain returns to question The Bureau on findings from The Quiet Invasion—a landmark timeline investigation into how Vancouver became a beachhead for transnational organized crime and Chinese hybrid warfare. What began in the late 1980s as low-profile infiltration by Chinese Triads has evolved into a full-spectrum crisis involving encrypted telecoms, fentanyl superlabs, and political access reaching Canada’s highest offices. In this episode, Meyer and Sam Cooper discuss the range of findings, including Canadian vulnerabilities now believed to be of deep concern to the U.S. government.For example, one firm in a cluster of Vancouver-based encrypted communications companies—linked to Mexican cartels, Hezbollah narco-terror networks, and PRC-affiliated clients, and flagged by U.S. agencies—was found to share an address with a chemical import business. That company received at least 85 tons of precursor chemicals used in the production of fentanyl, methamphetamine, and MDMA. The shipments coincided with the early explosion of fentanyl overdoses across Canada—and what Five Eyes enforcement experts now identify as a dual-threat: a tech front shielding cartel and Chinese actors, while facilitating the chemical backbone of the opioid crisis.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

OTTAWA–LOS ANGELES — In this special investigative discussion, Sam Cooper sits down with Chris Meyer of WideFountain to dissect the Chinese Communist Party’s long game—and its convergence with transnational organized crime—in infiltrating North America’s western front.As The Bureau prepares a sweeping timeline investigation into Chinese, Mexican, and Iranian threat networks saturating Vancouver, Meyer offers a penetrating historical lens: tracing how CCP leadership, beginning in the Deng Xiaoping era, allegedly embraced corruption, money laundering, and narcotics as instruments of geopolitical disruption aimed squarely at the West.Together, Cooper and Meyer begin connecting the transpacific dots—from encrypted communications firms and the emergence of fentanyl labs in Vancouver, to the rise of Sam Gor, China’s most powerful narco-trafficking syndicate, and its suspected ties to Beijing’s internal security apparatus. They examine how United Front and military intelligence strategies, launched more than four decades ago, set out to infiltrate North America—beginning with Los Angeles and Vancouver, while simultaneously targeting the White House—through ports, political networks, and elite capture.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

In this urgent breaking edition of The Bureau, investigative journalist Sam Cooper connects with frequent contributor Adam Zivo, live from Jerusalem, as day six of the war between Israel and Iran unfolds. Despite headlines warning of global escalation, Zivo reports a surprisingly calm atmosphere in Israel—even as tensions peak with Iran’s Supreme Leader threatening “irreparable damage” should the United States join Israel’s military operations.Zivo shares that the Israeli public has largely accepted direct conflict with Iran as inevitable, viewing the regime in Tehran—the “big boss” of proxy militias across the region—as the true adversary. In a shift, many Israelis, he says, believe military focus should pivot away from Gaza and directly toward Iran.Meanwhile, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei dismissed President Trump’s call for “unconditional surrender” in a televised statement, warning that U.S. military intervention would be met with devastating consequences. Trump, who has signaled reluctance to enter another Middle East war, warned this week that “our patience is wearing thin.”As the conflict deepens, this episode brings rare insight into how Israel is absorbing the war’s escalation—and where public opinion may be pushing next.Key Topics:* Zivo’s firsthand account of Jerusalem’s mood amid war* Public sentiment in Israel on Iran vs. Gaza* The potential for U.S. military involvement* Strategic implications of a broader regime-targeting campaignListen now for exclusive on-the-ground reporting and sharp geopolitical analysis from The Bureau.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

In this episode, Sam Cooper sits down with Jason James of BNN to examine The Bureau's months-long investigation into the convergence of Chinese state-backed fentanyl networks, Mexican cartels, and Iranian proxy groups. The conversation revisits key findings from Wilful Blindness (2021), which first exposed how Vancouver’s port and economy were exploited as gateways for China’s transnational narcotics and money laundering operations.Together, Sam and Jason unpack why U.S. authorities are now publicly affirming the very networks and vulnerabilities previously dismissed in Canada—and why, despite mounting evidence, a bloc within Canadian politics and media continues to fiercely deny the scope of the threat.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

