BROOKLYN, New York — A former engineer at Huawei’s American research subsidiary testified Thursday that she was shocked when a colleague allegedly boasted of co-opting patented code used in Amazon’s cloud-computing platform, offering prosecutors an early insider account in the Chinese telecommunications giant’s racketeering trial.

Meanwhile, Huawei's lawyers argued that jurors should not treat the sworn statement of Meng Wanzhou—the Huawei executive who avoided extradition from Canada and any appearance in this Brooklyn courtroom—as a confession.

Meng was the target of an intensive Chinese intelligence and coercion campaign in Canada that sought to prevent her extradition and the prospect that she could cooperate with U.S. investigators, according to The Bureau’s exclusive reporting on a classified Canadian Security Intelligence Service assessment.

Beijing ultimately obtained the outcome it sought: Meng was not extradited, the Canadian proceeding ended and she returned to China in September 2021.

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OTTAWA – In the escalating controversy over CBC News guidance directing journalists not to describe the al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001, as terrorism, FBI personnel assigned to American diplomatic posts in Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver were instructed to leave their workplaces and go home, according to a U.S. law-enforcement source with knowledge of interagency communications surrounding the incident.

When The Bureau presented the account to the FBI and asked detailed questions about its scope and operational consequences, the agency neither confirmed nor denied it.

“We will let the Director’s post speak for itself and have nothing additional to provide,” the FBI National Press Office responded.

The Bureau is withholding the source’s identity and agency because they were not authorized to comment on the matter.

It remains unclear whether the U.S. personnel continued working remotely, how long they remained away from their offices, who authorized the measure, whether it was intended as a protest, or whether any meetings, investigations or intelligence exchanges with Canadian agencies were interrupted.

The Bureau also sought information through other official channels including from U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra, but received no confirmations.

What is firmly established is that the CBC controversy rapidly reached the highest levels of American law enforcement and diplomacy in Canada.

On August 27, FBI Director Kash Patel issued an explicit public threat to Canadian agencies that did not repudiate CBC’s guidance:

“Any agency in Canada that doesn’t publicly reject this bastardization of history, and an insult to the souls lost during our largest terrorist attack in US history will no longer have friend in this FBI.”

The following day, Hoekstra reposted Patel’s warning and referenced the FBI’s direct intervention against significant terrorist and violent criminal organizations operating within Canada.

“Just this year, FBI has been instrumental in or directly responsible for multiple disruptions of significant terrorist and violent criminal organizations operating within Canada,” Hoekstra’s post said. “Failure to recognize and confront radical and terrorist ideologies significantly endangers our efforts to establish and harmonize a shared national and economic security partnership.”

Taken together, the two posts show that serious concerns were circulating at senior levels of U.S. law enforcement and diplomacy. The FBI maintains its Canadian legal-attaché headquarters at the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa, with suboffices at the American consulates in Toronto and Vancouver.

The FBI says its overseas personnel provide a “prompt and continuous exchange of information” with foreign partners and coordinate investigations, intelligence leads and requests for assistance. It also says those personnel serve under the authority of the State Department’s chief of mission. In Canada, that position is held by Ambassador Pete Hoekstra.

The guidance at the center of the dispute appeared in a memo to CBC News reporters and editors from the broadcaster’s senior director of journalistic standards and public trust.

First reported by Toronto Sun columnist Warren Kinsella ahead of the anniversary, the memo stated: “Do not refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as terrorist attacks.” It instructed staff instead to describe the hijackings that led to passenger-jet crashes in Washington, Pennsylvania and Manhattan, and the destruction of the World Trade Center.

CBC initially defended the memo as a reminder of its longstanding practice of using the terms “terrorist” and “terrorism” with attribution—a convention it said was shared by other major news organizations.

CBC revised its guidance on August 28, shortly after Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree said Canada had “always recognized 9/11 as the deadliest terrorist attack in history” and unequivocally condemned terrorism.

In a post on its editor’s blog that afternoon, Canada’s publicly funded national broadcaster announced that journalists would no longer require attribution when describing the September 11 attacks as terrorism.

Phil Gurski, a former senior strategic analyst for Canadian Security Intelligence Service who previously worked at the Communications Security Establishment and Public Safety Canada, has spent more than three decades analyzing terrorist threats.

His newly released book, 9/11: The Unfinished Battle — Why Jihadi Terrorism Is Stronger, Wider, and Far From Over, argues that Western governments transformed their security institutions after September 11 but failed to eliminate jihadist terrorism, mistaking an increasingly dispersed and evolving threat for a defeated one. The book also examines the convergence of terrorism with espionage, foreign interference and transnational repression.

In an August 28 column for The Bureau, Gurski applied that argument directly to the CBC controversy.

He wrote that the September 11 attacks satisfied the elements of terrorism in Canada’s Criminal Code: they were committed for ideological and religious purposes, intended to intimidate the public and caused mass death through violence. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility and remains a listed terrorist entity in Canada.

Against that background, Gurski told The Bureau that politicizing the Canada–U.S. security relationship could harm both countries. He did not independently confirm the reported FBI direction.

Gurski said his contacts indicate that cooperation at the operational level continues and “is working well.”

“Whatever the idiocy of the CBC statement, professionals at the ‘coalface’ have always collaborated closely to help thwart possible threats,” Gurski said. “Canadian and US agencies have long worked together and both nations have benefitted greatly.”

Meanwhile, today, the 25th anniversary of the attacks, Hoekstra is in Gander, Newfoundland, to thank the community that welcomed thousands of airline passengers stranded when U.S. airspace closed on September 11, 2001.

“The terrorist attacks of September 11 left a lasting mark on me and our nation, but during a very dark time, the people of Newfoundland showed us what true community really means,” Hoekstra told POLITICO. “On this 25th anniversary, I am returning to say a heartfelt thank you not just on behalf of those who were stranded, but for an entire nation that remains moved by Gander’s generosity.”

BROOKLYN, New York — “Theft, lies, cover-up.”

That was how Justice Department lawyer Taylor Stout opened the United States government’s criminal case against Huawei Technologies, alleging that the Chinese telecommunications giant spent two decades stealing American technology, deceiving global banks and concealing its business with Iran’s repressive regime.

The government’s first witness took the jury into the prosecution’s claim that Huawei assisted Iran’s domestic-surveillance machinery.

Parham Baheshti, a U.S. citizen who worked in Iran during the regime’s violent suppression of protests in 2009, told jurors that Huawei representatives made a pitch for “analyzing the Iranian people and their behavior online,” according to Associated Press reporting.

He later supplied information about his Huawei dealings to the U.S. government and left Iran in 2011 after learning that he was under investigation.

His testimony opened one of the most consequential corporate criminal trials ever brought against a Chinese company—and put a human witness behind the government’s allegation that Huawei assisted one of Washington’s principal adversaries with domestic repression.

Huawei’s lead lawyer, Brian Heberlig, told jurors that the government had distorted ordinary global commerce and isolated employee misconduct to portray a multinational corporation as a criminal organization.

“There was no blueprint for crime,” he said.

The trial before U.S. District Judge Ann M. Donnelly is the culmination of a prosecution that began under seal in 2018, burst into public view with Meng Wanzhou’s arrest in Vancouver and expanded in 2020 into a sweeping racketeering case.

The fourth superseding indictment contains 14 counts, although prosecutors said shortly before trial that they would not proceed on two sanctions counts.

In the same September 4 filing, prosecutors said they would no longer rely on a trade-secret episode involving anonymous “Company 2”—identified in reporting as Motorola Solutions—as a predicate act supporting the racketeering charge. The remaining allegations include racketeering conspiracy, conspiracy to steal trade secrets, bank and wire fraud, money laundering and obstruction of justice.

The geopolitical implications reach far beyond an ordinary corporate prosecution. U.S. officials have long suspected that Huawei’s technology and global reach serve Beijing’s strategic interests.

Donnelly nevertheless cautioned prospective jurors: “China and the Communist Party … are not on trial.”

Yet the extraordinary events surrounding the case point directly back to Beijing.

As The Bureau’s reporting on a classified CSIS assessment reveals, China’s intelligence service mounted an intensive pressure and interference campaign in Canada aimed at preventing Huawei executive Meng’s extradition—the outcome Beijing feared could lead her to cooperate with U.S. investigators and disclose privileged information.

On December 1, 2018, the RCMP arrested Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer and the daughter of founder Ren Zhengfei, at Vancouver International Airport on a U.S. extradition request.

Nine days later, Chinese authorities detained former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor on espionage allegations. A classified CSIS assessment reviewed exclusively by The Bureau reveals that Canadian intelligence viewed the detentions and Meng’s extradition proceeding as elements of a pressure campaign directed by the highest levels of China’s state-security apparatus.

The June 10, 2019, “Canadian Eyes Only” assessment—titled PRC Strategy and Tactics to Influence the Meng Proceedings—said Ministry of State Security units were tasked “from high levels” to respond to Meng’s arrest. Regional MSS bureaus competed to make the “largest possible impact,” while President Xi Jinping received reporting on the crisis directly from the intelligence service, according to CSIS.

The campaign combined trade retaliation, pressure on politically connected Canadian business leaders, clandestine interference in the 2019 federal election and the detention of Kovrig and Spavor.

“The PRC is calibrating its clandestine interference in the 2019 federal election to reflect its displeasure with Canada’s current political leaders,” the assessment said. “Multiple corroborated reports confirm that PRC missions in Canada are moderating their support for the Prime Minister and other Liberal candidates.”

At the same time, CSIS reported that Chinese missions were providing clandestine support to candidates from all three major parties—”hedging its bets” in an unpredictable election to maximize Beijing’s influence.

CSIS assessed that Beijing regarded the Canadians’ detention as retaliatory, but also useful as a pretext for “quiet communications” with Ottawa outside normal diplomatic channels. Beijing’s multidimensional campaign, the agency predicted, would remain in place until Meng’s extradition proceedings ended.

Paradoxically, Canadian intelligence believed Beijing expected Canada would ultimately extradite her.

Most explosively, “uncorroborated single source” intelligence indicated the PRC might consider Meng’s “exfiltration or assassination” if that became the only alternative to significant national harm.

Other public reporting shows how the solution developed.

In June 2019, The Globe and Mail reported that Canadian academic Wenran Jiang had advanced the possibility that Ottawa could terminate the extradition under section 23(3) of Canada’s Extradition Act. Former Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien then began floating intervention by the federal justice minister.

Huawei considered Jiang helpful to its campaign to influence Canadian public opinion, The Globe and Mail reported.

At the G20 summit in Osaka that month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reportedly slipped Xi a Mandarin note proposing private discussions. Days later, Trudeau’s economic adviser—and future Canadian ambassador to China—Dominic Barton held an unofficial meeting in Beijing during which a Chinese official specifically cited section 23(3), according to a detailed Wall Street Journal reconstruction.

After Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in November 2020, Trudeau placed Kovrig and Spavor at the top of the agenda for his first bilateral meeting with the new president. By mid-2021, the Journal reported, Barton and Chinese counterparts were working toward a resolution that would return Meng to China and free the two Canadians.

According to the Journal, Chinese lawyers supplied proposed language for a U.S. deferred-prosecution agreement on September 19, 2021. Canada voted the next day, returning Trudeau’s Liberals with another minority government.

On September 24, Meng agreed to the accuracy of a four-page statement detailing false representations she made to a global bank concerning Huawei’s control of Skycom and its Iranian business.

Washington withdrew its extradition request.

Canadian Justice Minister David Lametti terminated the proceeding under section 23(3), and Meng departed for China. Kovrig and Spavor were released within hours.

The deal did not end the prosecution of Huawei.

In June 2026, Donnelly ruled that Meng’s statement of facts could be presented to the jury as evidence against the company. Meng was—and remains—Huawei’s chief financial officer, the judge reasoned, and Huawei had adopted her account of conduct undertaken in her corporate role.

Huawei Technologies and three subsidiaries have pleaded not guilty.

Prosecutors allege that the companies operated as a criminal enterprise from approximately 1999 to 2020, acquiring American intellectual property through fraud, employee recruitment and theft while rewarding personnel who obtained confidential information from competitors.

The 2020 superseding indictment alleges Huawei installed surveillance equipment “used to monitor, identify and detain protestors” during Tehran’s 2009 demonstrations. It describes Huawei’s broader conduct as “deliberate and repeated misappropriation of intellectual property.”

The 2019 indictment alleges Huawei “made efforts to move witnesses with knowledge about Huawei’s Iran-based business to the PRC … and to destroy and conceal evidence.”

Meng’s signed statement of facts says “Huawei controlled Skycom, and Skycom employees were really Huawei employees,” and that Huawei caused approximately $100 million in Skycom transactions to clear through the United States.

The alleged targets identified in reporting included Cisco Systems, Motorola Solutions, Fujitsu, Quintel Technology, T-Mobile and CNEX Labs. The disputed technology ranged from router source code and operating manuals to antenna designs and a robotic testing arm that a Huawei employee allegedly removed from a T-Mobile laboratory in a laptop bag.

Another branch of the case centres on Skycom, a Hong Kong company prosecutors describe as an unofficial Huawei subsidiary used to conduct business in Iran. The government alleges Huawei concealed that relationship from HSBC and other banks while causing approximately $100 million in Skycom-related transactions to clear through the American financial system.

The trial continues today in Brooklyn.

Meanwhile, the conduct attributed to Beijing in the Meng case could be viewed as continuing today, in trade battles around the world.

Under a heading reading “Use of Trade Restrictions to Coerce Ottawa to Concede,” the assessment states that CSIS “assesses that the PRC has curtailed canola and pork imports as a means to coerce Ottawa to concede to China’s demands with respect to the Meng extradition.”

The agency described the method as routine rather than improvised. “Use of trade restrictions to coerce a foreign government to change a known domestic position is an established PRC tactic,” the document says, “having been similarly deployed against South Korea (2017), Norway (2013), Philippines (2012) and Japan (2010), among others.”

The target was not the Canadian economy but its leaders.

“Economic pressure is aimed at the business community, particularly those individuals with personal access to senior government officials,” CSIS wrote.

The assessment then names the company Beijing chose first. The PRC “singled out Richardson International Ltd., one of Canada’s largest grain processors, for trade action prior to a general notification,” it says, and “CSIS reporting confirms that ‘China picked Richardson’,” anticipating that the move would “have the biggest impact.” The agency set out three reasons it believed Beijing selected the firm: Richardson profits from Chinese markets, its executives have direct access to senior elected officials, and it is not significant enough to damage the long-term economic benefits of China-Canada trade.

China also restricted imports from three other Canadian agri-food firms — Viterra, Drummond Export and Olymel — and CSIS said it was working to determine how far those companies fit the same profile.

None of the four was accused of any wrongdoing. They were, in the agency’s reading, instruments.

“At the time of writing, CSIS considers the PRC’s trade actions against these firms are very likely designed with personalized political objectives in mind and are unlikely to be resolved through trade-related or technical mechanisms,” the assessment concluded.

Editor’s note: The charges against Huawei are allegations. The defendants have pleaded not guilty and are presumed innocent unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

OTTAWA — A former senior Canadian defence official suing the federal government over a dismissal her lawyer links to Mark Carney’s pivot toward China is pointing to the government’s newly disclosed military engagement with Beijing — and to what she calls growing public recognition that Canada’s partnership with China has impeded trade talks with Washington.

