The probe follows the arrest of a Canadian intern who worked at NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe in Belgium. Belgian prosecutors have charged her with espionage on behalf of a third country and participation in a criminal organization. Reuters has reported, citing a security source, that she is accused of spying for China.

Last week—before Parliament agreed to investigate—I conducted my own examination of the case with Jason James. We broke down the known knowns, the known unknowns and the probabilities behind the competing explanations.

Was this simply an extraordinary series of bureaucratic failures? Or could a political-access network have helped move this woman through Canadian institutions despite warning signs?

I also explained what a former senior CSIS officer told me about the likely vetting process—and why my source believes investigators should look closely at Global Affairs Canada.

So, what happened here?

We have a young woman who came to Canada from China, moved through universities and Canadian government institutions, and was ultimately sponsored by Global Affairs Canada for a sensitive position at NATO.

Yet before that placement, she had submitted applications to the Canada Border Services Agency using different names and different universities. The Public Service Commission found that she committed fraud during that appointment process, and the Federal Court later dismissed her attempt to overturn that finding. To me, the young woman’s persistence in attempting to overturn the negative finding, in itself, seems interesting.

Her case information wasn’t in some hidden intelligence intercept. It is sitting in the public record.

So how did she get through?

A former CSIS officer told me that CSIS would have conducted security vetting—and, in this officer’s assessment, it is likely the service produced a concerning red-flag report.

CSIS is a capable intelligence agency. It works with the CIA and other top allied services. As I tell Jason, I find it very difficult to believe that CSIS simply missed problems that were visible through basic open-source research.

My source told me it would make sense to look closely at GAC. That fits previous intelligence reporting indicating that Global Affairs has prioritized trade and diplomatic relations with countries such as China and India over security concerns—a longstanding source of friction with CSIS.

So, could it be the case that CSIS raised red flags and Global Affairs Canada effectively said, Nothing to see here?

I don’t know. That remains a theory, not a proven fact. But I believe it is a serious and plausible theory—and one investigators must test.

That means examining the institutional environment around senior GAC figures, including Mélanie Joly and David Morrison.

Since 2018, as I have reported, Joly has led or participated in Beijing trade-lobby engagement involving the Canada China Business Council and prominent Eastern Canadian business figures. My reporting has also traced meetings involving some of the same CCP-linked entities that appear around the Markham illegal-casino network and political fundraising circles.

I am asking whether an institutional culture—one heavily invested in trade, access and renewed engagement with Beijing—could have caused legitimate security warnings to be minimized or overridden.

That question becomes even more important because the woman reportedly listed Liberal campaign volunteering on her résumé and appeared at a Justin Trudeau fundraising-style event in 2014.

Research from the Jamestown Foundation and leaked intelligence records describe how United Front Work Department networks cultivate Western politicians, establish bonds of obligation and promote favoured individuals for positions inside government. In my reporting, I have identified hundreds of Canadian community organizations connected to the CCP’s United Front system.

The Jamestown reporting presents a blueprint: surround politicians across party lines, provide campaign and community support, develop access—and then advocate for selected people to receive positions inside government institutions.

Importantly, we recorded this conversation before this week’s reporting on declassified FBI material concerning Fang Fang and Congressman Eric Swalwell. That material reportedly examined whether an alleged Ministry of State Security affiliate leveraged a campaign-donation network to help place interns inside Swalwell’s office.

Even before that news surfaced, I told Jason that this is precisely the type of methodology the Jamestown Foundation says the United Front and Chinese intelligence services use in Western democracies.

That does not prove the NATO case followed the same playbook. But it makes it a plausible hypothesis that demands serious investigation.

Conservative national-security critic Dane Lloyd tied the NATO case to what he described as a broader pattern of security failures:

“Yesterday Conservative members forced hearings this fall on Canada’s national security clearance vetting processes,” Lloyd posted to X.

“This comes in the wake of troubling allegations involving a Canadian intern at NATO headquarters accused of espionage.

“This isn’t an isolated incident and comes in the wake of several high-profile security failures. The minister of public safety needs to take responsibility and ensure the integrity of our national security clearance system.”

WASHINGTON — A central element of the long-contested Wuhan laboratory story has moved from allegation to criminal admission: a senior official inside the health institute led by Anthony Fauci conspired with outside scientists to hide federal records while working to counter claims that COVID-19 emerged from a laboratory.

David Morens, 78, pleaded guilty Tuesday in Greenbelt, Maryland, to conspiracy to commit offenses and defraud the United States. From 2006 through 2022, he served as a senior adviser in the Office of the Director at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which Fauci led for thirty-eight years.

Morens’s admission does not prove that the pandemic began with a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Western intelligence assessments, however, have moved the laboratory hypothesis firmly into the range of probability.

Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service reportedly assessed an 80-to-90-percent likelihood that the virus escaped accidentally from WIV. The Federal Bureau of Investigation favors a laboratory incident with moderate confidence. The Central Intelligence Agency now considers a research-related origin more likely than natural emergence.

Morens has admitted a different but related conspiracy inside the American system.