Sam welcomes back Chris Meyer from Wide Fountain to break down The Bureau’s explosive reporting with retired DEA agent Don Im—and the chilling implications of what Im and other U.S. experts describe as a “reverse Opium War.”They trace the roots of Beijing’s alleged silent role in a vast narcotics-finance system: a web of Triads, Communist Party actors, and Western enablers laundering drug proceeds through legitimate trade. From fentanyl warehouses in Vancouver to encrypted cash auctions on WeChat, this is a global operation—sophisticated, deliberate, and devastating.Chris and Sam explore how Donald Trump’s trade war exposed fractures in a covert global economy—and why emerging signals from within China suggest Xi Jinping’s grip on power may be weakening. As the West confronts the mounting toll of fentanyl, Chris calls for a bipartisan reckoning: no more trade without accountability—and reparations.This isn’t just a narco story. It’s a story of power, profit, politics—and a clash of civilizations.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

Welcome back to The Bureau. Today, we bring you a special cross-border collaboration—linking explosive findings from rural Maine to revelations inside Vancouver’s shadow economy.Joining me is Steve Robinson, the investigative editor who got the ball rolling on a major story tying an illegal marijuana operation in Maine to the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department—Beijing’s foreign influence and intelligence arm. Steve’s reporting for The Maine Wire—later advanced by the Daily Caller News Foundation—traces how a so-called community group in New York City, the Sijiu Association, maintains close ties to the Chinese Consulate and has pledged financial support to United Front projects.These findings echo what The Bureau has uncovered in Canada, where United Front operatives have used legalization as cover for a sprawling cannabis export and laundering network. In Vancouver, Toronto, and remote parts of British Columbia and Ontario especially, United Front-linked triads have quietly consolidated legal cannabis licenses, exploited illegal migrant labor, and shipped massive volumes of marijuana to the United States and Japan, with inroads to Europe too—laundering the proceeds back through Canadian banks.In this episode, Steve and I will compare notes, connect the dots, and expose how these networks—rooted in state-directed influence and organized crime—are reshaping the underground economy across North America, just as FBI scrutiny intensifies.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

In this special episode, investigative Sinologist Chris Meyer of Wide Fountain joins The Bureau to dissect a deeply troubling picture emerging from our reporting—one that places Canada at the center of a global narcotics and money laundering operation with ties to Chinese intelligence.At the heart of the conversation: Chi Lap Tse, also known as Sam Gor, or “The Third Son”—the elusive boss of a transnational criminal organization trafficking fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, ketamine, methamphetamine and cannabis globally into the Americas, using Canada as a production, transshipment and money laundering hub for China. Based on assessments of The Bureau’s multiple investigations, including DEA and RCMP intelligence, and his research into Chinese history, Meyer argues that Tse and his “Big Circle Boys” associates are not just drug traffickers—but state-trained commanders whose operations benefit, and in some cases are subtly directed by, the Chinese Communist Party.We revisit my recent exposé on a mysterious 30-acre estate in B.C.’s Columbia Valley—just steps from the U.S. border—tied to Tse, a senior Chinese security figure, United Front-linked mining and chemical interests, and convicted Sam Gor narcotics traffickers like Ye Long Yong. According to RCMP sources, the property has been flagged for cross-border helicopter smuggling, association to high-level money laundering, cannabis, and a nexus of geopolitical friction between Ottawa and Washington.Meyer connects the dots between Canada’s exploitation by United Front mafias and those that architected their global operations in southern China, where Xi Jinping’s backers wield tremendous regional influence that has captured the balance of power in Beijing, according to Wide Fountain’s reports.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

In this podcast discussion with Jason James, I break down Prime Minister Mark Carney’s highly cynical—yet highly successful—election campaign, and explore the implications of three major recent investigations by The Bureau:* A deeper dive into Chinese Communist Party operations targeting Canada’s Parliament, including new details on threats against Conservative candidate Joseph Tay and his family in Hong Kong. (Recall that the Liberal Party previously turned a blind eye to Chinese secret police targeting of MP Michael Chong’s relatives in Hong Kong.)* The United Front’s quiet takeover of Canada’s legal cannabis market, using licensed grow-ops and brokerage houses as fronts for laundering and trafficking.* The DEA’s frustrations after being stonewalled in a 40-kilogram carfentanil seizure case in Toronto—an investigation with suspected links to Chinese and Pakistani transnational threat networks. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

