American Thought Leaders - Exposing CCP Infiltration Operations in the West, From Money Laundering to Election Interference: Dean Baxendale

Episode Date: October 24, 2023

Dean Baxendale is the CEO of Optimum Publishing International, which has been at the forefront of exposing Chinese communist infiltration in the West—from money laundering to election interference. Optimum Publishing International's new book will be out soon, titled “The Mosaic Effect: How the Chinese Communist Party Started a Hybrid War in America’s Backyard.”

The genesis of this money was coming from billionaire tycoons that are ultimately tied to the PLA and to organized crime in Canada. Dean Baxendale is the publisher of Optimum Publishing International, which has been at the forefront of exposing Chinese communist infiltration in the West. Between 20 and 30 percent of all the deadly fentanyl that is killing Americans is coming through Vancouver. Precursors coming from Guangdong province. Most recently, Optimum is publishing The Mosaic Effect,

how the Chinese Communist Party started a hybrid war in America's backyard. According to my intelligence and journalistic sources, they suggest that as many as seven ridings were turned by the Chinese Communist Party in our last election. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Dean Baxendale, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you, Jan. It's a pleasure to be here in Washington today. Dean, it's really high time that I had you on the show. You know, you've published a number of really, really hard-hitting books, of course, on China and the

Chinese Communist Party, Hidden Hand, Willful Blindness. The one that most recently we were looking at is the one by Scott McGregor, The Mosaic Effect, which is actually coming out fairly soon. Why don't we talk about The Mosaic Effect and some of the really interesting things you discovered in the process of researching this book. Yeah, and actually it goes back to the 2018 provincial election in Ontario, where the then leader of the opposition, the progressive conservative leader Patrick Brown, had spoken in the legislature asking why the Ontario government was awarding billion dollar contracts to a casino operator from British Columbia that seemed to have a rather suspect business

model. In fact, there were numerous reports by Sam Cooper at that time with the Global News and the Province, etc., that was showing hockey bags full of cash with no providence whatsoever coming into the casino, getting chips, and then when they would leave, they would cash out with a cashier's check, and hence that may end up in some kind of real estate. So Sam Cooper, I contacted him and we started talking about transnational organized crime. Optimum Publishing had been involved since the 1970s on bringing forward these narratives about organized crime,

the heroin business, the Canadian Connection, which we published back in the 70s. And that's where it all started. Okay, so what is The Mosaic Effect? So The Mosaic Effect book and the genesis of the Mosaic Effect was the Mosaic Project. The Mosaic Project really was an operation being conducted by my authors really to get a better understanding of the connections between transnational organized crime, threat terror financing, the People's Liberation Army, election interference operations, and ultimately in many cases money being used to suppress the China diaspora communities throughout Canada. But the genesis of this money was coming from billionaire tycoons that are ultimately tied to the PLA and to organized crime in Canada. So you have a backdrop, interestingly enough, that led the authors to do a deep investigation.

We'll call it potentially a counterintelligence operation that allowed them to really look at the United Front and all of its various tentacles in Vancouver, which the authors suggest is ground zero for the infiltration operations of the Chinese Communist Party into the backyard of America to wage hybrid war against America. Okay, I really want to dig into that further. But before we go there, there's been a lot of talk about election interference in Canada. Break it down for me. The election interference which involved here in Washington today, Michael Chong, MP, came to Washington to speak about transnational oppression against him him and the election interference operations, WeChat disinformation that took place in the 2021 election. There are a number of conservative MPs targeted by the Chinese

Communist Party, especially because of the then leader, Aaron O'Toole, had taken a very, very strong stance on China and trying to combat China's coercive operations inside Canada, identifying the issues. Well, the Chinese Communist Party doesn't like anybody to speak out against them. So they ran WeChat campaigns on a number of MPs, including an MP from the West Coast in Richmond, Kenny Chu, Alice Wong. And these campaigns, which the Conservative Party was not prepared or equipped in which to combat in the Chinese languages, ultimately led to the defeat of multiple MPs.

According to my intelligence and journalistic sources, they suggest that as many as seven ridings were turned by the Chinese Communist Party in our last election. was involved with part of the funneling of money to various candidates in the Toronto area as part of the election interference operation. And this was corroborated by Bob Fyfe and Stephen Chase from the Globe and Mail as well. That's astonishing. It's astonishing, but listen, according to Michel Junot-Katsuya, who is the former head of Asia Pacific for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, CSIS, said that this has been going on for 40 years. And when we, you know, when you came here, when we came here to Washington in March and you interviewed Scott, we talked about Operation Dragon Lord, which was an operation done by the Department of Justice, which was a multi-agency

task force that looked into the nexus, what we call the unholy trinity, and then this connection between organized crime and the Chinese Communist Party and key officials slash business and political elites inside Canada, Australia, and even the United States. But they were focused on Canada at the time. So election interference slash, you know, has been going on for over 40 years in Canada. As Michelle Juno-Katsuya, you know, said to the CBC, every prime minister from Brian Mulroney to Justin Trudeau has been compromised by agents of influence of the Chinese Communist Party for 40 plus years. And when the CBC reporter repeated that, she was gobsmacked in this assertion, and he went to say, yes, every single prime minister. So the question is that people getting close to the prime minister, those could be ministerial aides,

they could be agents of influence, contributors to the party. Money has come into Canadian elections directly into the political parties, both of them, the Conservatives and the Liberals, and have ultimately compromised our election process for that many years. So we'll actually roll that clip. Every prime minister, you say, has been compromised by those agents. Every prime minister, every prime minister, every government, every office was compromised. And when we brought the warning, nobody listened. And I remember watching it and just being shocked by it. Not so much about what he was saying, because we both know how the Chinese Communist Party operates, but more so just

that he said it on live television, which, you know, this is something that has been kind of unspeakable for decades. And one of the reasons why they have been unspeakable is because Michel Junot-Katsuya, as does Scott McGregor, find themselves under the Official Secrets Act in Canada. And until something becomes public and is exposed, they have no ability in which to talk about it because they're under their duty and obligation to protect national security and intelligence apparatus secrets within the country. So this provided a rare opportunity for somebody to come out and confirm that indeed these kinds of operations were being conducted by the Chinese Communist Party to undermine our democracy. So in the mosaic effect, you're

bringing in some new information, stuff that I don't even know about as we're recording here. What can we expect? What you're going to expect and what you're going to see is the most comprehensive analysis of the United Front operations inside Canada. The two centres of gravity in Toronto and Vancouver, how these operations are working, both from election interference to transnational repression of the diaspora community, to economic subversion, the purchase and acquisition of critical assets within the country. You will see a situation of the compromise of the mayor of Vancouver. You will see new information about the government's complicity in the police station apparatus with memorandums of understanding between the RCMP and the Chinese Communist Party

that allowed MSS agents to repatriate, shall we say nicely, a number of Chinese dissidents, as opposed to the idea being that these were, the idea was they were repatriating criminals. But that's not the case. So I just want to clarify that for people that might not be familiar with the RCMP. You're basically telling us that the federal police, the Canadian federal police, had an understanding with Chinese Communist Party security services to repatriate people based on the word of those security services. They said they were criminals. The reality was they were whatever the MSS said they were.

Yeah. Under the Harper administration, which was very much a law and order government, this made sense when the Chinese Communist Party came calling to suggest that you have these bad criminals inside your country. We need to repatriate them, we need to locate them inside Canada, and you should therefore extradite them, allow us to bring them back to China to face charges, etc. That seemed like a win-win proposition. But as we, you know, as Ambassador Guy Saint-Jacques, you know, later discovered that there was a lot more going on behind the scenes.

And of course, you know, in the case of my own author, Dolcan Issa, who will be, you know, launching his book, The China Freedom Trap, My Life on the Run, he was under a Interpol red notice for 21 years, sponsored by the Chinese Communist Party, under absolutely garbage claims. There was no. And so we see this and the Canadian government fell prey, as did many governments around the world. This is spoken by safeguard defenders, have brought a lot of attention to these issues around this. But we speak about the MOU specifically in the book, which will be somewhat revelatory for many Canadians and the world to understand just the level of participation that we had with the Chinese Communist Party, until we started to figure out that there was something much more sinister to their repatriation of supposed criminals from China. How is it that people—and this wasn't purely

in Canada, but you may be more familiar with the Canadian story. But how is it that the Canadian government, the Canadian establishment, imagined Chinese Communist Party agents to be good faith actors? Because clearly that would be an assumption that you would need to make to have this kind of agreement. First, you'd have to actually admit that there was agents inside the country. I think that the idea of setting up police stations, which ultimately involved the Ministry of State Security, or MSS, inside the country, seemed to have some logic to law enforcement at the time. The establishment certainly went along with it because it was in their best interest.

And there was also potential financial remuneration so all of a sudden the deal was going to be that 50% of the assets recovered would be shared with the government so now there's a financial windfall for the government for agreeing to go along with this in the case of my author Dolcan Issa, when he was captured, I believe in Korea, and was potentially going to be extradited, he would have faced death. That is what this regime is about. They are evil, and I hate to see what the outcomes are for some of those people. And I look at all of the great work that people in the Hong Kong freedom movement,

in the Tibet movement, in the Uighur Movement are doing to bring light to these issues and tell the world that this is an egregious, atrocious regime that has no place on the world stage. And in part because of their influence in global agencies, it gave them also cover when they went to national governments to say, well, listen, Interpol says that this person's a criminal, etc. So they've used the institutions at the international and national levels to influence them to get their way. So people often forget that the actual head of Interpol, who was a Chinese national, was actually disappeared in China while still head of Interpol. I can't believe I just said that, but that happened.

It did indeed. And it speaks to Xi Jinping and this particular regime, that individuals that somehow run afoul with the regime are going to be accountable to Xi Jinping and the upper echelons of the Politburo. And ultimately, they will disappear individuals who, shall we say, have transgressions that ultimately the powers that be are not interested in condoning nor supporting. But basically the Chinese regime said, you know, this person is so trustworthy as to be given the job of the head of Interpol. Yeah. What's more astonishing is that nation states, democratic states who are part of the decision-making

process in terms of who they hire for that position, not only condoned but supported bringing in the top guy from the Chinese Communist Party. That flabbergasted me in of itself that we have found ourselves falling prey to the trappings of the Chinese Communist Party and their influence operations within these organizations and within the nations, that we've allowed them to run amok and ultimately control the destiny. And ultimately, in the case of Interpol, which is one of the most important international agencies for looking at criminal activity and the worst of the worst, that we're allowing them to make judgment and pass judgment about individuals that may have spoken out truth to power against a nation state like China, Russia, North Korea,

and all of a sudden they're on the list and being hunted down. Imagine being on the list for Dulk and Issa for 21 years. As a matter of fact, when he went to Taiwan just this past week, he was actually, it took some intervention by the Ministry of State in Taiwan to get him into the country because that was still hanging over his head. I was going to say absolutely astonishing, but of course it isn't. But thinking back at that, it's amazing. I'm glad that he got in, and hopefully that notice can be removed off of his record at some point.

I just remembered also, we've talked about Twitter censorship a lot on this show. You yourself, your account or your publishing house's account was censored a while back. Tell me about that. Yeah, so this happened when we brought out Willful Blindness by Sam Cooper and that he had been on a podcast in Vancouver where it was ground zero for the Chinese Communist Party infiltration operations and hybrid warfare. And he had been on this podcast and people within the UFW and Beijing did not like what he was saying and it was being promoted all I did was simply promote this free and

fair interview with my author and I was targeted by the Chinese got by the UFW and ultimately seven accounts of mine were taken down, suggesting that the content that I was promoting was not in the best interest of the Twitter policies. We believe this was actually done by the UFW and actually a senator, a sitting senator, was part of this. Canadian senator, right? Senator Yuen Pao-Wu, who has come out against Sam Cooper and done a number of editorials, along with other Chinese Communist Party parachukes, to ultimately suggest that what we were saying was lies, that we were racists,

that the information we're bringing out tying the transnational organized crime to business tycoons, UFW people, speaking on behalf of Beijing or working directly for them, that these were all lies. Well, of course, we come two years later, and it's not all lies. But they censored my accounts. It took U.S. journalists to get on board and start exposing that, including NTD, who had a great interview on this issue. And after about a week, they finally reinstated my accounts, but gave me a warning that should I engage in such activity again

in promoting false narratives, that I would be censored. Well, I haven't been censored since, but it was because the journalistic community came to our defense that we were able to get our accounts reinstated. Yeah, and I think this was pre-Elon Musk's purchase of the platform. Correct. Yes, it was. This is in 2021. Right, exactly. Now, I mean, so have you had any other brushes with censorship? So Sam Cooper, after we published Willful Blindness for the first time around, CSIS, the, again, Canadian Security Intelligence Service, contacted him for a briefing specifically around the release of the book

and the effect that the book was having on creating a narrative that the Chinese Communist Party was clearly not happy with in Canada. And they started an operation to collect information on Sam Cooper and myself and to see if we were aligned with the five poisons. In other words, working with the Falun Dafa, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Uyghurs, and Tibetans. And, you know, am I working with them as a publisher? Well, I'm representing all those viewpoints through the authors, Benedict Rogers, Dolkan Issa, you know, Clive Hamilton, Marecki Olberg, who have published all these issues. So the answer is yes, I guess I am aligned to the five poisons.

What I'm actually aligned to is freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom of democracy, and that is what we should be supporting. And yet our legislators in Canada, the United States and around the world have been slow to come to the table to actually put the safeguards in place for people like Sam Cooper as a journalist and myself as a publisher being attacked using lawfare to silence us. And as the chair of the China Democracy Fund, who worked on the Professor Anne Marie's case, which basically she was being censored by our university based on a UFW proxies who were professors in New Zealand universities, you know, we had to fight back very hard. So the Chinese Communist Party, no matter what, is going to put out as much as they can to disenfranchise, to silence, and to keep their critics in check. But the reality is that

now we've moved a couple of years forward. We've created the platform. I would say not that the gig is up. China is redoubling all of their efforts all the time. But ultimately, now people in Congress, people in Parliament in Canada, in the UK, throughout the world, are very much aware of these tactics and see through them now, whereas a few years ago they did not. And I'll direct our viewers to American Thought Leader's interviews, both with Sam Cooper and Scott McGregor. We were talking about some of the early work around mosaic effect. You mentioned that your publishing house, you're already publishing hard-hitting stuff in the 70s. So how did you get into all this?

So my father was in the publishing business starting in the 70s. He worked for what was called a weekend magazine, which was the weekly magazine that was in every newspaper across the country back in the 70s and early 80s. He was the managing director of that. He started Optimum Publishing. And the focus of Optimum at the time was around national politics, the environment, we did everything from cookbooks, social issues, public policy issues, but organized crime and true crime was one of the key areas that my father specialized in. And so that started, you know, in the 70s with the Canadian Connection. And interestingly enough, the Canadian Connection, which was part of the movie of the French Connection, is the back end

of the heroin trafficking business that ultimately, most of it was being filtered through Montreal, not getting through New York because there was too many issues with the unions. They didn't have control over them. In Montreal, they had complete control of the ports, the heroin was flowing in, and then went to the United States through those ports. So that's how we kind of got started in that, and, you know, into these hard-hitting kinds of books, and so that's what Optimum had specialized in. And then when I took over, you know, when my father left the company to me after his passing, he suggested over, you know, when my father left the company to me after his passing, he suggested that, you know, I should do this because I can afford to be a publisher. And he gave the rest of the money to my siblings. So, and in that tradition, in that vein, one of

the key things he told me about, you know, publishing about organized crime is that organized crime members love to read about themselves. They love the notoriety and so it's fair game for you to publish about them because they really like it. I said well what's the downside? He said well the only downside is if you spell their name wrong. I said well what happens then? Well then they'll kill you. And so it was a bit of a joke, but they threatened one of his authors. I think they shot his author just as a warning. But in an upcoming book with Gary Clement called undercover inside the RCMP and organized crime, Gary recounts the fact that the Hell's Angel put

a hit out on him. And he kind of, you know, being a cop that he was, nonchalantly kind of deals with it, goes to the clubhouse and says, you guys want to, you know, you guys want to come after me, you're coming after the whole force. And basically they removed the hit from him right away. But, you know, there's always a relationship between organized crime and police, and there's obviously a lot of things that go on. And, you know, the police have a really, really tough job, especially in Canada these days, in terms of combating these organized crime groups, because ultimately it's all about the money, and it's all about the money laundering operations and they're moving billions of dollars through real estate and banks inside Canada around the world. Canada has,

you know, as Sam Cooper pointed out, over a hundred billion dollars a year is laundered in Canada by organized crime and that also includes some very nefarious terrorist groups. And there is an actual association, as Scott McGregor points out in the mosaic effect, between organized crime and terrorists. No one believed in the security and intelligence apparatus in America that that could possibly take place. But they were in the security and intelligence apparatus in America, that that could possibly take place. But they were in the Middle East. He was part of a joint kind of forces operation with the U.S.,

and they proved this out. And so it's very scary for us to safeguard freedom and democracy when we have criminals helping to facilitate the transactions and operations that may undermine our very democracy. Right. Alongside terrorists and so forth. I've been thinking about Venezuela, as you're talking, I'm thinking about Venezuela, which has kind of made itself

into a kind of a haven for money from all the most illicit regimes. Yeah, I mean, I think there are... You don't think of Canada. for money from all the most illicit regimes, right? Yeah, I mean, I think there are… You don't think of Canada. I guess that's what I'm saying, right? You think of Venezuela. No, because, you know, as I've been coming to Washington for the past couple of years, I've been emphasizing the fact that, you know, Canada is your problem.

