December 1, 2020 is the second anniversary of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou’s arrest—or kidnapping, depending on your point of view—in Vancouver, Canada.

If you work for the U.S.’s Departments of Justice, Treasury and State, with the CIA/NSA cheering from the galleries, it is just a simple extradition request to “carry out the law.”

If, however, you are company executive Frédéric Pierucci, Meng was kidnapped by the U.S., just as he was in 2013, whereupon he was imprisoned for two years on similar—he would say trumped-up—charges. His seizure was used to extort France’s flagship Alstom Corporation to pay $772 million in fines (ransom according to Pierucci) and sell off its most valuable portfolios to General Electric (GE), its U.S. competitor—all to gain his release. Pierucci survived his maximum-security incarceration and wrote a book about it, The American Trap: My battle to expose America’s secret economic war against the rest of the world.

The booty collected by the U.S. Treasury Department was the largest fine ever assessed, and enabled GE to seize key assets from and weaken one of its biggest global competitors. In Meng’s case, former assistant U.S. attorney in New York, Nick Akerman, who was a Watergate prosecutor, and Joseph Campbell, director of Navigant Consulting and an FBI agent, believe the U.S.’s goal is to get her to sing about Huawei’s internal operations and to name names—in other words, extort information out of her.

We can also add that her seizure is just one more in a long list of anti-China “maximum pressure” measures that the Trump administration has been ratcheting up since 2017.

Pierucci and Meng are two headline catchers, but they are not alone. Eight foreign executives had already been arrested by 2007, using the U.S.’s sweeping antitrust laws. There are now many others, including executives from Abraaj Group, Martinair Cargo, and Parker ITR Srl.

Largely ignored by the mainstream media, there is also Wang Weijing, former Chinese diplomat turned Huawei marketing executive, who was arrested in Poland last year for espionage. Also not reported much is that, inside the United States, Chinese scientists and academics continue to be arrested or mysteriously die with many more in the arrest pipeline, like Hao Zhang last month.

Whether the target is political-economic or a real crook, anti-trust lawsuits involve building legal cases which are hard work, expensive and must eventually be made a part of the public record, making them more accountable.

While an integral part of U.S. “diplomacy” going back to the Cold War, the Trump administration, since 2017, has increasingly been using a second form of “enforcement”—legal or of the loan shark variety—financial sanctions and economic/trade embargoes against targeted countries, their companies and executives. This includes purported “allies” too, like France.

For the U.S. the beauty is that these sanctions are frequently applied against targets for violating other unilateral sanctions, like against Cuba in France’s case and against Iran and Syria with Germany. This opens up America’s perceived geopolitical enemies and commercial competitors to thousands of “gotcha” traps.

For example, a component from your company was used in parts sold to the targeted state/business, your company owns shares in another company in a similar trade transaction, or they paid/were paid via SWIFT bank transfer (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), which the U.S. effectively controls via the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

U.S. sanctions have quickly become imperial fractal designs, which metastasize and multiply themselves across global commerce and trade. Who needs expensive, accountable anti-trust lawsuits? It is easy to declare sanctions and, often, such extortion is all that is needed to get the desired effect. There are thousands of countries, businesses and persons listed on the U.S. Treasury Department’s sanctions webpages.

This closed-sanction loop, enshrined in the Trump-era CAATSA (Countering America’s Adversaries through Sanctions Act 2017) is a perpetual motion machine for American businesses to extort international competitors, as was the case for Pierucci and Alstom Corporation, as well as a geopolitical wrecking ball for the Treasury, Justice and State Departments.

This U.S. modus operandi appears to be the method used with Meng Wanzhou and Huawei.

What makes Meng’s story so volatile, is that, due to her being arrested/kidnapped in Canada, her case is now a ménage-à-trois, with Ottawa being the submissive, as it has been caught in the middle. While claiming that they are only “respecting its extradition treaties,” Canada and the U.S. indicate they must defer to their “independent judiciaries” and honor the “rule of law.” Upon close examination, however, this case demonstrates gross hypocrisy, if not many inconsistencies and fault lines. At least U.S. President Trump admitted publicly what routinely goes on behind closed doors. On December 11, 2018, just days after Meng’s apprehension, Trump said he would be happy to use her as a bargaining chip to win a better trade deal with China.

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The Devil is in the Details

On August 22, 2018, 100 days before Meng’s December 1^st detention in Canada, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, in Brooklyn, issued her arrest warrant, for “conspiracy to defraud multiple international institutions.” It was read out at Meng’s first court hearing on December 7, 2018, detailing the U.S. claims that she misled banks to circumvent unilateral American sanctions on Iran, that Canada opposes, a rich, hypocritical irony, indeed.

Arrest warrants are a matter of public record, but a thorough search of the usual online databases draws a blank for 46-48 year-old Meng in the above court filings. The question is why? Another interesting political aspect of Meng’s apprehension is that it was not made public for four full days, until December 5, 2018. Meng was in transit at the Vancouver Airport to continue on another commercial flight to Mexico City. Why such a long wait to tell the world? Typically, captors are anxious to tell the world about their “victory” in apprehending their catch. At the same time, the captive usually wants to buy time before it becomes big news, so as to gather as much information as possible.

No Canadian or U.S. press conference seems to have been held to make the announcement, so it can be assumed that Meng’s lawyers leaked it to the media. We know that Meng was able to call her lawyer on December 1, 2018, as she requested to talk to her lawyer at 14:27, three hours after she was seized by Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA)—meaning immigration—agents. Here is the court registered timeline:

• 11:10 a.m.: Meng arrives at YVR on Cathay Flight CX838 with a companion and gets off the flight. A provisional arrest warrant had been issued in Vancouver the day before by a Supreme Court of B.C. justice that ordered “all peace officers having jurisdiction in Canada to immediately arrest Wanzhou Meng.” Three CBSA agents are on the jetway and screen passengers as they leave the plane. The border agents have a description of what Meng is wearing. Two RCMP officers are observing. Meng is identified, told she was being detained, not told about the arrest warrant and two of her phones and one belonging to a travelling partner are seized and placed in mylar evidence bags.
• 11:35 a.m.: Meng is escorted by two CBSA agents to the secondary screening area where she is left by herself for 10 minutes. She is not free to leave or speak to any third parties.
• 11:45 a.m.: Meng is brought to Counter 21 in the secondary screening area and the two agents begin to question her and search her belongings.
• 12:03 p.m.: Meng’s bags are retrieved from the luggage carousel.
• 12:13 p.m.: A third CBSA agent approaches Counter 21 and speaks with the other two officers.
• 12:14 p.m.: Agents seize an iPad, MacBook and USB stick from Meng’s luggage.  (note: all her electronic devices were put into bags provided by the U.S. FBI)
• 12:20 p.m.: Two agents leave the counter while the third agent talks with Meng over the next 25 minutes.
• 1:09 p.m.: The two agents return to the counter, where Meng is asked more questions.
• 1:13 p.m.: One of the agents leaves and Meng is allowed to go to the bathroom.
• 1:55 p.m.: Meng is again interviewed by an agent for 14 minutes and is questioned about her role with Huawei. During this time Meng is compelled to handover the passcodes to her electronic devices.
• 2:11 p.m.: Meng is taken away from Counter 21 so that she can be arrested by the RCMP.
• 2:15 p.m.: Meng is taken into a room where the RCMP interact with her for the first time and she is told why she has been arrested and of her right to obtain counsel.
• 2:27 p.m.: Meng requests to speak with a lawyer [as per one of the RCMP officer’s notes].
• 3:20 p.m.: Meng is able to call legal counsel from YVR [YVR is the code for Vancouver Airport].

This timeline is from the Memorandum of Fact and Law Application for Disclosure between applicant Meng Wanzhou and respondent The Attorney General of Canada on behalf of the United States of America.

Notice that, when Meng was seized by two CBSA agents at the airport jetway, that “Two RCMP officers are observing.”

For most of us, likely including Meng, there is a huge difference in perception between dealing with immigration (BCSA) and police (RCMP) officers. Immigration greets us at the airport and stamps our passport, asking mostly innocuous questions about our visits.

Yet, not realized by most of us, immigration can serve court-ordered arrests. Thus, why did the RCMP officers, who were standing right there, not arrest Meng directly? It was likely to give Meng the impression that she only had a problem with her Canadian paperwork, since she had been a legal resident of Vancouver since not that she was being set up for extradition to the U.S. on criminal charges.

Notice in the above timeline, CBSA held and questioned Meng for 2.5 hours (11:45 a.m. – 2:15 p.m.), where,

Meng is [again interviewed by an agent for 14 minutes and is] questioned about her role with Huawei. During this time Meng is compelled to handover the passcodes to her electronic devices.

This timeline strongly suggests an illegal sting operation to get Meng to innocently spill the beans to immigration about her case and Huawei, give up all her passwords to the electronic devices that CBSA took later turned over to RCMP, not to mention the devices of Meng’s still anonymous travel companion from Hong Kong.

Can you picture these CBSA agents wearing wiretaps to record Meng’s 150 minutes of illegally gained testimony in Chinese and translated into English? Can you envision the RCMP turning over all of Meng’s and her travel partner’s devices with passwords and pre-arrest interrogations to the FBI?

Further and more detailed evidence strongly depicts an FBI and RCMP sting operation from the get-go.

From British Columbia Supreme Court documents, we know that on the morning of November 30, 2018, RCMP’s Foreign and Domestic Liaison Unit (FDLU) received emails about Meng’s arrival the next day, this news coming from the Department of Justice Vancouver Office (DOJ-VO).

From the time the first email was received at 8:58 a.m. that day, the RCMP and DOJ-VO worked feverishly, receiving a second provisional warrant that included the password-protected Summary of Facts for Meng Wanzhou, a Chinese Citizen.

Finally, at 3:00 p.m.,

Warrant of Provisional Arrest in regards to Meng Wanzhou, aliases Cathy Meng and Sabrina Meng. Department of Justice attorney John Gibb-Carsley provided a copy of the warrant, granted by B.C. Supreme Court Justice Margot Fleming.

With only hours to go until Meng’s departure from Hong Kong, they then organized contact numbers for RCMP Regional District Officers to locate a Mandarin-speaking female officer to assist with the arrest. Two RCMP officers, Dhaliwal and Yep, went to the Vancouver Airport (YVR) to speak to the Richmond RCMP based there to plan for her arrest.

Finally, at 7:52 p.m.,

The Provisional Warrant for Meng, granted by B.C. Supreme Court Justice Fleming, is posted on the Canadian Police Information Centre database.

Was BCSA ever contacted? Apparently not. One of the cardinal tenets of law enforcement is to note everything down, to use later as evidence, and up to now BCSA was not mentioned. Was the FBI sending instructions to BCSA on the side, for plausible deniability? Perhaps. In any case, five hours later, Meng’s flight, Cathay Pacific flight CX838, left Hong Kong for Vancouver and the next day’s trap was set and loaded.

The next morning, December 1, 2018, starting at 7:30 a.m., the likely real string puller for “Operation Snatch Meng,” the FBI, was emailing RCMP and CBSA agents, asking if all systems were Go. Notice that now, RCMP court records include CBSA as part of the action.

Two hours later, regional and local RCMP and airport CBSA agents had a meeting to plan how Meng’s arrest would proceed:

9:30 a.m.: (regional RCMP) Const. Dhaliwal and Const. Yep attend YVR and have briefing with (local RCMP) Sgt. Lundie, Const. Dawn But and (airport) CBSA officers Scott Kirkland, Sanjit Dhillon and Sowmith Katragadda.

Could the four RCMP officers at the airport have arrested Meng as she got off the plane, read her her rights to a lawyer and taken her straight to jail? Of course. But the three CBSA officers were certainly used to trick Meng into believing she had a Canadian immigration problem, not U.S. criminal charges, “while RCPM officers were watching as it happened.”

This well-organized trap is further proven by court records (please forgive some necessary duplication in the two timelines):

• 11:21 a.m.: (CBSA) Kirkland takes control of two cell phones from Meng and one cell phone from her companion.
• 11:30 a.m.: Meng in CBSA secondary waiting area.
• 11:44 a.m.: (RCMP) Yep text to (RCMP) Dhaliwal: “She’s been pulled into secondary at CBSA with her female companion. Once they are done, we will serve the warrant on her.”

Is this a smoking gun which will get Meng’s case dismissed?

As described above, for the next two and one-half hours, the three BCSA agents illegally detained, questioned and extracted passwords from Meng and her never-identified travel companion. Again, were they wearing wiretaps or was this secondary waiting area wired to record audio-visual? I suspect that they were.

The court record confirms it was exactly 150 long minutes:

• 2:13 p.m.: (RCMP) Yep and But escort Meng to room C2860.0 at CBSA secondary area.
• 2:15 p.m.: Warrant executed.

Even then, Meng wasn’t read her rights for another 12 minutes.

• 2:27 p.m.: Yep read Meng her rights.

With everything the Americans needed, the fig leaf of the BCSA “turning over” Meng to the RCMP was played out,

• 2:45 p.m.: (CBSA) Katragadda handed (RCMP) Dhaliwal a Hong Kong passport belonging to Meng.
• 2:59 p.m.: (RCMP) Dhaliwal seized all personal belongings subsequent to the arrest of Meng: two cell phones, one iPad; one MacBook computer; one Cruzer Glide 3.0 256 GB storage; eight pieces of luggage (suitcases, handbags and boxes).
• 3:32 p.m.: One brown Botega bag, wallet with money, large Rimowa blue suitcase and four rings given to her travel companion, as per Meng’s request.
• 3:53 p.m.: (RCMP) Dhaliwal leaves YVR for Richmond RCMP [police station] with Meng’s electronic devices and apparently with Meng too.
• 4:38 p.m.: Dhaliwal observed Meng at Richmond RCMP cells. She is assigned prisoner number 849.
• 4:44 p.m.: Meng fingerprinted and photographed. The booking officer determines she is alert and her state of mind is “OK.” But her balance is “fair.” [Note: Meng suffers from hypertension and is in cancer remission.]
• 5:06 p.m.: Meng escorted to private phone room 407 to await a call.
• 5:17 p.m.: Meng picked up phone in room 407; she hung up the phone at 17:25.

It is likely that the Canadians, passwords in hand, made copies of all the data on the seized electronic devices. Similarly, it is likely that the FBI had its Vancouver station officer, who was emailing the RCMP and CBSA the whole time, be the courier to ferry all the devices south of the border, along with the recordings of Meng’s illegal 2.5-hour interrogation.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Justice Ministers/Attorneys-General David Lametti and Jody Wilson-Raybould, British Columbia Supreme Court Justices Heather Holmes, Margot Fleming and Catherine Kane, Prosecutor John Gibb-Carsley, politico-media star Chrystia Freeland and their U.S. counterparts can bloviate and pontificate all they want about the West’s “rule of law,” “judicial independence” and honoring treaties. However, there has never been “blind” justice, whether in Canada, the United States, China or anywhere else. If this delusion were true, then why the big uproar about President Trump choosing the successor to fill the seat just vacated by Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Supreme Court?

At least China is honest about it, admits this reality and is trying to make its judicial process more transparent, but never to the point that it endangers the people’s freedom and independence from foreign subterfuge. To pretend that the legislative and executive branches of government are political, and that the judiciary somehow floats above it all, is absurd and laughable. Thousands of victims, like Fred Hampton, Jr., and Mumia Abu-Jamal, have paid heavy prices for this bitter truth.  

The preponderance of the evidence strongly suggests that the U.S. worked hand-in-hand with Canadian law enforcement and its courts to deceive Meng Wanzhou into thinking she was being arrested for an immigration problem, was compelled to turn over her electronic devices with their passwords, while being interrogated for 2.5 hours about her work and Huawei, only then to be served an arrest warrant and advised of her right to a lawyer.

The fact that the Canadian courts have refused to acknowledge the illegality of what happened to Meng is all you need to know about what a hollow farce Western “rule of law” and “judicial independence” really are.

On August 25, 2020, Meng was denied having the contents of six confidential documents released to her legal team after arguing in Federal Court that these heavily redacted documents would support the position that their client was illegally arrested at Vancouver Airport and her rights grossly violated. Canadian Justice Catherine Kane refused to do so, claiming the contents were not relevant to the case. If that were true, why not let Meng’s defense lend their opinion?

On October 9, 2020, Meng was denied her request to be shown hundreds more documents deemed “confidential” by the Canadian authorities—documents related to all the communications between the U.S. and Canadian agencies before and after her arrest. Meng’s legal team has already complained that the documents they have received were heavily redacted.

Is it safe to assume that what Canadian authorities are hiding, under undoubtedly intense U.S. pressure, involves all the evidence presented here? Is it likely these documents are so damning that Meng’s case would have to be thrown out, setting her free?

I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count.

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About the Author

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