TAIWAN — The HIMARS roar that echoed off the coastal mountains of southern Taiwan this week was more than a weapons test. It was a declaration of deterrence.From their perch at Jiupeng military base—where steep green ridges descend toward the Pacific—Taiwanese forces fired the U.S.-made rocket artillery system in a live-fire display designed to show how the island is transforming itself into a fortress of modern asymmetric warfare. The Taiwanese unit conducting the test had trained with U.S. forces in Oklahoma in 2024, and this week’s exercise marked the first time they demonstrated their proficiency with HIMARS on home soil.The HIMARS platform—demonstrated in footage provided to The Bureau from Taiwan Plus—signals a decisive shift toward a mobile, nimble defensive force designed to face overwhelming scale. Unlike fixed missile sites or air bases—prime targets expected to be destroyed within hours of a PLA first-wave assault—truck-mounted HIMARS units can slip into position, launch a strike, and quickly vanish into Taiwan’s jungle-thick terrain and cliffside roads. These launchers are meant to hide, hit, and move—relying on camouflage, speed, and the natural topography of the island to stay alive and strike again.This transformation had been quietly underway for years. In September 2023, The Bureau met with Taiwanese military strategists and international journalists at a closed-door roundtable in Taipei. Among them was a Ukrainian defense consultant—invited to share hard-won battlefield lessons from Kyiv’s resistance. The strategist told the group that the most crucial lesson for Taiwan was psychological: to instill in citizens and soldiers alike the will to prepare for aggression that seems impossible and illogical, before it arrives. “You must believe the worst can happen,” the Ukraine vet said.That same week in Taipei, Taiwan’s then-Foreign Minister Joseph Wu made the case directly in an interview:“There's a growing consensus among the key analysts in the United States and also in Taiwan that war is not inevitable and the war is not imminent,” Wu said. “And we have been making significant investment in our own defense—not just increasing our military budget, but also engaging serious military reforms, in the sense of asymmetric strategy and asymmetric capability.”That principle now guides Taiwan’s evolving force posture. The May 12 HIMARS test—launching precision-guided rockets into a Pacific exclusion zone—was the first public demonstration of the mobile artillery system since the U.S. delivered the first batch in late 2024. With a range of 300 kilometers, HIMARS provides not only mobility but standoff power, allowing Taiwan’s forces to strike amphibious staging areas, beachheads, and ships from hardened inland positions. Lockheed Martin engineers observed the drills, which were broadcast across Taiwanese news networks as both a military signal and psychological campaign.The live-fire exercise also marked the debut of the Land Sword II, a domestically developed surface-to-air missile system designed to counter diverse aerial threats, including cruise missiles, aircraft, and drones. Land Sword II adds a mobile, all-weather air defense layer to Taiwan’s increasingly dense multi-domain network. By deploying it alongside HIMARS, Taiwan demonstrated its commitment to building overlapping shields—striking at invading forces while protecting its launch platforms from aerial suppression.But these new missile systems are only the tip of the spear.Taiwan’s military has quietly abandoned the vestiges of a Cold War posture centered on fleet battles and long-range missile parity with the mainland. Defense officials now concede that attempts to match Beijing plane-for-plane or ship-for-ship are a dead end. Instead, inspired by the “porcupine” concept outlined by retired U.S. Marines and intelligence officials, Taiwan is remaking itself into a smart, lethal archipelago fortress—one where unmanned drones, dispersed missile cells, and underground fiber-linked command posts neutralize China’s numerical advantage.Wu, who now serves as Secretary-General of Taiwan’s National Security Council, has been one of the doctrine’s most consistent advocates. In his writings and interviews, Wu points to Ukraine’s ability to hold off a vastly superior invader through mobility, deception, and smart munitions. “We are not seeking parity. We are seeking survivability,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs. “And if we survive, we win.”A New Arsenal of Ideas: From Silicon Valley to the Taiwan StraitIf Ukraine showed the value of agile, off-the-shelf technologies on the battlefield, Taiwan seems poised to go a step further—by integrating cutting-edge systems developed not by defense contractors, but by Silicon Valley insurgents.Among the most closely watched innovators is Palmer Luckey, the former Oculus founder whose defense firm, Anduril Industries, is quietly revolutionizing battlefield autonomy. Through its Dive Technologies division and flagsh