You know, Canada is the conduit and the success apparatus and mechanism, Vancouver being ground zero, for the hybrid war against America. And 25, you know, between 20 and 30 percent of all the deadly fentanyl that is killing Americans is coming through Vancouver. Precursors coming from Guangdong province under the full guise and understanding of the Chinese Communist Party. In fact in the book and Willful Blind Sin we talked about mosaic effect as well. The RCMP asked for help from the Chinese Communist Party and this was during the Meng Wanzhou incident. Basically they

turned a blind eye. We're not going to do anything. In other words, we're helping to facilitate the reverse opium war against the world. And they're using it to destabilize and undermine democracies yet again. 100,000 people dying from opioid fentanyl overdoses directly could be controlled and stopped by the Chinese Communist Party. And the fact that we have very little ability in which to interdict and stop the flow of these precursors coming into North America, Mexico, Canada. And Vancouver is the distribution point for many of these going back actually to Asia. They don't manufacture there for the supply comes out of Vancouver going back to Japan, Australia, New Zealand, etc.

So it's big business. There's a lot of money involved. And, you know, you can die with that $20 pill that you purchase on the street. Well, and given the relationship between the CCP and organized crime, that flow could be stopped in an instant. Absolutely. As I understand it. Yes, flow could be stopped in an instant, as I understand it. Yes, it could be. But there's no willingness, and it forms part of another tentacle of the hybrid warfare strategy by the Chinese Communist Party, ultimately, to destabilize democracies

around the world. So tell me a bit about what the China Democracy Fund is doing. The China Democracy Fund was formed by a number of academics, some journalists, editors, publishers, former academics, some politicians, first in defense of Professor Anne-Marie Brady's case, where she was being censored ostensibly by her university in the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. By the way, for writing on magic weapons and the Chinese influence over Communist Party influence operations. Correct. It was called her paper with a pen in one hand and a gun in the other. And ultimately this was about

academia in New Zealand transferring sensitive information on military secrets with respect to weapons systems off to the Chinese military through universities doing research in New Zealand. And so she was calling out those professors and what was going on inside of New Zealand. And so she was calling out those professors and what was going on inside of New Zealand. And so that's where the genesis of the China Democracy Fund happened. And most recently, I've been working on the case for Daniel Suidani, who was the deposed premier of Maleta province from the Solomon Islands. We know the Solomon Islands ostensibly has been taken over by the PRC and the Sogavare government

ultimately is a puppet government of the Chinese Communist Party and I've written about this in the Sunday Guardian in Delhi before and I'm working with those people hopefully to support their bid to put more democratic, democracy, ethically based individuals back into their parliament in the Solomon Islands next time around. Hopefully that takes place in April of next year. The Prime Minister had stopped the elections because he said we have to do the Pacific Games which is highly sponsored by China. And Saudi Arabia recently came through with an $8 million, I believe, donation to those games.

But China controls the infrastructure. It is actually a microcosm of what we call the Vancouver model for money laundering operations and how they infiltrated the Solomon Islands through influence operations, bribes, etc. It's a classic example just showing itself quite readily there in the islands. So what's next for you in Optimum Publishing? Oh, I think, you know, first of all, we've got a lot of work ahead of us. Our authors, you know, who have come to us, you know, recently are, to bring these very, very important stories forward. Whenever anybody is questioning or, you know, truth to power and ultimately trying to challenge the convention and oftentimes people's voices who have been silenced, they'll come to Optimum because, you know, we're willing to work with them, take the risks together to bring their stories forward.

I'm not brave. It's the people that I work for, which ultimately are my authors, to bring their stories forward because they have all the stories, the incidents, the oppression against them, or in the case of the organized crime, etc., exposing these types of things so that global leaders and citizens can understand what's going on behind the scenes. Well, Dean Baxendale, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Jan, thank you so much for having me. Thank you all for joining Dean Baxendale and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.

I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.