Raquel Garbers was the principal architect of the small team that drafted Canada’s 2024 defence policy, Our North, Strong and Free. On Oct. 15, 2025, she published an opinion piece warning that Ottawa’s increasingly anti-American rhetoric was dividing the Western alliance and benefiting Beijing and Moscow.

Those hostile states — principally China — had been waging a covert war against Canada and the United States for about a decade, Garbers wrote. Two days later, Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand was in Beijing describing China as a strategic partner. Four weeks after that, Garbers was told her position was being eliminated.

She filed a wrongful-dismissal claim in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in June. In an interview, Garbers’ lawyer said Carney’s strategic pivot toward Beijing had chilled parts of Ottawa’s bureaucracy and created a perception that Garbers was fired as a warning to others. None of the allegations has been tested in court.

Writing on LinkedIn on Monday, Garbers responded to a story The Bureau published the same day: Canada’s military had formally reopened its Defence Coordination Dialogue with the People’s Liberation Army on Sept. 4, but Canadians learned of the meeting only through a two-paragraph notice from China’s defence ministry.

“The [government] mismanaged the public politics of its defence/military deal with Beijing,” Garbers wrote. “In staying silent while Beijing shouted about it across the globe, Ottawa handed Beijing a major propaganda win.”

Garbers’ second point concerned Carney’s collapsed trade talks with the Trump administration.

Days before the Victoria military conference opened — an event attended by a Chinese delegation led by General Yang Zhibin, commander of the PLA’s Eastern Theater Command — Carney was describing Canada’s relationship with Washington in warlike terms.

“Last evening, I instructed our negotiators to return to Ottawa,” he said on Aug. 22. “We cannot accept what they’ve offered, and we will not give what they’ve asked.”

That same day, he characterized the relationship this way: “You’re at war when you get attacked. We got attacked.”

In her LinkedIn post, Garbers argued that Ottawa’s failure to disclose the renewed engagement with the People’s Liberation Army means media “coverage of the deal will put Ottawa’s reputation for accommodating China front of mind just as the public is realizing that its partnership with Beijing played a pivotal role in crashing CUSMA talks.”

Garbers’ third point was sharper, presenting the implications of Canadian military cooperation with Beijing as an unavoidable factor in relations between Ottawa and Washington.

“[With respect to] questions [around] the impact on US relations, the [government] must either admit de facto US ‘consent’ of the deal (a blow to its domestic chops) or it must deny US ‘consent’ (a win for DC’s claim that [Canada] is Beijing’s backdoor into the US).”

Put plainly, Garbers argues that Ottawa faces two politically damaging possibilities.

If it says Washington knew about the military engagement and did not object, Ottawa risks appearing to concede that a sovereign Canadian defence decision required the approval of the administration Carney has described as attacking Canada. If it says Washington was unaware, it lends support to an argument already circulating in the U.S. capital: that Canada offers Beijing a back door into American security.

Meanwhile, the Department of National Defence told The Globe and Mail that the Sept. 4 meeting took place in Ottawa and characterized it as “working-level dialogue.”

But an unnamed Canadian official told the newspaper that military participants ranged in rank from major-general to colonel. The reported presence of a major-general — an officer holding one of the Canadian Armed Forces’ highest ranks — raises questions about Ottawa’s characterization of the meeting with the People’s Liberation Army as merely “working-level.”

The bilateral talks occurred two days after the Indo-Pacific Chiefs of Defense Conference concluded in Victoria. DND’s public account of that conference said it brought together 32 senior military representatives from 29 countries, but did not identify the Chinese delegation or disclose the subsequent meeting in Ottawa.

Garbers’ fourth point anticipated what the government might say when it addresses the matter publicly.

“Forthcoming talking points about ‘security guardrails’ on the deal will invite scrutiny of Canada’s much too lax security posture — and could the timing for that possibly be worse as the [government] prepares to host investors in sensitive defence sectors?”

Garbers closed with some advice for Carney and his government.

“The flaws in the [government communications] strategy are many and serious. To be fair to the PM, he cannot be all things at all times. He really [should] add some real geostrategists to his team.”

VANCOUVER — In June 2025, eight months after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced it had dismantled the largest fentanyl and methamphetamine laboratory in Canadian history, the force invited American agencies to its British Columbia headquarters in Surrey for what the Americans had hoped would be a working session.

In their telling, the case had started in China, led to a U.S. Treasury-sanctioned chemical importer in a Vancouver suburb, and ultimately reached the White House as a symbol of stonewalling in Ottawa and failed cooperation on a lethal scourge decimating North American communities.

For the Americans, the session inside Green Timbers — the RCMP’s imposing, high-security E Division headquarters, a nearly $1-billion facility — would end in disappointment.

According to The Bureau’s sources, investigators in a New Jersey-based counternarcotics bureau with a global mandate had uncovered the Chinese suppliers and followed the trail to laboratory networks involving Canadian, Chinese, Mexican and Iranian players.

But the tightly controlled, one-way briefing at Green Timbers foreshadowed the case’s meager denouement last week: the guilty plea of a low-level dealer who attempted to ship methamphetamine to the Philippines.

