American Thought Leaders - From Agroterrorism to Bioweapons Research: How the CCP Infiltrates the West | Sam Cooper

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

A 33-year-old researcher and her 34-year-old boyfriend, both Chinese nationals, were recently charged with allegedly smuggling into America a fungus called Fusarium graminearum, a potential bioterrorism weapon.This recent case is just the tip of the iceberg, says investigative reporter Sam Cooper.He played a key part in uncovering a similar case in Winnipeg, Canada.“A married couple from China had been allegedly—according to the documents we now have access to—working with the highest levels of the Chinese military’s bioweapons program in Ebola research,” Cooper says. “They were running, clandestinely, materials from China and connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology into the Winnipeg lab.”For years, Cooper has been at the forefront of exposing Chinese Communist Party infiltration in the West.He is the founder of The Bureau and author of “Wilful Blindness: How a Criminal Network of Narcos, Tycoons, and Chinese Communist Party Agents Infiltrated the West.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. 

A young 33-year-old university student from China was discovered by FBI counterintelligence to be coordinated in smuggling a potential agro-terror weapon into the United States, lying about it. This recent case of alleged agro-terrorism is just the tip of the iceberg, says investigative reporter Sam Cooper. In fact, he played a key part in uncovering a similar case in Winnipeg, Canada last year. A married couple from China had been allegedly working with the highest levels of Chinese military's bioweapon program in Ebola research. They were running clandestinely materials from China and connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology into the Winnipeg lab.

For years, Cooper has been at the forefront of exposing Chinese Communist Party infiltration of Canada. He's the author of Willful Blindness, How Criminal Network of Narcos, Tycoons and Chinese Communist Party Agents Infiltrated the West. No one is like the Chinese Communist Party in terms of the inseparable integration with transnational organized crime. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Sam Cooper, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Great to join you, Jan.

Well, Sam, you've been doing some unbelievable work. I'm just going to read your newest headline because it speaks to something on both sides of our border. Exclusive analysis, Chinese couple smuggled agro-terrorism weapon fungus into the US. We've heard about that. Echoing Winnipeg Lab Ebola espionage case. Why don't we start by you just giving me a picture of what this agroterrorism weapon side things was, and why does this reminisce of that Winnipeg case some years back? Well, Jan, as you know, I've been following China's deep infiltration of North America for years. So when a new case pops up from the FBI, I'm able to compare to my findings that have come out in Canada. The case in Michigan and Texas, we're still getting our heads around it, but I think people are rightly

stunned that a young 33 year old university student from China, a Communist Party member with her boyfriend was discovered by FBI counterintelligence to be coordinated in smuggling a potential agrotarot weapon into the United States, lying about it. And the record shows they were evidently working on this material in these two schools, in Texas and Michigan, and they had previously been working on this at the same university in China. What really struck me from the findings included, found on the young woman's phone was her pledge of loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party, which included ties to her research grant funding. Other stunning information, of course, as you know, Jan, we're we're we're in a cold war that appears to be getting pretty hot between Beijing and Washington. And so this type of case raises the concern that Chinese

students with connectivity to Chinese research grants, which evidence shows from previous cases from the FBI is part of China's thousand talents dual use plan. These types of let's just call them potential agents of the Chinese military are using North American research facilities to potentially work on bio weapons. And so there's a lot more to that case,

but I can jump into my, where I think I'm adding world level reporter value is the cases in Canada that speak to those findings. So the Winnipeg lab case, evidence has trickled out very, I would say unwillingly out of Ottawa for years now that a couple again, a married couple from China had been allegedly, according to the documents we now have access to working with the highest levels of Chinese

military's bio-weapon program in Ebola research, of course, from the Chinese side, this is about defensive technology, but CSIS records that have come out in Ottawa, due in part to my digging, show that these two scientists in the Winnipeg lab were covertly running Chinese military connected research students, their research students undercover, but they were being run into Canada with visa fraud, they were running clandestinely materials from China and connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology into the

Winnipeg lab. So there's a lot going on there but my top level findings are we have Chinese couple who have pledged loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party. Evidence shows they have been working, at least the woman, Dr. Chu in Winnipeg, working with the highest levels of the People's Liberation Army bioweapon program. Documents show that Dr. Chu in Canada was clandestinely working on two projects for the Wuhan lab, Ebola, Gain of Function, using Canada's facilities, and the bat filovirus projects,

which others have shown also involved controversial US based researchers. And so we could talk for a few hours about this case alone, but those findings of visa fraud, but clandestine bio weapon potential bio weapon research using North American facilities clandestinely. It looks like sending that biotechnology back to China and posing a threat, I believe, to our lives in North America, if not already during the pandemic. Those are my top-level comparative findings. I mean, absolutely fascinating. I can't help but remember just looking at some of the email correspondence between some top top US government officials in the sciences and also the Wuhan

Institute people. And just like the character of the communication, it's this sort of chummy, like we're in this together. There's no seemingly awareness of the fact that this is obviously a dual-use facility in Wuhan, that it's not just a research, it's a military operation. If indeed there is even a non-military element to it. Of course, everything in Communist China functions in this dual use or hybrid way. What lesson can the FBI right now glean from the reporting you've done on the Winnipeg lab? I think there's a lot of lessons. And the first one is, unfortunate to say, as a Canadian, the FBI should be very wary of the government in Ottawa and their lack of by the way opposition parties had the parliamentary authority to request

documents back in 2021 to ask, you know, what is going on in that Winnipeg lab when news broke that the RCMP reportedly was investigating this husband and wife team. And the government then investigating this husband and wife team. And the government then through a law case refused to disclose that information. I was always like you. I was struck by the emails that came out through freedom of information, including my investigations that Dr. Chu in the Winnipeg lab

appeared to be bullying in her tone to Canada's government. She seemed at in my judgment to be under such pressure to deliver unknown quantities, unknown materials in some cases, but what we do know, the engineered Ebola products that she had sent to the Wuhan lab, as well as other highly dangerous pathogens. I remember in one memorable email, she emailed a superior and said, essentially, what's the holdup? The crown doesn't regulate the crown, essentially saying, in my view,

she was saying, this department in Ottawa can't tell Health Canada, who already has authorization, that we can't ship these materials to Wuhan. I saw the same bullying and pushing tone from scientists in the Wuhan lab. Their identities are redacted, but I believe that I could see the tradecraft of the Chinese Communist Party, apparently pushing the Canadian scientists around. The lessons for the FBI of Kash Patel, the lessons for the CIA, the lessons for all American,

including military intelligence, I believe that came out of what we know, what we're able to know from the Winnipeg lab is that case goes very deep. Dr. Chu added her scientific capacity under a high-level thousand talents program to the bat filovirus project. And as we say, to gain a function for Ebola, there is no evidence that Dr. Chu sent any materials from the Winnipeg lab related to the the bat filovirus. We do know according to the CSIS records that have come out that she was hired by Wuhan to give them the at least the appearance of having the high-level safety standards of the West. So I'll boil down my my top line

answer to you. Washington needs to be concerned that this case in Winnipeg has shown that Ottawa has not responded to its intelligence warnings on insider threats. And when news did break, there was a big concern in Winnipeg. The parliament of prior Prime Minister Justin Trudeau covered the case up. And they even pointed to the opposition MPs asking for answers and suggested this was anti-Chinese and racist to suggest that anything untoward with regards to

China's use of the Winnipeg lab had happened in Canada. had happened in Canada. This is just absolutely astonishing. Sam, you've been on the cutting edge of understanding how deep some of this infiltration goes, whether it's through what I think it's called the unholy trinity, right? It's the business tycoons and the triads, and then of course the CCP itself, the state security, all working together to facilitate outcomes for the CCP. You've kind of documented this in multiple extensive ways, along with the numerous other people. But I want to go for a moment to your book, A Willful Blindness, which I love the title, because I think what you seem to have been talking about just now is willful blindness. Absolutely. And as you raise my book,

the top line thesis, which is essentially now confirmed in US congressional hearings, that elite Chinese Communist Party members, very unfortunately, are involved in dark alliances with global Chinese triad actors, including in Mexico City, very strongly set up in Toronto, Markham, Ontario, Vancouver, Richmond, British Columbia. The CCP is involved in fentanyl trafficking. The US government now says this in 2024, 2025. My book was indicating it in 2021 because I had Canadian intelligence, leaked documents from the past, and I had sources in Canada and United States with that intelligence visibility.

And what you raise when you talk about that dark alliance, it brings to mind that a figure that the great Australian researcher, Alex Jostky, into United Front and Ministry of State Security Networks in one of his reports on the Thousand Talents of a very elite actor in Markham, Ontario, who is being investigated for the Chinese police station activity. My information strongly indicates involved at the highest levels of trade and organized crime activity with connectivity at the highest levels of the United Front to the point where this individual

can be shown shaking hands with Xi Jinping at one of these state level presidential level United Front Work Department meetings in Beijing. This is all on video. Here's the point. This individual is pictured at a thousand talent station in Markham, Ontario, in Alex Jostky's research, standing beside him, Canada's former ambassador to China, John McCallum. So that just, I think in a nutshell, in a case study that brings together the Winnipeg Lab story. I believe it should bring in the Michigan and Texas threat network story, at least in the big picture, that the thousand talents and dual use is being used to run agents into North America disguised as students or leveraged as students by United Front actors, who I'm asserting with 100%

confidence are also involved at elite levels of CCP police station and organized crime activity. So sometimes when I step back at my findings, I almost have to give my head a shake and go back to my sources, whether they be at senior levels in the State Department, DEA, RCMP, Canadian Intelligence and say, are all these connections right? And they say to a sentence and to a word, 100% what you're reporting, Sam, we know a lot of it's classified. That's why we can't always come out and say it. but I do believe in comments we've recently heard from Cash Patel on Fox News. I know you saw them. He said, Canada has a problem, especially in Vancouver, with the Chinese Communist Party interconnecting with Mexican cartels and Iranian threat actors.

And so that's what I pointed to in Willful Blindness. Let's do a couple of definitions along the way, just for the benefit of our audience, for people who might not know the terminology. For a quick, very, very quickly, the Thousand Talents program, what is that? This is a research program that the FBI in recent years has publicly said. publicly said, China, at the highest levels, is running essentially a Chinese military funded program to reach out to, in many cases, Chinese ethnic migrant researchers who are working in the West, and to offer them while they maintain

their jobs at Western universities. So getting one paycheck, having access to our high intellectual property labs that are taxpayer funded, as you know, these people are offered secondary grants to at the same time be working for Chinese universities. And if we can picture it visually, according to the FBI, Alex Jostky and the experts, this is a dual use clandestine tunnel of sucking out, to use a vernacular word, vacuuming out Western intellectual property under the cover of academic research, but sending it directly to the capacity of the People's Liberation Army. So this would be applicable to, I believe, Huawei's growth. I believe it would be applicable to what I

have reported, you know, based on Western intelligence, Huawei's clandestine takedown of Nortel, Canada's former leading 5G, you know, crown jewel. So high-tech should be bioweapon research. Thousand Talents would apply to the Winnipeg lab, and it would apply in general to that agro-terror alleged or potential agro-terror research case with the news breaking this week. And just very quickly, we hear about Chinese police stations. What's the situation in Canada with Chinese police stations? The situation in terms of functionality is very similar to the situation in the United States, where we have indictments in New York City of it has turned out alleged proxies for the Chinese

state working with the Ministry of Public Security to collect information on residents in New York City. And it turns out that the actors are from Fujian province. So they're called Fuso compatriot societies. And the difference in Canada is these very same networks are active in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, consistent of purportedly hometown associations from across China, but working within Beijing's funded foreign influence arm, the United Front Work Department, these hometown associations are tasked clandestinely by Ministry of Public Security officers to maintain illegal, right?

These aren't legal by the Vienna Convention, illegal clandestine consulates on Canadian and American soil. But what I wanted to add though, the RCMP has announced investigations and subsequently charges, mind you that only came out after safeguard defenders informed the world of how these so-called 110, which relates to the Ministry of Public Security stations, are running around the world. The RCMP hasn't charged anyone. And Jan, I think this concerns certainly some of the experts I talked to because the individuals that my sourcing indicates are under investigation are frequently

pictured with the elite Canadian politicians. And as I've said, associated to the thousand talents program. So I think it raises the fair question that we have charges in New York City. Of course, the same things are going on. We have community leaders from Fujian now living in New York, Boston, many areas in the United States pictured with American politicians. It raises concern, but we have some charges in the U.S. We don't have charges that we can report in Canada. It's interesting that you mentioned the United Front because both of these types of operations fit into the

overall rubric of the United Front. This is something many years ago, I can't remember. I remember when we first discovered this United Front and started reporting on the fact that it existed and was functioning in North America, nobody wanted to believe us. that it existed and was functioning in North America. Nobody wanted to believe us. Yeah, it literally is a conspiracy. And conspiracies

are hard to report and they're hard to believe. Rightfully, you don't want people believing every wild story that comes out. but the evidence behind the United Front and how it was massively, it's always been there since Chairman Mao, you know, his first spymaster, Zhou Enlai. We can read Alex Jostki's report about how Zhou Enlai said, "'The United Front shall be used to conceal the illegal within the legal.'" And that's exactly what the United Front Work Department does.

Its first victim is the Chinese people. So there's only so many Chinese Communist Party members sitting on top of, you know, a population of one point four billion. The United Front is the core entity used to maintain control from the highest levels over all that population who are not CCP members. It's now being rolled out as researchers like Alex Jostky have proven through documents across the world and ramped up massively under Xi Jinping in 2012. So I agree with you. This stuff, it's hard to believe that the CCP has such an active functioning party

involved in our democratic systems. But that's what the United Front is. It's there to surround our politicians, our business leaders, our police officers with clandestine operatives from Beijing under the cover of purported community associations. So again, remember, I hit this home all the time when I'm trying to explain the United Front, blending the illegal with the legal or using the legal to conceal the illegal. That's fascinating. I love that particular characterization. We saw you see it in entities

like the Confucius Institutes, which are extensively educational institutions, but also the factors of influence or elements of this overall influence strategy. There's also this other dimension, and this is something that's really on my mind lately since the CCP escalated actions against us, the Epoch Times, and various Falun Gong-related entities like Shen Yun and practitioners in general. There's been this escalation of focus in the foreign sphere, perhaps ostensibly because of the success. There's been intelligence that tells us that it's because of the success of these institutions.

The thing that strikes me most here is that it's going to be local people, foreign people that the CCP believes are under their jurisdiction, which are essentially anyone coming out of communist China, Han Chinese, or various ethnic groups that are within China, but also people like yourself and people like me fit into that, either through influence or coercion. And you've actually done some reporting on this. Maybe you can give me a picture.

Yeah, I can give you a picture based on documentation, and I can relate it to what you say about perceiving an intensification of attacks on Falun Gong from the United Front. There is a police report I have read about a United Front Work Department leader, the same individual I referred to earlier in this interview that is seen shaking hands with Xi Jinping in 2019, who I am asserting is involved in Canada's election interference networks, which my reporting revealed, who is involved in RCMP investigations of CCP police stations, not charged by the way.

This individual allegedly brazenly threatened Falun Gong members who were protesting about the inclusion of a Confucius Institute in Toronto in 2014. Furthermore, my evidence that intelligence sources who accurately sourced my Canada federal election interference stories provided me the view on documents that said, uh, one of these United Front groups in Toronto, who I am saying is led by the individual I'm pointing to received $1 million to run $1 million from the Toronto Chinese consulate to run fake counter protests against, you know, those who were speaking out against Confucius Institutes. So all of this evidence is speaking towards the high level actors. My way of research has always been you can see the high level actors in Canada that are involved at the highest levels in casino crime at the highest levels, I believe, of global money laundering

that is moving money around the world for Mexican cartels dealing fentanyl. Unfortunately, in Canada, my photo evidence shows these same actors meeting with senior Canadian elected officials, whether it's in Vancouver, Toronto, or Ottawa. So transnational repression, I believe, is flowing down again from Ministry of Public Security, Ministry of State Security, the People's Liberation Army, the United Front Work Department that we've been speaking about, and these senior, on the surface, legit businessmen in North American cities that are really, I'm saying, at the elite level of global gangsters, because they are

facilitated and enabled by Chinese intelligence networks, they are the ones thuggishly in the community, whether it's New York, Boston, Toronto, Vancouver, Los Angeles, they are the ones that the diaspora knows are dangerous. They are what Canadian intelligence documents call high harm proxies. That means I believe they could be responsible for transnational repression that would go up to bodily harm, potentially to the highest levels. Forced repatriations, perhaps even kidnapping in some countries. That's how bad transnational repression gets.

And people in the community have been telling me about this for a journalist, as a journalist for a long time, the threats are real. Joseph Tay, in the journalist for a long time, the threats are real. Joseph Tay, in the recent federal election in Canada, running in a very key riding, was the subject of such repression, both on a cyber level from Beijing, and I believe at a physical level where he was trying to campaign that as I reported later confirmed by the New York Times, Mr. Tay was warned by the RCMP. They thought it wasn't safe for him to go knock on doors.

And the thought that that raises in, in, in myself and members of the community that I've spoken to, including Francis Kui, who herself is a community leader from Hong Kong, also sanctioned by Beijing's national security law and now living in the Massachusetts, Boston area. These people say, why did the RCMP not provide protection to Joseph Tay so that he could run a fair campaign and knock on doors? Why have they not acted on these transnational repression networks? Yeah, and that's a case that I'm still working on,

both in the American side and the Canadian side, and it deeply troubles me. And I'll finish my answer. My knowledge of repression, unfortunately, is direct. I myself, as a reporter in Canada at the leading edge of exposing these networks, and now North America, I was asked to testify in Canada's parliament in 2023 about how Beijing is threatening Canadian politicians. This is before the Joseph Tay case.

Two days after I testified, an RCMP national security unit knocked on my door and said they had legal authorization to warn me that they had learned about a credible threat against myself as a journalist. And I'm not stepping forward to share this sensitive information with you today as a victim. I'm saying that I have the capacity and connections to protect and to expose. But people in the community perhaps have been living for a long time under the same and serious threats and Canada's government hasn't acted and still isn't acting. We still lack a foreign agent registry in Canada, even though Canada's parliament in 2024,

after my investigative reports, tabled and voted for unanimously a foreign agent registry, it's still not implemented, almost shockingly. Yeah, and of course, Frances Hui, a very well-known dissident from Hong Kong, a million Hong Kong dollar bounty on her head remains. It's almost hard to believe. This is someone who, as a teenager, was fighting for freedom in the most peaceful way imaginable. It saddens me. It stuns me. Jan, I'm still working on the story about Francis Hui and the community's reaction to the fact that a jury didn't move forward with a conviction against the man that allegedly was involved in stalking Francis in 2019. You remember there were so many cases across the world of these

young, brilliant, brave, in in many cases, very young Hong Kong democracy activists in cities around the world, Australia, United States, Canada, protesting for freedom in Hong Kong, protesting against the takeover of the Chinese police state. And in so many cities, Boston, Toronto, Vancouver, we saw thugs, you know, many of them associated to high-end cars threatening people like Francis Hui, threatening people, you know, from Joe Tay's community in Toronto and Vancouver to the point where there's WeChat evidence of these thugs that are tasked by Beijing, tasked by these criminals living in Toronto, Vancouver and other cities. We

saw messages shared among them with pictures of weapons saying that in Francis's case, they said, you know, shoot her in the face. So deeply saddening the results in Boston. I'll be looking into that, but I'll say this, at least a case went forward. Joseph Tay, my latest reporting, along with others, indicated his family members in Hong Kong were brought in for questioning. Again, to just continue producing the tentacles, rather the

thuggish fists almost of pressure on these brave people like Joseph Tay around the world. And we still don't have an adequate response from Ottawa. Well, let's talk about that a little bit. This is a pretty standard tactic. Many people, unfortunately, working at Epoch Times, especially on the Chinese side of Epoch Times, have experienced exactly this. You come up with a good article, you have a prominent video interview, you say something that's particularly sensitive to the regime, next thing you know, you're getting a phone call from your elderly father saying, I've just been paid a visit, they're here, and I've been asked to convey a message to you. explicit. It's not explicit. It's just that, hey, we're here.

Absolutely. And this is one of those things that it's hard to believe. Again, the average person around the world, if they read a story like this, hard to believe. But we've seen the cases. There was a case in Australia where a brave young woman shared, you know, the video evidence of one of her family members sitting with the Ministry of Public Security in China. And I forget the exact words, but absolutely. For anyone, you know, shaking their head and saying, this isn't going on in the West, it's happening and the videos show it. And again, this is the linkage, Ministry of Public Security in China, applying those veiled or sometimes not veiled threats to family members.

Get your relative in New York, Toronto or Melbourne to be quiet or else. And then the other end of the Ministry of Public Security, using proxies in these illegal Chinese police stations on our Western soil to enforce that threat into the community on the ground. And as I say, using the most feared organized crime thugs in the communities and enriching them in their criminality. That's the trade-off there. and enriching them in their criminality. That's the tradeoff there. I want to go back to this unholy trinity idea because it's hard for people to imagine often that it's really the Chinese state security, the CCP working hand in hand with the criminals, with the triads, with the gangs, and with the wealthy businessmen

altogether. And this is quite notably, for example, in the real estate, causing the real estate market in Vancouver to explode in ways that are even difficult to imagine in some of the richest communities in the world. Yeah, it really is a tremendously sophisticated and I'm not ashamed to say tremendously evil system because there's lots of governments around the world that in one way or another, they may interact with a

little bit of organized crime. But as I know, and as my elite experts in North America and the West say, no one is like the Chinese Communist Party in terms of the, the inseparable integration with transnational organized crime. So it works through my recent reporting at the Bureau has shown that the United Front Work Department and its leaders are literally architecting underground banking and money laundering systems. They are architecting drug collection brokerage houses, cash laundering brokerage

systems for the Mexican cartels that are on the front end, brutally of dealing fentanyl that is, of course, ultimately sourced from precursors in China and the latest evidence from the US Congressional hearings in the past year and investigations are, for example, the US government knows that Chinese Communist Party members have so-called golden shares of fentanyl precursor production factories. Chinese Communist Party members, I believe at governor level and the people surrounding them have direct business relationships with these global triad leaders that happened to be set up very strongly in Canada, as I reported in Willful Blindness and Continued Report.

So that the level of interconnectivity between China being behind the global narcotics trade, as the U.S. experts I talk to say China is upstream, the cartels are below them and they're working together. The money laundering is controlled by Beijing's United Front Work Department in many ways. And it interweaves with the Belt and Road development projects that we hear about around the world, sort of debt trap diplomacy,

corruptive development projects often in, you know, not wealthy countries where Beijing wants influence. And as my most recent reporting shows, the global drug bosses working with China and enriched and protected by Chinese security are using, you are using drug cash around the world to fund these Belt and Road projects and to send those profits back to enrich the communist regime. So that's how deep and integrated and sophisticated that connectivity of organized crime drug cash and Beijing is. It goes right to the top and it can't be separated.

crime drug cash, and Beijing is. It goes right to the top and it can't be separated. You've been covering the fentanyl trade on the Canada side, the Canada-U.S. border for some time. I saw that you recently noticed that there seems to be an increase in lab activity, cartel activity on the Canadian side. We're talking about Mexican cartels here? What are we talking about? Yes, this is a very little known until recently factor, and that is that Canada, of course, like every nation, has and has always had organized crime. In Canada, it was often groups related to traditional Italian mafia and outlaw biker gangs that were understood to be very strong in Canada. But as my expert source reporting has shown, since roughly the early 2000s in Canadian cities, especially Vancouver and Toronto, also Quebec, Montreal, Mexican cartels with ultraviolence have moved in

and have been involved in taking over the highest levels of organized crime in Canada. So that is using Canadian cities, using corporate structures, law offices, transportation networks. And as the book Willful Blindness showed, even higher as I'm indicating the Chinese Communist Party and their united front networks, and these tycoons and triad leaders that are empowered by Beijing working together in providing precursors for fentanyl labs set up on Canadian soil. Iranian Middle Eastern threat networks are also very strongly involved. And I had been reporting this for a long time, since 2021.

And I think that's why people, well, people were shocked when Cash Patel came out and pointed to those exact networks in Canada on his Fox News interview. But as I know, this, we can just call it a takeover of organized crime in Canada has been happening at a deep level, especially if we're focusing on the cartels for 10 to 15 years now. And the story that I broke recently is that major investigations in Canada have raised the concerns that Mexican cartels along with Chinese triads are using Indigenous First Nations land in Canada. using Indigenous First Nations land in Canada. And the key point here is that they are using this land for production. We know of illegal tobacco, for example. I believe also the worst

of synthetic narcotics, weapons trafficking is involved on these Indigenous lands. And the key thing here is, as in America, indigenous bands, due to very well-known historic harms, they have won, for good reasons, jurisdiction in many ways over these lands. But what has happened is, if we're talking about Mexican cartels, Chinese triads, who I'm saying are integrated with state networks and empowered by state networks, they are coming in onto these First Nations lands in Canada, as

a stronger authority, almost as a government level, as I'm saying, a criminal government,, as I'm saying, a criminal government and using this land, often in Ontario and Quebec, right along the American border and spread out. In some cases, we call it the six nations, six Indigenous nations in Ontario and Quebec, they have cross border access between Canada and the United States. So in my view, I think this will be what Washington at an intelligence level is very concerned with. These land corridors in Ontario and Quebec being used and being used easily and clandestinely by, I believe it's 170 criminal groups that have access to those First Nation lands and are using it to cross the border with drugs, weapons, and human trafficking. This should involve via

the terror suspects that Kash Patel is concerned about. My reporting in previous months and years has also raised concerns about. I saw fairly recently a Washington Post headline about the reduced movement of fentanyl and drugs across the southern border. The headline suggested that the reasons are complex and difficult to figure out why that might be. My guess is it might have to do with the fact that the movement of people across the border has been dramatically restricted. But that's just my, I guess, correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation. But has there been a change on the northern border in response to those changes on the southern border? I believe so.

And this has been very controversial in Canada, with President Trump pointing to Canada and saying, along with more recently, Cash Patel, that Canada is increasingly responsible for the flow of fentanyl into the United States. There's not always, you know, fulsome data to back that up. But in conjunction, I had to smile when you raised that Washington Post headline. Look, there are Mexican cartel operatives that have said, President Trump, in some ways, we respect that he has come out and said he's going to protect his people and there have been numerous cartel bosses now extradited from Mexico to the United States.

And we know that the US military is now set up on the southern border. So I don't think we need to be necessarily a high level detective to discover that even the Mexican cartels are saying that Trump crackdown and the crackdown on the flow of people at the southern border would be, you know, what is responsible for that sealing of the southern border. But in the past months, I have been reporting, you know, based on in some, sometimes senior level sources from US agencies that can't be named. They said, what we are concerned about is that we have sealed up the Mexican border. America since 2004, I believe, really started to crack down on labs, whether they were methamphetamine at that time.

And that's when the lab set up strongly in Mexico, you know, from 2005 onwards. There's some major cases that show that. But what my US experts said was Canada increasingly is where the super labs are set up because you have you have weaker laws and your government no one is wanting to point fingers too much you know they don't want to increase the the tension and rhetoric but our government in Ottawa hasn't been responsive and as I reported in in Willful Blindness this has been going on, the scaling up of labs, I pointed to it in 2021. My book has a picture of Vancouver with an artistic representation of blue fentanyl pills exploding out of that port. the book have that? Why did I suggest Vancouver was such a problem for the world with fentanyl? Because we could already see labs spreading out across what we call the lower

mainland. So that's the Vancouver area. And now they're on, as I say, more rural areas in Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec. This is a growing concern. Yeah, and we're going to be doing some more reporting in this vein on our end as well at Epoch Times. We have some things in the works, so to speak. When it comes to Canada, there is a new government. Mark Carney is the new prime minister. It seems like an opportunity to change the approach to all these things. Absolutely. Prime Minister Carney, his rhetoric has been

a little bit hard to decipher at times. His party, the former government, and himself during the campaign were openly dismissive to the Canadian public of Washington's concerns that Canada is increasingly a vulnerability for fentanyl production and trafficking and across the borders. And yet, as we now know, privately with President Trump, and after being elected in a very public White House meeting, Prime Minister Carney said he thanked President Trump for his attention to the fentanyl crisis. So there's absolutely an opportunity now that Prime Minister Carney has won. As we both know, Yan, politics is a tough game and sometimes the truth

can get lost or buried during campaigns. Prime Minister Carney has an opportunity to to implement very strong measures to crack down on fentanyl and to work with the American government. As you know, Mexican cartels have

now been designated as terror organizations. So what does that mean? As I've reported for the Bureau, David As labs, which, by the way, will have incredible high powered weapons, grenades, laced with bombs. These are these are war like facilities in terms of the cartels brutality, their firepower. You know, Mr. Asher said in one of the stories that I produced, we can not only go after those cartels because they're obviously terrorists, we can go after their financial

facilitators, including the Chinese triads. And if you want to be blunt, the United Front Work Department, I'm saying should be part of that because the cartels cannot send out that killing fentanyl without the precursors from China. I'll add to that. What if a big bank from North America, or a big shipping company, a logistics company, a postal company is found to not be taking adequate measures to crack down on the shipment of fentanyl, methamphetamine, or the complex

laundering of the proceeds, they too could be hit with very powerful laws under these terror designations. So look, Prime Minister Carney, he could stand up in Parliament and promise the North American citizens that he is going to use that law. And he's going to use it like a hammer. As the Canadian government, you know, used very powerful financial laws during the pandemic against certain groups, the Canadian government could do the same against fentanyl facilitators. Now, I'll add this.

I believe I can say, you know, without humbleness, without false humbleness, willful blindness in 2021 said Canada needs an anti-racketeering law that has been incredibly lacking in Canada, you know, forever in terms of what the US government uses to crack down on the highest incredibly lacking in Canada, you know, forever in terms of what the US government uses to crack down on the highest levels of corruptive transnational crime is that RICO law. Canada lacks one.

Again, Prime Minister Mark Carney has the opportunity to stand up in parliament and say, here's a new law that will align us with our allies in Washington, more strongly with our allies in Australia, in London, because transnational crime working with China, Iran, and Russia, as Kash Patel said, is involved in hybrid warfare against our people. That's the reality. Yeah, and of course, when it comes to the fentanyl, we're not just talking about precursors, we're talking about the pill presses, we're talking about the manufacturing facilities,

we're talking about the money laundering operations. The CCP is so deeply involved in all aspects here, even as some of the legwork is being done by cartels and associated organized crime. You're right. And the way I described it in my book, and I continue to describe it from US sources as new DEA cases, pop-up indictments, China has spread its decentralized drug production facilities around the world. So you're right. If you're a business person that imports a pill press, whether it's in Mexico, you know, upper New York State, Vancouver, where I know there are many, you could be,

you could, you should be hit with facilitating China's offshore production. And again, my point here is that China has strategically spread and decentralized its synthetic narcotics production facilities around the world. Why? Because recent administrations, starting with Trump, followed through with Biden, said, hey, you can't be sending those pills or precursors from your state regulated factories into our cities. And so what does China do? They respond by sort of claiming some deniability and spread the factory pieces out around the world where they're reintegrated by the very same actors that are working, I believe the US government evidence is now with elite Chinese

Communist Party officials. There's always this sort of quasi plausible deniability. I think in many cases, it's not even plausible anymore. And that's again, where this brilliant term, willful blindness, comes in. It's just much more convenient often to just not have to deal with it. But what happens is it metastasizes over time. Yes, this is a theme or a thread of reporting that I'm digging deeper into right now. The complexity that allows Beijing to claim deniability is directly related to Beijing giving the provincial governors or the provincial CCP systems and even the provincial security bureaus sort of free reign to fulfill very secret and high level objectives that come from the top in Beijing. And they can allow those regional governors to go out

and get that, get, get GDP for, for China any way you can bring it in through the Belt and Road and the insulation will be there because Beijing doesn't necessarily want to know or does certainly wants to avoid the evidence that they know that those projects are being sourced by the drug cash which comes from the precursors, you know, emanating from Chinese factories and that deniability, you know, I can report with great confidence stories I'm working are that, look, U.S. officials have for years been visiting the Ministry of Public

Security at the highest level and telling them that, hey, in the U.S. government, we understand this very sophisticated underground banking system that's going on involving triads. Can we tell you about it? It almost brings a smile to my mind because I hear about the reports back that,

oh, the Ministry of Public Security was very interested in our evidence. They said, tell us more, tell us more. I can say with confidence they know it. They know it all already and it's part of their economy, inseparable. The person running the show here, the state governor or whatnot, everybody understands that he's pocketing quite a bit of that himself along the way. In a way, it functions very much like a mafia, doesn't it? That's a term I can agree with wholeheartedly and 100%. And as I always like to do, I have a document that supports a strong statement. And so in my case, I provided documents from a Canadian

patriot named Brian McAdam. He's no longer with us. A big source of my book. He was there in Hong Kong in the 1990s, looking, discovering at how Canada's immigration system was being infiltrated by CCP agents and triads. One of his immigration reports that I have a full finished product of says, our Canadian intelligence with US Homeland Security has reported that the governor of Fujian province in the early 1990s,

their wife was allegedly involved with the Hong Kong Sun Yon Triad in business relationships. And so again, stunningly, the Canadian government and of course the US government knew in the 90s that these high-level CCP families and officials in certain regions had direct relationships with triads and this involved human smuggling. This is why I reported last year for the Bureau. If you're looking at the Southern border and all those people and stunningly, mostly Chinese migrants coming across the Mexico border into the United States, I reported it makes sense because we've known and I've reported that governor in

Fujian province working in human smuggling with Chinese triads that use stolen passports and use Latin American states in corruptive ways. So the picture adds up and it's undeniable. Is that a mafia state? I say yes. Yeah. And then if you think about how crazy it is, that we really knew about the proto status of where we are today, already as early as the 90s, and it's just been allowed to basically grow and metastasize into something quite terrible and difficult to deal with. metastasize into something quite terrible and difficult to deal with. I agree. And again, Brian McAdam, I hope people can look up the stories I've done sourced to him.

Again, a great North American patriot. I believe the American government would really appreciate him. His report called Passports of Convenience that I have disclosed on my stories at the Bureau shows that McAdam predicted that. He said, if we don't crack down on these Chinese triads that through corruptive ways are allied with CCP actors to infiltrate American cities. They're using heroin now and this will harm our population if we don't act now. The situation, just to paraphrase, the situation is going to get worse and how prescient and how heartbreaking that this is documented. He told the Canadian government, please act on this. And they didn't. Unfortunately, too common a tale what you're describing, people heroically trying to disclose

some of these things. Or the Sidewinder report from years ago. We're going to finish up in a moment. I'll encourage our viewers to look up Sidewinder and find out what that was. But we know a lot of what was going on years ago, but often these reports were mothballed or people demoted and so forth. We do have to finish up. A final thought, Sam? Final thought, I'm a Canadian patriot. I can equally say I love the United States and I love the leadership they're providing in the world. Sometimes tough work leads to controversies around the world. But North America really is a fortress that should be protected and equally the role of countries like Canada and the

United States in trying to provide freedom and support to the people of China that are living under a brutal regime, I believe that that is the mission of our time. And as you say, it's sad that, you know, patriots of the past have been ignored often through willful blindness that I believe leads to corruption in the West. And that has to be overcome because what is on my mind almost every day after, especially after being invited by the ministry of foreign affairs in Taiwan to visit that wonderful democracy in 2023 and learn how they have withstood, you know, a brutal attack from the United front from decades,

but now are increasingly endangered. Really, it is, the citizens of the United States and Canada and other Western powers cannot ignore what China is doing on our soil and other nations around the world. We need to stand together. Sam, I'm going to ask you one final question. This is the real one because I can't help but do it. You mentioned legislation that needs to be passed in Canada, something of the equivalent of RICO laws. But what in your mind would be the top way in which the Canada and US could cooperate to bring some of this to heel? It really is about alignment and for Canada, I don't like to be tough on my compatriots, but it very clearly, whether it's cartels and triads using First Nations reserves, or

the lack of implementing a RICO law or tougher money laundering laws, this has been negligent of Canada's government. For 20 years or more. We can go into parliamentary records and hear about debates on the very issues that I'm talking about today. So look, we need Canada to implement reasonable modern laws like a Rico Act. I write in Willful Blindness, the Rico Act needs to be twinned with an anti-infiltration or anti-hostile state activity act to give a hammer-like power that is able to surgically crack down on agents of foreign states and dangerous gangsters that are essentially killing our people. That's what needs to happen. We will have that alignment

if Ottawa can reform some laws. I'm not saying that the United States, Washington, or even Canberra, Australia have perfect laws, but they're at this level of protecting their people reasonably. Canada is at this level. And this comes from documents. I'm not just saying it. Well, Sam Cooper, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again. It's great. I hope we can do it again. This really is the topic of our time. Absolutely. Thanks a lot, Sam. Thank you.

Thank you all for joining Sam Cooper and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.