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This week on The Bureau, we examine one of the most urgent and politically charged stories in Canada: the crisis surrounding government-issued “safer supply.”I’m joined by Adam Zivo, the investigative reporter who broke many of the key stories exposing the unintended—and often devastating—consequences of Canada’s drug policy experiment. Together, we unpack how federal and provincial “safer supply” programs, originally designed as harm-reduction tools, have instead become conduits for organized crime. In some regions, like London, Ontario—where fentanyl once had little presence—the program has triggered an influx of potent opioids and fueled new criminal markets.We’ll explore what’s really happening on the ground, why this issue matters in Canada’s federal election on Monday, and which political parties are pledging to reverse course—or maintain the status quo, even as overdose deaths surge and fentanyl floods our streets.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

Welcome back to The Bureau.Today we’re joined by independent journalist Adam Zivo, whose reporting has shed powerful light on one of Canada’s most controversial policies: the “safer supply” opioid program. Meant to save lives, these programs have been exploited by organized crime—making the fentanyl crisis worse, not better.Right now, Adam is reporting from Serbia, where massive student-led protests are challenging a deeply entrenched system many describe as a mafia state. These protests are historic—not just for Serbia, but for the global moment we’re in.Serbia’s government has close ties with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a sweeping plan by Chinese President Xi Jinping to grow China’s global influence through foreign investment and infrastructure. But American intelligence sees a darker side to the Belt and Road—saying it’s also about setting up military footholds and corruption networks to boost Beijing’s plans to replace Washington as global hegemon.In our conversation, Adam gives us a critical breakdown of what’s happening on the ground, beginning with the dramatic collapse of a train station built under the Belt and Road. It’s a striking symbol of what’s to come as the United States steps back from global leadership, and China fills the gap with its own brand of "foreign aid" that carries dangerous strings attached.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Here’s what we cover:What’s Happening in Serbia* Collapse of a major train station built by a Chinese firm under the Belt and Road Initiative* Student protestors attacked by the government* Protests grow throughout November:* Students reject political leaders — they organize through public forums called plenums* They rotate spokespersons and emphasize peaceful resistance — even cleaning up after protests* Their movement is not tied to any political party* They issue four initial demands:* Release government spending documents* Investigate and charge those who attacked protestors* Drop charges against protestors* Increase the education budget by 20%* Their non-political, disciplined approach draws wide support* By December:* 100,000 protestors join across the country* 50 university faculties shut down* President Vučić tries to paint the protests as a “colour revolution” (a foreign-backed plot)Into 2025: The Movement Grows* In January, thousands of students begin marching nationwide — joined and protected by biker gangs, who support the protests and are respected in rural areas* By March, more than 300,000 people — nearly 5% of Serbia’s population — are protesting* National railways are shut down by mysterious bomb threats* Protestors face hooligan attacks, firecrackers, and even a sound cannon — which the government denies using* Students add a fifth demand: Investigate the use of sound cannons* Meanwhile, opposition parties are calling for a new interim government made up of neutral technocrats, and fresh elections* This demand is gaining some support among the wider protest movement* President Vučić has rejected the ideaBig Questions Ahead* Can the student movement stay independent of party politics?* Will they form a new political force — or ally with the opposition?The Deeper History Behind It All* Serbia has struggled with organized crime and corruption since the 1990s* Under Slobodan Milošević, the country grew more nationalistic and authoritarian, fueling brutal wars in Bosnia and Kosovo* Aleksandar Vučić, Serbia’s current president, was once Minister of Information under Milošević (1998–2000)* He was part of the far-right Serbian Radical Party* During his time, journalists were murdered, foreign media was banned, and independent outlets were heavily punished* After student protests helped bring down Milošević, reformer Zoran Đinđić became Prime Minister in the early 2000s* He was assassinated in 2003 by mafia-linked police and elites* Vučić later rebranded himself as a pro-European moderate* In 2012, his Serbian Progressive Party won elections and formed a minority government — launching his rise to full power This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