After the National Institutes of Health terminated a grant that financed bat-coronavirus research in Wuhan, Morens and his co-conspirators agreed in writing to conceal their communications while trying to restore the funding and “counter the narrative that COVID-19 leaked from a lab,” according to the Department of Justice.

The terminated grant, Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence, had been awarded to an American organization whose leader made a subaward to WIV. Although the plea record does not name the organization or its president, the grant title and structure correspond to EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak. Daszak has not been charged.

Anticipating demands under the Freedom of Information Act, Morens and his co-conspirators agreed to move their discussions onto his personal Gmail account. They used it to exchange nonpublic government information, edit letters intended to influence NIH leadership, discuss efforts to restore EcoHealth’s funding and send “back-channel” information to a senior NIAID official.

The judicial record does not name that official, although its description points to Fauci.

On July 29, less than three weeks before Morens pleaded guilty, Fauci appeared under subpoena before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Asked about the origins of COVID-19, dangerous biological research and his conduct in government, he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 100 times.

Morens also admitted conspiring with the unnamed organization leader in an illegal-gratuities arrangement. The leader sent wine to Morens’s home for his “behind-the-scenes shenanigans.” Morens then identified an official act he could perform to “deserve” the gift: authoring a commentary for a prominent medical journal that advocated a natural origin for COVID-19. The leader also proposed meals at Michelin-starred restaurants in Paris, New York and Washington, prosecutors said.

Morens faces up to five years in prison when he is sentenced on November 12.

“By pleading guilty today, Dr. Morens has taken responsibility for what he did, and he will continue to do so,” his lawyer, Timothy Belevetz, said.

Fauci sought to distance himself from Morens during congressional testimony in 2024, saying they worked in different buildings and that Morens did not advise him on institute policy or other substantive issues.

In July, Senate Committee Chairman Rand Paul released internal messages among Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, Eddie Holmes and Andrew Rambaut, authors of the influential March 2020 paper The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2. The paper told the world that its authors did not believe “any type of laboratory-based scenario” was plausible.

The private discussion was different.

In June 2020, Andersen told the group that “we really don’t have any hard evidence one way or the other” and could not rule out that the virus’s furin cleavage site had been inserted.

“Our paper was pretty strong in saying ‘there’s no way,’ but I have less confidence in that statement at this stage,” he wrote.

Andersen described Shi’s laboratory in Wuhan as taking bat coronaviruses and culturing them under biosafety level two conditions in animal cell lines to learn which could infect human cells and what mutations might make them capable of doing so. He wrote that the EcoHealth grant specifically funded that type of work. Given the information then available, he said, he found a natural origin and a laboratory origin “equally probable.”

Fauci accused Paul, his longtime Senate inquisitor, of conducting an “unhinged” campaign to have him imprisoned. His lawyer argued that he still faced possible criminal exposure despite the sweeping preemptive pardon President Joe Biden issued on his final day in office in January 2025.

The hearing followed the release of Fauci’s contemporaneous notes. In a June 2021 entry, he recorded a CIA briefing on intercepted communications and source reporting concerning military activity, pangolin sampling and unknown experiments in Wuhan. Fauci called the presentation “very fishy” and later described it as “the catastrophic briefing that the amateurs from the C.I.A. gave me.”

As The Bureau reported in July, documents released by Paul show that United States border officers intercepted three vials in November 2018 from a courier traveling through Detroit and turned them over to the FBI’s bioweapons unit, the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. The courier initially declared no biological material, then said the vials had been given to him by Yusen Zhou of China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences for Fang Li, a federally funded coronavirus researcher at the University of Minnesota.

Government laboratory testing identified an antibody and a fragment of porcine epidemic diarrhea virus spike—a coronavirus component.

The American files link Li to Zhou, a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) scientist, and to Shi. A postdoctoral researcher in Li’s Minnesota laboratory wrote a thesis on bat-coronavirus receptor analysis listing Li as principal investigator and Shi as the adviser in China.

Emails show that Shi asked Li in April 2018 whether a student could carry severe acute respiratory syndrome antibodies back to China by hand. Li declined, citing tensions between the United States and China, and proposed formal shipping.

The Detroit interception occurred during the same period that Canadian security investigators were examining a parallel network centered on Dr. Xiangguo Qiu at Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg.

On October 12, 2018, a security guard at NML stopped a WIV technician carrying ten vials out of Qiu’s laboratory while accompanied by restricted visitors, including a doctoral student from a PLA-affiliated veterinary institute. The contents of those vials have never been publicly identified.

Canadian intelligence later assessed that Qiu intentionally transferred scientific knowledge and materials to China for the benefit of Beijing and used Canada’s highest-containment laboratory to strengthen China’s capacity to work with dangerous pathogens. In March 2019 she organized an authorized shipment of Ebola and Nipah virus samples to WIV.

The Canadian records also placed Qiu and Shi in a 2018 Wuhan project intended to use reverse genetics to create synthetic bat-filovirus strains and assess cross-species infection and pathogenic risk. Qiu was listed as responsible for overall planning. A senior scientist and deputy director at WIV—identified by The Bureau through cross-referencing as Shi—was assigned project design. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service said the work suggested that gain-of-function studies might occur.

All of these records do not identify the source of COVID-19.

But in The Bureau’s assessment, they accrue to a mounting circumstantial case consistent with recent comments by former CIA director and secretary of state Mike Pompeo about how the pandemic unfolded—and what Beijing did once the virus began to spread.

At the May 7 Canada Strong and Free Network conference in Ottawa, Pompeo—who led the CIA before serving as secretary of state during the outbreak—said the United States government had “high confidence” and “good evidence” by late 2019 and early 2020 that the virus originated in a Chinese laboratory. He said he did not believe its release was intentional. What followed, he argued, was. Xi Jinping “put people on airplanes and sent them to Europe,” Pompeo said. “He knew what he was doing then.”

OTTAWA — Chinese premier Zhu Rongji discarded a prepared speech at a 1998 dinner in Beijing and spontaneously declared Canada to be China’s “best friend” while seated directly between prime minister Jean Chrétien and Chrétien’s son-in-law, Power Corporation executive André Desmarais, according to the Canadian diplomat assigned to record Zhu’s remarks.

But Zhu’s declaration did not appear in the account published by the Chinese Communist Party’s flagship newspaper, People’s Daily.

Charles Burton, the veteran diplomat and China scholar who attended the dinner as an official note-taker, told The Bureau Tuesday that People’s Daily instead published Zhu’s unused prepared speech the following day. Its account also omitted Zhu’s off-the-cuff response to a Time magazine profile warning that his aggressive economic reforms had carried him dangerously close to the political sun.

Burton disclosed the circumstances after reading Desmarais’s tribute to Zhu, published in La Presse and The Globe and Mail following Zhu’s death on August 12 at 97.

Zhu’s death drew tributes from around the world to the technocrat who led China into the World Trade Organization and helped transform the country into the world’s factory.

Desmarais’s tribute stands apart among them, both for its intimacy and for what it says about relations between Beijing, Ottawa and Washington.

It is also illuminating for Canadians seeking to understand Ottawa’s long-standing approach to Communist China—and the influence of a Montreal corporate and political network that championed deeper engagement with Beijing.

Desmarais describes Zhu as an uncle-like figure, mentor and intimate friend. Burton’s account provides a rare firsthand window into how the statement underpinning that narrative was actually delivered.

“The text [of] Zhu’s upcoming dinner speech was placed at each table setting,” Burton recalled. “I got out a sharpened pencil to note if he left any of it out or added any asides.”

“Then Zhu completely ignored the prepared text.”

Burton was also struck by Zhu’s position at the table.

André Desmarais was then head of the Canada China Business Council, Burton said. Jean Chrétien, the Canadian prime minister, was his father-in-law.

The Chinese premier sat directly between them.

“I am pretty sure that the CCP took the father-in-law/son-in-law [relationship] as a significant factor,” Burton wrote in comments to The Bureau.

“I was a bit thrown to see Premier of the State Council Zhu dead centre between them.”

The tableau compressed a powerful Canada–China network into a single seating arrangement: the Chinese premier, Canada’s head of government and a leading member of the Montreal corporate dynasty that had spent years developing commercial and political relationships with Beijing.

Power Corporation was among the Canadian companies that founded the Canada China Business Council in 1978. Paul Desmarais served as its founding chairman. André Desmarais later led the organization and remains its honorary chairman.

Desmarais also recalls Zhu warning in a speech that an eagle flying too close to the sun would burn and be reduced to ashes. Everyone present, Desmarais writes, understood the eagle to represent the United States, and Canada to be the steady partner on which China could rely.

The anecdote casts America as the arrogant power destined to fall, while Canada emerges as Beijing’s trusted and dependable alternative. That interpretation has immediate resonance as Prime Minister Mark Carney holds last-minute talks with Washington to avert threatened 50 percent American tariffs.

But Burton says there was no reference to the United States in Zhu’s remarks that night.

The eagle was Zhu himself.

Less than a month before Chrétien’s November 1998 visit, Time published a profile titled China’s Missing Pieces. It compared powerful men to Icarus and identified Zhu as China’s most daring “highflyer”—a reformer in danger of crashing under political resistance, unemployment and unrest.

At the dinner, Burton said, Zhu jokingly rebutted that characterization. Seated between Chrétien and Desmarais, he suggested that the Canadian prime minister could see Zhu had neither burnt feathers nor the smell of roasted chicken.

“The Icarus metaphor of ‘flying too close to the sun’ was famously applied to Zhu Rongji by Time magazine in October 1998,” Burton said.

“There was no reference to the United States in Mr. Zhu’s remarks that night. None of his refuting of the Time Magazine piece or his Canada is best friend of China assertion made it into the official record,” Burton said.

For Burton, the 1998 dinner was emblematic of something larger.

“Zhu Rongji’s premiership marked the golden age of highly lucrative relationships between the Canadian Laurentian elite and Chinese Communist business networks,” he told The Bureau.

Under Xi Jinping’s neo-Leninist redirection of China’s political economy, Burton added, a new mercantilism focused on domestic investment has taken hold, and Canadian industrialists are no longer the “valued partners and friends” they may have naively believed themselves to be 30 years ago.

Nearly three decades after Burton saw Chrétien seated beside Zhu and Desmarais, the former prime minister was again in Beijing, The Bureau has reported.

On the eve of Carney’s January 2026 visit, former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig drew attention to Chrétien’s private meeting with Chinese Vice-President Han Zheng only days before Carney’s arrival.

Kovrig described Chrétien as a possible “warm-up act” for the official mission. He emphasized Chrétien’s close connections to Power Corporation and the CCBC and characterized the circumstances as a possible effort by “certain business interests to deepen trade and investment.”

“Canadians should watch closely what sort of dealmaking follows,” Kovrig said, as reported by The Bureau.

Brian Lee Crowley of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute has recounted an even blunter warning.

Crowley said the late David Kilgour told him that, upon becoming minister of state for Asia-Pacific under Chrétien, Kilgour received a visit from a representative of the Prime Minister’s Office.

“Our policy toward China, he was told in no uncertain terms, is set not at our foreign ministry or the PMO, but at the headquarters of Power Corporation in Montreal,” Crowley wrote.

That is Crowley’s account of Kilgour’s recollection, but the relationships themselves are documented.

LAS VEGAS — In May 2013, an undercover FBI employee sat down in Las Vegas with a Chinese student who had already built an unusual network stretching from Chinese government circles into the political establishment of Northern California.

To Christine Fang, the encounter appeared to offer a business relationship.

To the FBI, she was Rusty Thumbs—a woman who was cagey about parts of her educational background and who, within several meetings, would claim personal connections to people she described as the PRC equivalent of “royalty,” including someone related to Mao Zedong.

This was not, in police language, a mere “fishing trip.”

An underlying FBI investigation had already identified Fang as having suspected ties to China’s Ministry of State Security, while both of her parents were classified internally as known MSS intelligence officers. At the same time, Fang was cultivating American politicians and claiming access to influential figures inside the Chinese government.

What followed, revealed in a newly declassified FBI counterintelligence file, was an unusually ambitious recruitment operation.

Rather than confront Fang over what investigators suspected, undercover agents constructed a commercial cover around her, studied her access and psychology, met her repeatedly over meals, and listened as she discussed American politicians, Chinese government contacts, her ambitions and her vulnerabilities. They wanted to determine whether her interest in money, status, employment and immigration security could help draw her into the American intelligence fold.

The FBI believed the very connections that made Fang a counterintelligence concern might also make her valuable as a source.

“Given RT’s apparent connections with MSS personnel and the PRC government,” one operational assessment said, coupled with her continuing contacts with American and local officials, Fang “may be able to report on MSS influence campaigns directed at the U.S. government.”

An undercover employee represented himself through a fictitious company that needed exactly what Fang seemed to offer: contacts in China, knowledge of the Chinese business and political environment, and connections to municipal governments around the San Francisco Bay Area.

The bureau was also trying to understand the woman herself.

Under the heading “Motivations,” an FBI assessment offered a stark judgment: Fang appeared to be driven by “money and power.”

She was socially adept, agents wrote, but displayed “egotistical/narcissistic traits” that could potentially affect her suitability as an intelligence source.

At a subsequent San Francisco dinner in June 2013, the undercover employee documented Fang carefully. She arrived punctually at about 6:30 p.m., dressed in what the report called an “almost-businesslike fashion,” and appeared more professional than she had during the Las Vegas meeting.

Then she ordered the most expensive item on the menu.

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WASHINGTON — An explosive collection of newly declassified FBI records reveals that federal agents opened a full public-corruption investigation into then-Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell over allegations that suspected Beijing intelligence operative Christine Fang facilitated a scheme to place interns in his congressional office in exchange for campaign contributions—including money investigators said she routed through American intermediaries to conceal herself as the prohibited foreign source.

The sprawling investigation went far beyond the now-documented sexual relationship between Fang and the rising California politician. FBI records show agents suspected Fang had ties to China’s Ministry of State Security, Beijing’s powerful civilian intelligence service, while investigators used physical surveillance, confidential sources, search warrants and an undercover operation to determine whether campaign money was being exchanged for access and internships. At one stage, the operation’s stated objective was to gather enough evidence to indict and arrest both Swalwell and Fang for campaign-finance violations and alleged quid pro quo exchanges.

The investigation reached deeply into Swalwell’s political fundraising network. The FBI noted that his campaign had received $1,145,688 in individual contributions between January 2013 and December 2014.

FBI files describe a Chinese national volunteering in the campaign, a wealthy winery owner who said Fang told him to “just bring his checkbook” because she would reimburse his donation, and a fast-food franchise magnate who told agents Fang wanted his contribution credited to her.

Agents also scrutinized an unusual 2014 event at the Wynn Casino in Las Vegas involving Fang, Swalwell, collected donation checks and campaign-finance reimbursement concerns—an episode whose key participants remain partly obscured by FBI redactions.

The investigation, codenamed Freshman Fifteen, centered on allegations that Fang was facilitating a scheme to trade internships in Swalwell’s congressional office for campaign contributions. In March 2015, FBI agents wrote that several contributions had been routed through intermediaries and that, in at least two cases, Fang used conduits to conceal herself as the prohibited foreign-national source of the money.

The case had been opened as a Sensitive Investigative Matter because one of its subjects was a sitting member of Congress. A June 2014 FBI memorandum listed possible violations including bribery of public officials, conspiracy, excessive campaign contributions, prohibited foreign-national contributions and contributions through conduits. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California was notified before the investigation was opened, and an Assistant U.S. Attorney agreed to prosecute if agents developed sufficient evidence.

Agents were already conducting physical surveillance in the case.

On the evening of June 16, 2014, two FBI agents conducted more than three hours of surveillance at a California shopping center, recording arrivals and departures minute by minute. A man resembling a city councilman appeared shortly after 6:30 p.m. Agents logged a gold Lexus, a black Mercedes-Benz, a white Mercedes-Benz and a Toyota FJ Cruiser. At 8:42 p.m., they watched an Asian woman in red shoes descend an escalator and cross the parking lot while interacting with what appeared to be a cellphone.

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LONDON/OTTAWA — Four former Western University students at the center of a sprawling firearms and explosives investigation now face 19 new charges alleging possession of TNT and three other explosive substances, prohibited magazines and silencers, while one of the accused allegedly accessed data that could be used with computerized systems to make and traffic guns.

The allegations are contained in an amended list of charges filed Tuesday, August 11, with the Ontario Court of Justice and reported by CBC News and the London Free Press, adding charges to an already unusual case that began with an overnight break-in call inside Western University’s engineering complex in January.

The four accused—Jerry Tong, 27; Zekun “Alex” Wang, 26; Fei “Frank” Han, 25; and Feiyang “Astrid” Ji, 21—now face 31 separate counts, some jointly and others individually.

Most strikingly, court records identify for the first time the explosive substances the four are alleged to have possessed: pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN; trinitrotoluene, or TNT; dinitrophenol, or DNP; hexamethylene triperoxide diamine, or HMTD; and lead azide.

Court records also show a change from the original charges. Han and Ji are now charged with possessing precursor explosive substances, while Tong and Wang face counts covering both precursors and finished high explosives.

The new charges significantly sharpen the picture of what investigators say was taking place inside a student residence near Western’s campus, while doing little to answer the larger question that has surrounded the investigation from the beginning: what were the alleged weapons and explosives being made for?

Tong, Wang and Ji are also newly accused of possessing prohibited overcapacity magazines and silencers—devices the charge sheet describes as suppression devices, prohibited under the Criminal Code for muffling the sound of a firearm—according to the court records reported by CBC.

Tong and Wang are also accused of handling and carelessly storing a prohibited rifle.

And Wang alone now faces one of the most notable new allegations: accessing computer data pertaining to firearm or prohibited-device design files that could be used with a 3D printer, metal-milling machine or other computerized system. According to the London Free Press, the charge alleges the data could be used “to make and traffic guns.”

That allegation—combined with the silencers, prohibited magazines, finished high explosives and alleged firearms manufacturing—broadens the questions surrounding a case initially linked publicly to the development of an anti-drone weapons system.

Those allegations add another dimension to an investigation that The Bureau reported in February had already drawn support from the RCMP’s Integrated National Security Enforcement Team, or INSET, the specialized unit responsible for investigations involving terrorism, espionage and foreign interference.

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By Garry Clement

OTTAWA — Canada has developed a dangerous habit: when reality collides with the prevailing political narrative, we increasingly question the reality rather than the narrative.

Call it …

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VANCOUVER — Harry Chun Tak Yeh, a Hong Kong-born Canadian who became an early Bitcoin investor and later founded Quantum Fintech Group, was found dead at about 4:30 a.m. on August 7, his body at the foot of the tower, naked and covered by a black plastic bag, according to Paraguayan reporting citing police interviews.

What investigators found upstairs was equally suggestive.

Police and forensic investigators entered a 30th-floor space used by Yeh and found doors open and the interior in considerable disorder. Police Director Francisco Ávalos reported that objects were strewn across the floor and some electrical cables appeared to have been ripped out. The head of the homicide unit, Abel Cantero, said evidence gathered from two units rented by Yeh was turned over to the Public Prosecutor’s Office.

Yeh occupied both the 30th and 27th floors, according to Ávalos. Police described the upper floor primarily as a work space containing numerous high-end computer systems, while Yeh apparently lived on the 27th floor with his Brazilian partner.

According to reports from Paraguay, a police investigator said the building’s extensive physical security and video surveillance made it difficult, in his assessment, for an unknown person to have entered without being detected.

A Canadian Chinese-language report published Thursday, citing prosecutor María del Carmen Palazón, said preliminary evidence was leaning toward suicide but that investigators would not make a final determination until autopsy and other forensic results were complete. The report said forensic specialists had taken bodily-fluid samples to test for substances that could have affected Yeh’s behavior, and had documented handprints and apparent contact marks around an open glass window near the 30th-floor office.

But The Bureau’s review of British Columbia Supreme Court records found another significant dimension to Yeh’s history: years before his international crypto ventures expanded, he had been a substantial customer and one of the larger known claimants in one of Canada’s more notorious cryptocurrency exchange collapses.

In December 2019, Yeh sued Vancouver’s Einstein Exchange and related companies, alleging fraud, forged or falsified wire-transfer confirmations and the failure to return more than US$4.3 million in cryptocurrency.

The lawsuit alleged that Yeh used Einstein not simply as a personal cryptocurrency account, but to process transfers for himself and his clients. Beginning in 2017, according to the claim, he regularly moved Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency through the exchange and used affiliated companies to facilitate wire payments to clients and creditors.

The claim also alleged that Einstein companies provided false or forged confirmations for several wire transfers. Yeh said the episode damaged his reputation and client relationships and forced him to cover obligations arising from transactions conducted through Einstein.

Yeh ultimately obtained a judgment by default against Einstein Capital Partners after the company failed to respond to his lawsuit, with damages and costs left to be assessed. But the subsequent court record reviewed by The Bureau shows no damages award or recovery, suggesting Yeh was never able to collect the millions he sought.

Einstein’s principal later admitted in March 2026 that he was responsible for the Einstein companies’ fraud and agreed to pay the British Columbia Securities Commission $1 million, the maximum amount available for that misconduct. Separately, in 2019, the commission notified the RCMP of possible money-laundering concerns raised by a former Einstein employee. By the time Yeh filed his lawsuit, the companies were already in receivership; an interim receiver found less than $45,000 in cash and cryptocurrency against customer liabilities exceeding US$18 million, and the companies were dissolved in 2020 with no assets remaining.

Paraguayan police said Yeh had entered the country as a tourist using a Canadian passport, while Canadian Chinese-language reporting published Thursday noted that Yeh had also displayed a Canadian passport in his own social-media postings.

A remarkably detailed 2010 profile, originally reported by the Vancouver edition of World Journal and republished by China News Service, the state-run news agency operating within China’s united front system, described Yeh as a Hong Kong-born Canadian Chinese immigrant entrepreneur. It reported that his family had moved from Hong Kong to Canada and that his parents built an import-export business, bringing merchandise from Hong Kong into Canada.

Caixin, a Beijing publication backed by state-linked Chinese capital, reported from Hong Kong on Thursday that Yeh was an ethnic-Chinese cryptocurrency figure born in Hong Kong who emigrated to Canada while young.

Long before Bitcoin, Yeh was reportedly building businesses in the Vancouver technology sector.

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OTTAWA — A new report from a prominent Ottawa attorney has concluded that Luc Sabourin — the Canadian border intell…

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OTTAWA — Five weeks after a Liberal majority shelved a parliamentary probe of Prime Minister Ma…

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I started with the documentary record on Beijing’s 575 United Front Work Department community groups in Canada, including a group that pressured two successive party leaders to step down.

Drawing on Jamestown Foundation research into Chinese Communist Party influence operations in Canada, I explained how these United Front organizations are tasked with targeting local politicians and community leaders, mobilizing voters behind candidates viewed as supportive of Beijing, and applying pressure to political parties and institutions.

This isn’t about one political party, and it doesn’t require us to assume that any individual politician understands or acquiesces to Beijing’s community networks.

The broader picture is roughly 575 organizations, or 576, counting the organization led by a Canadian senator and now confirmed to The Bureau as having Beijing links, operating in Canada within systems that Beijing can mobilize to surround politicians, shape political narratives and, ultimately, try to influence elections and leadership contests.

Brian then gave a striking example from his own experience.

The morning after Erin O’Toole lost the 2021 election, Brian received a cold call from a man he had never heard of—and who, Brian said, had no obvious reason to have his number. The message was simple.

O’Toole had to go.

Brian’s interpretation was equally clear. O’Toole had been hawkish on China from the beginning. Beijing disliked him and, in Brian’s view, wanted him removed.

I added what Canadian intelligence reporting has shown. In my reporting, I described intelligence intercepts involving Chinese consular officials discussing the need to push a message through diaspora communities that electing a leader like O’Toole would be comparable to electing Donald Trump.

That brought us to the current leadership question.

A leadership vacancy creates an opportunity. Members can be signed up. Networks can be activated. A preferred candidate doesn’t have to be Beijing’s ideal candidate—just somewhat “less bad” from Beijing’s perspective.

My reporting showed that a Chinese proxy agent, according to CSIS reporting I obtained exclusively, attempted to influence a federal party leadership contest in 2022 by paying for memberships, recruiting CCP members to join the party, and seeking to make it less hawkish toward Beijing.

While CSIS did not name the Conservatives, my sources inside the party and within the diaspora pointed to a network that sought a leader other than Poilievre, I told Brian.

I also told him that we know the Chinese Communist Party studies Western political systems and individual politicians in extraordinary detail. The objective, as I put it to Brian, is fairly simple: they are trying to win inside our system.

From there, I turned the questions back on Brian.

On party operative Kory Teneycke, I pressed Brian on speculation that Teneycke had been working back channels to encourage a Jason Kenney leadership bid.

Then we got into Larry Brock.

Brock’s departure, Brian said, has nothing to do with dissatisfaction with the Conservative leadership.

Brock had been on leave from his position as a Crown prosecutor and faced a September deadline to make a permanent choice.

The more significant disclosure involves what happened earlier this year. According to Brian, the Liberals dangled the possibility of a judicial appointment in front of Brock. Brock declined and immediately reported the matter to the Conservative whip and House leader.

Brian’s assessment is that nobody crossed the legal threshold for an inducement. But he believes the Liberals should still have to answer for what happened—and that Brock should not be blamed for reporting it.

We closed on two larger questions I’ve been looking at.

The first is whether consulting firms and law firms—including firms employing former senior politicians—are increasingly being used as access points into Canadian political institutions.

The second is what a decade of Liberal Party judicial appointments has done to public confidence in the courts.

OTTAWA — On July 14, 2014, a Facebook account belonging to Biwei Zhang, the woman now accused of spying inside NATO’s military command and of membership in a criminal organization, published a photograph of Justin Trudeau speaking from a stage at the Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, in a ballroom holding several hundred guests seated at banquet tables, phones raised toward the podium.

Five years later, applying for a job in the federal public service, Zhang — by then a university student in Toronto, having come to Canada from China — wrote that she had volunteered on an election campaign for the Liberal Party of Canada. She did not say which one.

Zhang has been held in Belgium since late July, after an investigating judge placed a Canadian national under arrest on charges of espionage and participation in a criminal organization. Belgian investigators have not said which country she is accused of spying for, but Reuters named China, citing government sources. The allegations have not been tested in court, and she is appealing her continued detention.

She has been identified through online profiles by numerous outlets, and a federal source told the Canadian Press this week that officials in Canada are proceeding on the basis that the suspect is Zhang.

The case has raised substantial questions about how she was screened under Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government. Court records, as The Bureau first reported, show Zhang was found to have committed fraud in an application to the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), a finding upheld by the Federal Court eleven months before she took up her post at allied command — one of several markers visible in the public record and in her own online profile.

Jody Thomas, the former national security adviser to Justin Trudeau, told CTV News that Zhang’s case raises a lot of questions and that what was known at the time of her vetting has to be explored.

“It’s possible that her record – other than this court finding – was clean, and that she was corrupted once she got to (NATO)… or perhaps, she was sitting, sleeping, waiting for an opportunity to act,” Thomas said.

She said the government will have to do comprehensive “reverse engineering” to understand who Zhang truly is, pointing back to her first Canadian government job, in 2017.

But the July 2014 photographs analyzed by The Bureau pull that timeline back three years further, placing Zhang in proximity to the future Liberal prime minister Thomas would eventually serve — and to the Toronto fundraising networks Trudeau would later have to answer for, after accounts of sensitive CSIS investigations were leaked to The Globe and Mail and to this writer.

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VANCOUVER — Port Coquitlam Mayor Brad West called on British Columbia Conservative Leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay Wednesday night to take an unverified allegation about one of her own caucus members to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and expel her from caucus, or else apologize to her — the first significant public intervention by an elected official into a purported leak that has moved through British Columbia political circles at speed since Tuesday evening.

“Many know I have been both a target of, and an outspoken opponent against, foreign interference in our democracy,” West wrote in a post published at 9:48 p.m. “If Kerry-Lynne Findlay has evidence to support what she has alleged, I urge her to immediately provide it to the RCMP and remove MLA Teresa Wat from caucus.”

“If she doesn’t, she should apologize to MLA Wat,” West continued. “Foreign interference is far too serious an issue in British Columbia and Canada for any responsible political leader to play games with it.”

West was responding to a post by an anonymous account operating under the name The Findlay Files, which said it had received what it described as a trove of files and stories concerning Findlay’s leadership, and published what it called an alleged screenshot from an internal group used by Findlay’s leadership campaign. The image, which The Bureau has not authenticated, shows a message attributed to an account labeled “Hon. Kerry - Lynne Findlay,” forwarding a ten-page document and then adding a series of instructions to unnamed recipients.

“Remember that WeChat is China Govt controlled and Teresa Watt MLA is CCP & sold many memberships to CCP Chinese in Richmond,” the message reads in part. “The Chinese community that supports us knows this.”

Findlay responded publicly two hours and 42 minutes after West’s post, at 12:30 a.m. Thursday, with a statement praising Wat that did not address the alleged message, confirm or deny its authenticity, or mention West by name.

“I had a wonderful discussion today with MLA Teresa Wat, who also serves as our steadfast Critic for Multiculturalism and Community Partnerships,” Findlay wrote. “I especially value her contributions, experience, and the important role she plays in bringing our team together.” Building relationships with the Chinese Canadian community, she added, had always been important to her. She then framed the episode as an attack on her party: “As the Conservative Party of British Columbia continues to gain momentum, increased scrutiny and political attacks are inevitable. But we will not allow them to distract or divide us.”

There is no public evidence that ties Wat to the Chinese Communist Party, and no Canadian public inquiry, regulator, or law enforcement body has ever found or alleged that she dealt improperly with it. Media reports, including from The Bureau, have documented meetings and engagements between Wat and entities of the People’s Republic of China over more than a decade. Responding in 2017 to questions from this writer about her role in bringing Poly Culture — an arts subsidiary of a Chinese state conglomerate whose arms division was formed as a manufacturing wing of the People’s Liberation Army — to British Columbia, Wat said that as minister of international trade she met regularly with local and international corporations, and that Poly Culture was one of many such companies she met and spoke with in the course of that work.

But the man now demanding an answer is not a bystander to this subject. West has told The Bureau he was warned by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) that Chinese diplomats in Vancouver regarded his political rise as a threat to their objectives, and says Beijing-linked networks in British Columbia later worked to defeat him at the ballot box because of his criticism of Chinese interference. His intervention raises the purported Findlay communications — and whatever the new Conservative leader now does or declines to do — to a matter of significant public interest in Canada.

Hours before West weighed in, the same purported leak was amplified by Jas Johal, the veteran broadcaster who hosts afternoon drive on CKNW and who spent much of his journalism career reporting from Asia. “Somewhere in the BC Conservative caucus, a group chat just exploded,” Johal wrote.

Johal served as Global News’ Asia bureau chief in Beijing beginning in 2008, traveling extensively in China to report on the economy, foreign and domestic policy, and human rights, before returning to British Columbia and entering provincial politics. In 2017 he was elected the Liberal member for Richmond-Queensborough and was appointed Minister for Technology, Innovation and Citizens’ Services in Christy Clark’s final cabinet, sitting in the same government caucus as Wat, who served as Clark’s Minister of International Trade and Minister Responsible for the Asia Pacific Strategy and Multiculturalism from 2013 to 2017. Johal lost his seat in 2020 and returned to broadcasting.

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OTTAWA — The Canadian woman of Chinese origin held in Belgium on suspicion of spying inside the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) military command for a third country, and of membership in a criminal organization, was vetted by CSIS and the RCMP and cleared for the posting — despite a finding by Canada’s public service watchdog that she committed fraud in a hiring competition run by the CBSA, CSIS’s sister agency inside the Public Safety Canada portfolio.

The Federal Court upheld that finding in a published judgment 11 months before she took up her post at allied command.

Whether the fraud finding ever surfaced in the screening, Ottawa will not say. As The Bureau reported Tuesday, CSIS referred questions about its vetting to Public Safety Canada, which declined to comment on specifics. Global Affairs Canada, which makes the final decision to grant, deny or revoke clearances for Canadians taking positions with international organizations including NATO, would not discuss the case.

She was arrested Friday, a day after searches of her home and her workplace at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe in Mons, after her conduct was flagged by alliance security services.

On Tuesday a Belgian pre-trial judge refused her release and ordered her held for at least another month as the investigation continues. Thursday, the prosecutor confirmed the suspect has appealed that decision.

She has not been officially identified; Belgium’s Federal Prosecutor’s Office told The Bureau it never discloses the identities of suspects in ongoing investigations, and The Bureau is currently withholding her name for that reason.

CBC News identified her Wednesday through open-source techniques, Reuters reported her earlier as Claire Z., and the European outlet Follow the Money published similar material. The Bureau had independently assembled the same online resume profile this week and held it.

Her trajectory through the Canadian government’s national security and sensitive information and technology departments is on the public record.

She was a data scientist at the National Research Council for six months in 2017, an economist at Statistics Canada from April 2018 to October 2022, and a systems engineer at the Canadian Space Agency from May 2022.

She lists a policy analyst role at the European Space Agency, work in the economic research and statistics division of the World Trade Organization, and seats on mirror committees of the Standards Council of Canada.

She took a master’s degree at the University of Ottawa in 2022. In July 2025 she posted in a Mons housing group that she was arriving for a six-month internship at allied headquarters, CBC reported. A security source told Reuters she worked in its information technology department.

Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree has previously committed to establishing whether the suspect worked for any Canadian agency.

“Ultimately, we need to get to the bottom of this, and we need to ensure that these types of incidents do not occur in the future,” he said. He has not yet commented on the CBC’s reporting.

What the minister says he intends to establish is already on the public record, in a Federal Court judgment issued last year. Public Safety Canada runs CSIS, the RCMP and CBSA — the two agencies that vetted her, and the agency whose own competition produced the fraud finding against her. Global Affairs Canada holds the final clearance.

In January 2019 she filed two applications to the same CBSA competition, 13 hours apart, from two university email addresses carrying two different orderings of her name.

The applications were nearly identical.

Invited to sit two standardized examinations under each, she signed confidentiality agreements for both. That March, CBSA asked her to re-sign one using her own full name rather than the other name she had used.

She complied without asking why.

She then sat the examinations twice inside 24 hours, against instructions imposing a 180-day wait before any rewrite. When the testing contractor flagged the duplication and CBSA asked directly which application was hers and whether she had filed two, she gave a single application number.

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