Meanwhile, the international players believed to stand behind the laboratory — and whom some sources connect to alleged Sinaloa Cartel frontman Ryan Wedding — remained beyond the reach of the case.

“The first thing they say is, ‘This isn’t an open discussion. This is just a briefing of what we have,’” said a U.S. official who had previously given The Bureau a detailed account of how the RCMP refused to work the British Columbia fentanyl file with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in late 2022 and 2023.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity.

The DEA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Homeland Security Investigations and U.S. Customs and Border Protection were in the room, the official said, and, to the official’s recollection, the Canada Border Services Agency as well.

The briefing, the official said, was the RCMP’s answer to mounting pressure.

“They were getting lots of independent questions from all of the U.S. agencies about the lab,” he said. “So I think their response was to have everybody come out and we will give a presentation basically how it started and to where it was.”

The frustration, he added, had reached the White House and, in the official’s assessment, reflected mounting concern about Ottawa’s handling of the file.

“It did reach outside of all of our agencies to the White House,” he said. “So I think this was their way to triage any sort of bad look on their part.”

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OTTAWA — Canada's military reopened a formal channel to China's People's Liberation Army last Friday for the first time in eight years, and Canadians have learned of it only from Beijing.

China’s defe…

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OTTAWA – An Iranian immigrant living in Vancouver spent more than five years buying American missile-testing equipment and drone cameras for Iran’s Department of Defense, routing the goods and the payments through front companies in China. A Seattle court sentenced him to 42 months in prison in 2018. He was arrested not by Canadian police but by an American agent, at the border crossing in Blaine, Washington.

The case is a public record illuminating the Iranian-Chinese procurement system that now sits at the center of Washington’s financial war against Iran, and that Canada has never confronted. Iranian government buyers stand at one end of it, Chinese operators and their front companies at the other end, and hundreds, if not thousands of Canadian residents from Iran serve as its trusted Western face, operating from major Canadian cities, wired into Canadian banks, trade and technology and real estate companies, and Canada’s political system.

The scheme moves sensitive American technology to Tehran through fake import and export firms and transshipment points, and it settles the bills in oil and Chinese currency, often laundering euros and US currency through currency exchange hubs in the Middle East, Canada or Hong Kong.

According to one of The Bureau’s sources, the file also explains the unexamined machinery behind an explosive story by the Canadian national security reporter Stewart Bell.

Bell revealed that the son of a former Iranian vice-president, described by Canadian Security Intelligence Service as a participant in a covert weapons procurement structure for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, spent a quiet decade in Edmonton winning some $2 million in contracts from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Department of National Defence.

CSIS warnings went nowhere inside Justin Trudeau’s government, and Ottawa’s single attempt to remove him apparently collapsed on a notorious structural error in Canadian law: intelligence gathered by the spy service often cannot be used in court by the border enforcement agency that needs it.

The covert Iranian financing machinery involved is the target of the newest phase of Washington’s war, which Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent calls an economic D-Day.

American military officials say Iran’s ability to close the Strait of Hormuz is degrading, and the pressure has moved to the Revolutionary Guard’s money — the channels that fund its war machine and run the country’s economy. They are the same channels running through the Canadian cases examined here, including Bell’s, which has produced Conservative calls for an inquiry into Canada’s security failures.

Speaking at the Group of 20 finance meeting in Asheville, North Carolina, this week, Bessent described the system. “The Chinese pay the Iranians (for oil) in RMB,” he said. “The RMB comes back to the Gulf Region, and whether it is through neighbors shipping that supplies over, or whether it is through banks — such as the one we put out of business in Dubai on Friday — or whether it is the cash houses, those are being closed down. When that money cannot be converted to dollars, then the regime will starve.”

Fourteen years earlier, a Vancouver man had written the same system down in an email to his partners in China.

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OTTAWA — While the case of Biwei Zhang moves through the courts in Brussels, where an appeals court has extended the detention of the Canadian intern from China accused of espionage inside the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s military high command, a second file involving a Chinese national living and studying in Ontario — whose phone, United States officials found, held photographs of himself and others in tactical formations holding rifle-styled firearms, after he was caught photographing American aircraft in Chicago and admitted to a similar operation at Toronto’s airport — is opening in federal court in Michigan.

Weiheng Zeng, a citizen of China who lives in Cambridge, Ontario, and is an undergraduate at the University of Waterloo, was charged on August 26 with one count of making false statements to federal officers.

The criminal complaint is supported by a 19-page affidavit sworn by Robert Holbrook, a special agent assigned to the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division. Holbrook alleges that a Chinese contact assigned Zeng specific aircraft and tail numbers, paid him $20 to $30 for each accepted photograph in yuan transferred to a Bank of China account, mailed him China Telecom SIM cards that allowed him to bypass Canadian cellular networks and sent him on two assignments involving FedEx facilities — one at Toronto Pearson International Airport in October 2025 and another at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago the following April.

For the Chicago assignment, Zeng allegedly admitted that a contact he believed was a Chinese government security official gave him a cover story in advance to recite if anyone stopped him. Zeng, who was born in 2004, is not charged with espionage.

The tactical photographs surfaced during the first of three interviews at the Ambassador Bridge, which links Windsor, Ontario, with Detroit, Michigan.

“ZENG’s phone was also found to contain pictures of him and other individuals in tactical clothing and in tactical formations, holding rifle-styled firearms,” the affidavit states. “When asked about those pictures, ZENG stated that the weapon was an ‘airsoft’ gun. ZENG stated that he had fired weapons before in Europe, but denied having any military service or training, or having any family who served in the military.”

Zeng was issued a United States B1/B2 visitor visa on October 11, 2022, and has entered the country approximately 24 times since then, Holbrook’s affidavit says.

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BRUSSELS – A Belgian appeals court on Monday rejected the release appeal of Biwei Zhang, the C…

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OTTAWA — The Ring of Fire sits about 500 kilometers northeast of Thunder Bay in the muskeg of Ontario’s James Bay Lowlands, on Treaty 9 territory. Prospectors found it in 2007 and named it after a Jo…

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By Phil Gurski

OTTAWA — Of all the terms in the English language that have led to arguments over what exactly they mean, terrorism has to be at or near the top. Phrases such as “one man’s terrorist is…

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By Ian Bradbury

OTTAWA — Political tribalism and bandwagon loyalty permeate Canadian public life across every region and the full spectrum of parties and interests, representing a measure of political…

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VANCOUVER — Former British Columbia Liberal trade minister Teresa Wat has resigned from the B.C. Conservative caucus and will sit as an Independent, escalating a month-long dispute over accusations made during Kerry-Lynne Findlay’s leadership campaign that the veteran Richmond MLA “is CCP” and had “sold many memberships to CCP Chinese in Richmond.”

Meanwhile, in a day of extraordinary tumult for the far western Canadian province well known for wild politics, leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay fired caucus operations director Apollo Chung as a separate controversy involving purported audio recordings erupted around the party.

The two developments intensified an extraordinary collapse inside British Columbia’s Official Opposition. Wat and MLA Brennan Day became the fourth and fifth members to leave the Conservative caucus in 12 days, reducing a party that won 44 seats in the 2024 election to 33.

Findlay announced Wednesday that she had directed her chief of staff to terminate a senior official effective immediately. She gave no reason for the dismissal. The announcement followed the circulation on social media of purported audio recordings attributed to Apollo Chung, according to The Canadian Press.

Earlier Wednesday, Langley-Abbotsford MLA Harman Bhangu said he was “disappointed and disturbed” by audio released that day and condemned the idea that a Conservative employee would misuse members’ donations.

Western Standard reported that the recording captured a staff member discussing ways to monetize his time in office. The Bureau has not authenticated the recording, confirmed the speaker’s identity or established that it played any role in Chung’s dismissal.

The dismissed party executive Apollo Chung, meanwhile, arrived in Findlay’s caucus office with a political history spanning several parties and provinces.

As recently as 2021, he worked as a constituency assistant to Brenda Bailey, the New Democrat who is now British Columbia’s finance minister. He was later listed under the name Paul Chung as executive director of the Republican Party of Alberta, which advocates Alberta’s separation from Canada, and served as financial officer for some of its candidates.

In early 2025, Chung reportedly contributed $5,000 to the party, the maximum permitted under Alberta’s rules. The Toronto Star reported this month that the Republican Party of Alberta collected nearly $190,000 from fewer than 50 donors during the first half of 2025, with more than half contributing the maximum.

The Toronto Star’s investigation identified Chung as a longtime B.C. political operative who had worked for three of the province’s parties in recent years. The Star found that at least four donations appeared to have been made by people living in British Columbia, and two of the apparent donors had previously worked for the B.C. NDP.

An official House of Commons record from 2005 identifies a man named Apollo Chung and a woman named Christine Li appearing together before the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration on behalf of the Chinese Canadian National Council.

Li, a national executive of the council, introduced Chung as her colleague. She argued against revoking the citizenship of people who had entered Canada under false identities during the head tax and exclusion era, telling the committee that those immigrants had used false papers because the law of the day left them no other route.

A later blog post by Li describes her work on a redress campaign alongside community leaders, lawyers and journalists, and carries a photograph dated June 21, 2006 whose caption names Apollo Chung and Li aboard the Redress Express with journalist Simon Lee, and Kristyn Wong-Tam, now a New Democrat member of the Ontario legislature.

A man named Apollo Chung’s connection to Kristyn Wong-Tam extends beyond their earlier involvement in Chinese Canadian redress advocacy.

In April 2013, Toronto Sun columnist Sue-Ann Levy reported that Chung, operating through a British Columbia company, had performed extensive work for Wong-Tam’s successful 2010 Toronto council campaign and for that of Adam Vaughan, then a Toronto councillor and later a Liberal member of Parliament in Justin Trudeau’s government. The work included setting up telephone lines and websites, Levy reported, and in Wong-Tam’s case producing robocalls.

Levy also reported that CUPE Local 416 official David Hewitt provided union-subsidized administrative support to Wong-Tam’s campaign, and that she had seen him working from Wong-Tam’s campaign office.

Later in 2013, Toronto councillors Giorgio Mammoliti and Mark Grimes formally sought a city staff report into Chung’s involvement with Local 416 and sitting councillors’ offices.

A subsequent Toronto Star report on a CUPE-commissioned forensic audit said Local 416 paid Chung and two companies he apparently controlled $328,690 for call-centre and technical-support work between 2011 and 2013. The audit did not allege that Chung committed wrongdoing. For its story this month, the Star sent Chung questions by personal email, work email and letter. He did not respond.

The Star reported that Chung had previously been affiliated with the Chinese Canadian National Council, which suggested at the time that he might be living in Vancouver.

The turmoil surrounding Wat and Chung came amid a wider exodus from Findlay’s caucus.

Peter Milobar quit on August 14, Ian Paton on August 24 and Rosalyn Bird on August 25. Day followed Wat out of the caucus Wednesday, citing Findlay’s “judgment, conduct, and ethical standards” and the associates she had chosen.

A day before Wat and Day announced their departures, Findlay was asked whether more members would follow.

“There may even be others that leave our caucus,” she said. “I don’t know.”

Chung’s dismissal unfolded as Wat announced her own break with Findlay over a controversy that had been building since late July.

Wat said she could no longer remain in a caucus led by someone who had made “serious and unfounded accusations” that called her allegiance to Canada into question and then failed to correct the public record.

“I cannot continue to sit in a caucus led by someone who has questioned my loyalty without evidence and, when given the opportunity to correct the record, has failed to do so,” Wat said.

“It is unfortunate that MLA Teresa Wat has decided to take this extraordinary measure,” Findlay said Wednesday. “It is a betrayal of the hardworking volunteers, campaign workers and voters who helped get her elected as a CPBC MLA in the 2024 election.”

The dispute traces back to an anonymous X account called The Findlay Files, which last month published what it described as a screenshot from an internal group used by Findlay’s leadership campaign.

Postmedia reported that it obtained a screen recording of the chat thread and that a source said the message was sent from Findlay’s personal cellphone number, which the news organization independently verified as belonging to her.

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SAN DIEGO — A sworn FBI affidavit unsealed Wednesday describes a seven-year investigation into a Chinese hacking operation that targeted NASA, the Federal Reserve, the Department of Energy, the Justi…

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By Garry Clement

OTTAWA — More than a century and a half ago, China learned a brutal lesson about the strategic power of narcotics.

During the nineteenth-century Opium Wars, British commercial interest…

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OTTAWA — On July 23, someone reached into the controls of the drinking-water plant in Saint-Noël, a village of fewer than four hundred people in Quebec’s Bas-Saint-Laurent, and began raising the chlo…

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OTTAWA — Canadian universities have participated in Qatar-backed research projects in scientific fields Canada classifies as sensitive, and coordinated campaigns sought to make causes including Gaza a decisive issue in the 2025 federal election, while broader Muslim voter-mobilization efforts target up to 80 ridings, according to a new report alleging that Canadian institutions have become unusually susceptible to Islamist influence.

The 200-page study, published by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, or ISGAP, argues that these developments are not isolated. It portrays them as parts of a longer campaign of Islamist “entryism”—the cultivation of influence inside democratic institutions by activists, organizations and foreign-state partners.

Among its starkest assessments is one from Edmund Fitton-Brown, a former British ambassador and senior fellow at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“Amongst comparable Western countries like the U.K., France, and Australia,” Fitton-Brown said, “Canada stands out as being furthest down the road to Islamist infiltration and consolidation.”

The Bureau reviewed many of the report’s underlying citations. Several central assertions—including registered lobbying, meetings with government and security officials, election-finance filings and Qatar-backed university projects—are supported by public records or fit within a broader body of confirmed reporting.

The records do not, by themselves, prove the report’s more sweeping conclusions. But some of its stronger arguments assert that Canadian organizations are influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood, that Qatar financed particular projects to alter Canadian policy or campus discourse, and that advocacy against Islamophobia could constrain legitimate national-security scrutiny.

ISGAP places this activity within a longer strategy of targeted electoral leverage. It says one principal Muslim voter-mobilization organization identified between 60 and 80 federal constituencies where the Muslim population approached or exceeded the previous margin of victory, concentrating its efforts in ridings where a coordinated voting bloc could exert outsized influence.

During the 2025 campaign, the report says, more than 100 Muslim organizations supported a declaration presenting unified voting as a “collective responsibility,” while candidates in 45 ridings were endorsed according to their positions on Gaza, Islamophobia and related policy commitments.

The report further asserts that leadership links connect these voter-mobilization organizations to a broader network of Muslim Brotherhood-aligned institutions. It notes that a director of one organization formerly led a national Muslim civil-liberties group, while the executive director of another previously served as foreign-affairs secretary to Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s former president and a longtime Muslim Brotherhood leader.

Several directors, ISGAP says, have simultaneously held positions within a major Canadian Muslim charity.

ISGAP describes itself as nonpartisan and dedicated to academic research on contemporary antisemitism. Its leadership has included—and continues to include—former Israeli officials.

The report argues that the Muslim Brotherhood’s approach to Western democracies is not conventional integration but tamkeen—the gradual accumulation of influence and authority through institutional entrenchment. It traces this strategy to two foundational texts, The Project and the 1991 Explanatory Memorandum, the latter of which explicitly includes Canada in a North American campaign conducted “from within existing societal structures.”

What appears outwardly as moderation and adaptation to Western culture, democratic norms and laws is therefore portrayed by ISGAP as covert, long-term positioning.

The machinery operates across four mutually reinforcing fronts, according to ISGAP: controlling narratives around Islamism, Palestine and Islamophobia; embedding interconnected networks inside charities, schools, universities and professional bodies; translating that presence into political mobilization and policy outcomes; and using litigation and reputational pressure to raise the cost of scrutiny.

Qatar supplies the state-level infrastructure and funding in ISGAP’s telling, that allows the strategy to operate at a scale unavailable to a non-state movement.

Canada’s central failure, according to the report, is its refusal to examine that system as a whole.

It points to government reviews and investigations into Muslim Brotherhood-aligned networks in the United States, France, Britain and Austria.

But Canada, it says, has undertaken no equivalent inquiry “at any level,” despite being explicitly identified in the 1991 Explanatory Memorandum.

The result is a national-security blind spot in which Canadian institutions address individual charities, grants, advocacy campaigns and controversies separately, while overlooking the coordinated strategy that allegedly connects them, according to ISGAP.

One of the report’s most consequential sections probes concerns over Qatar’s relationships with Canadian universities.

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Paskal has testified repeatedly before the United States Congress and the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. A former journalist, she has spent years travelling through the Pacific’s smallest and most strategically important states. The path that drew her into this subject resembles my own in Vancouver.

As a travel journalist, she watched patterns of Chinese investment advance rapidly across smaller states, year after year, until they formed the unmistakable outline of a larger strategic objective. Her research examines how Beijing combines political influence, commercial activity, organized crime and intelligence-linked networks to alter conditions on the ground without firing a shot.

Paskal explains that maritime geography is leverage in this contest of great powers.

Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands — including Saipan and Tinian — are U.S. territories. Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands are independent nations linked to Washington through Compacts of Free Association. Together, they form an American-controlled corridor between Hawaii and the first island chain encompassing Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines.

If war erupts over Taiwan, those islands become the logistical spine for moving American forces west. Paskal argues that Beijing understands their importance far better than Washington often appears to.

Meyer, a former U.S. official and veteran China analyst, connects what he has found in Saipan to the casino-based money laundering, underground banking and political influence networks I documented in Wilful Blindness. His assessment is blunt: Beijing sends its “A team” into Micronesia, while Washington too often treats the region as an afterthought.

Their investigation focuses in part on Imperial Pacific International, the spectacularly troubled Saipan casino venture. Paskal and Meyer examine its reported financial volumes, its Chinese state-connected construction contractor and allegations involving illegal labour, human trafficking, money laundering and public corruption. In congressional testimony, Governor Arnold Palacios described the casino era as being marked by precisely those problems.

The episode also scrutinizes a special, CNMI-only immigration pathway that currently permits eligible, pre-screened Chinese visitors to enter the islands without a conventional visa for stays of up to 14 days. Critics fear that such access, combined with direct flights and uneven enforcement, creates vulnerabilities close to Guam’s military installations.

The most sensitive part of our discussion concerns Palacios himself.

After taking office in 2023, Palacios pressed federal agencies to examine public corruption and the handling of enormous amounts of American funding. In April 2025, he reportedly asked the territory’s congressional delegate to carry a request directly to FBI Director Kash Patel for “intensive investigations of public corruption,” saying his administration possessed considerable evidence.

Three months later, Palacios collapsed in his office. He was flown to Guam and died that night at 69.

Paskal says some people in the Northern Marianas remain deeply suspicious about the circumstances, including questions surrounding the medical response and whether his transfer was delayed. She does not claim to possess proof that Palacios was killed. But she argues that this uncertainty produces its own strategic effect: If an official challenges entrenched interests, dies suddenly, and the unanswered questions are never resolved, other officials may decide that speaking out is too dangerous.

That, she says, is cognitive warfare — the shaping of behaviour through fear, doubt and the appearance that democratic institutions cannot protect those who defend them.

The conversation then moves to the Marshall Islands, home to the critical U.S. missile-testing facility at Kwajalein and one of Taiwan’s remaining diplomatic partners. There, Cary Yan and Gina Zhou pleaded guilty in a U.S. federal case to conspiring to bribe Marshallese officials. Prosecutors said they sought legislation establishing a semi-autonomous zone on Rongelap Atoll, with relaxed tax and immigration rules that could benefit their commercial interests.

Paskal sees that case as a warning. Corruption in a remote island legislature can become a matter of global security when the territory involved sits beside indispensable American military infrastructure.

This is not a story about a conventional warfare.

It is about strategic terrain being softened through money, access, intimidation and elite capture. From Saipan to the Marshall Islands, Paskal and Meyer argue that the laws already exist to confront much of this activity. What is missing is consistent enforcement — and the political recognition that defending these islands may be inseparable from preventing China’s aggression against Taiwan, and the West.

By Phil Gurski

OTTAWA — Twenty-five years ago, many of us witnessed an event that changed the world — and us — irrevocably. To label anything “world-changing” is fraught with danger. What exactly chan…

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