In this discussion with Jason James, a few weeks before Mark Carney became Canada’s prime minister—securing nearly 90 percent of votes in the opaque Liberal Party contest to replace Justin Trudeau—I explained why I cautiously explored Carney’s role in international multilaterals and investments where Beijing’s influence is evident, such as the World Economic Forum. Our conversation also touches on my assessment of the growing collision course between Washington and Beijing, which may partly explain President Donald Trump’s wrecking-ball approach to international alliances, supply chains, and diplomacy.“This is, tragically, like 1938,” I said. “It seems like that’s where we are. And if you understand that, whatever your interest is in the world—if you have some time for geopolitics—I’m not saying the confusion goes away, but the fog starts to lift.”The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

Thanks for coming to The Bureau, where we provide some of the most sophisticated geopolitical analysis in the world—especially in these turbulent times.That’s the theme today: many Canadians are shocked and concerned by reports that the Trump administration may be considering cutting Canada out of the Five Eyes alliance, imposing border adjustments, and even referring to Canada as the '51st state.' So, what is really going on here?Chris Meyer, a former U.S. official who, like me, has spent the past decade studying China’s global influence operations, has some interesting advice for Canadians and our elected MPs (and Liberal-leader elect Mark Carney.)In our conversation, the concept of cognitive dissonance emerges—two competing ideas, each containing some truth, yet their contradictions breed confusion and chaos. On one side is Trump’s sledgehammer rhetoric, coupled with his tactical, transactional approach to ‘deal-making’—a style that risks inflicting lasting damage on one of the most vital modern democratic alliances: the Canada-U.S. relationship. Beyond that, it threatens to undermine the post-World War II Anglo intelligence alliance.On the other, there’s the stark reality that Canada has deep border and port vulnerabilities to China and organized crime—issues that have long raised concerns within U.S. administrations, past and present, as I know from my reporting. And that concern is only growing as the risk of a larger war involving China, Taiwan, Russia, and Europe intensifies.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Currently, Meyer serves as the head of the U.S. Micronesia Council and is the founder of WideFountain, a platform for in-depth geopolitical analysis.A passionate China observer since age 16, Meyer studied East Asian Studies at George Washington University, where he wrote a thesis on the geopolitical dimensions of China’s Special Economic Zones.His career includes:* Five years in sales and marketing with a U.S. Fortune 500 company.* Service in the U.S. diplomatic corps as an Asia expert at the Development Finance Corporation (DFC).* Consulting on U.S. government projects, particularly in Micronesia.* Founding an edtech company, patenting innovative products, and building supply chains in Taiwan and China. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

I wasn't surprised by the Financial Times report indicating that Peter Navarro, a senior Trump administration official known for his ultra-hawkish stance on China, was circulating plans to limit U.S. national security exposure to Canada. The U.S. perceives Canada as the weakest link in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance due to its vulnerabilities to Chinese infiltration. Two weeks ago, a military source shared a report with me confirming that similar discussions were taking place within the U.S. national security and military community, pointing directly to Navarro. And according to my military source, expelling Canada from Five Eyes is just one of several actions under discussion.As I’ve discussed before, this aligns with broader U.S. concerns—for example, the People's Liberation Army's breach of Canada’s Level 4 Lab in Winnipeg and the inexplicable return of the main suspects Dr. Qiu and Keding Cheng to China after allegedly transferring sensitive bioweapon research to Wuhan. The fact that Canada also partnered with CanSino, a PLA-linked company, on a COVID-19 vaccine only deepens those concerns. CanSino was part of the Winnipeg Lab breach plot according to CSIS. This isn’t speculation—it’s open-source fact. As I reported a year ago:The CSIS report adds Qiu was "dismissive" when asked if she thought her collaborations with WIV and other Chinese institutions involved in the Thousand Talents program including CanSino Biologics "have assisted the capabilities of the PLA."Now, think about what the U.S. government knows that we don’t?In this discussion with Jason James of BNN—recorded before FT broke this Five Eyes exclusion story—I answered his question about what the Trump administration really means when it warns of Canada’s fentanyl vulnerabilities. As Trump escalates economic pressure and even suggests Canada should become the 51st state, his trade adviser Navarro is dismissing the report on Canada’s removal from Five Eyes as ‘crazy stuff.’ But make no mistake. Before the Financial Times report, I already had sources pointing to these exact concerns—now they’re out in the open. Canada needs to take these concerns seriously and act accordingly.The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe