Submitted by David Asher, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and former senior advisor to the State Department on China,
At 0800 ET, the China Subcommittee in the House of Representatives will convene a critically important hearing on the Chinese government's involvement in fentanyl trafficking.
Congressman Mike Gallagher will make his final appearance as Chair of the Committee. Expect some mind-altering news as the results of a year-long special investigation are unveiled.
The US faces a drug death catastrophe where we incur fatalities approaching those during the entire Vietnam War every six months. The vast majority of deaths are derived from fentanyl-laced narcotics, many of which are marketed as "ordinary" painkillers and anti-depressants by Mexican cartels. China knowingly supplies the ingredients to Mexican cartels manufacturing illicit fentanyl drugs, and Chinese organized criminals in the US handle the laundering of proceeds. It's an end-to-end Chinese Communist conspiracy.
Nationwide drug overdose deaths have topped 100,000 in the last few years.
The overdose crisis is from Coast to Coast.
This is shocking.
A joint DEA-State Department investigation between 2017 and 2020 found that over a thousand Chinese Communist students here on visas alone deposited well over a billion drug dollars in America's largest banks, mainly in cash to pay for real estate. The role of the Chinese Communist Party in coordinating this "reverse opium war" was apparent to those of us who led the investigation.
Our system of financial law enforcement is broken. Hundreds of billions of dollars annually are being laundered for the cartels and their Chinese triad partners through the global financial system, while banks and dirty bankers are treated as too big to fail and too big to jail. The Department of Justice has not taken down a major narcotics trafficking bank in decades. The last significant criminal law enforcement operation against a major bank occurred in 1988 when Bank Credit Commerce International — at the time one of the ten largest banks on the planet — was targeted and eventually put out of business with its dirty executives taken away in chains.
Hopefully, former Attorney General William Barr will address the failure of the Department of Justice to apply its authority against financial institutions during the hearing. Likewise, former DEA Chief of Special Operations Ray Donovan will shed insight into the failings of his former agency to secure top-down financial prosecutions.
Having advised the DEA on financial investigations for nearly a decade, I can assure you it is not due to a lack of evidence.
It's time to take the drug war into the financial arena, holding not just the money launderers legally accountable but their dirty banks and bankers responsible as well. The first step should be applying Section 311 of the USA Patriot Act against a Mexican bank. Mexico, not surprisingly, is ground zero for cartel finances. 311 is our primary anti-money laundering tool protecting the US financial system, but it has never been applied in Mexico. To its maximum extent, 311 empowers the US Treasury Department to cut off a foreign financial institution from the ability to transact and settle dollar transactions via the US. It concerns the "nuclear option" in the Treasury's war against illicit finance. How many more Americans have to die before 311 is applied and we wage war to put murderous drug traffickers out of business?
The second step should be to designate a Chinese bank as a "primary money laundering concern." This 311 authority should have been applied against China-based HSBC in Mexico City 15 years ago, but it was waved off due to concerns over financial stability. The multi-year DEA undercover investigation into HSBC's involvement in cartel finance was similarly driveled down into a deferred prosecution agreement and a couple billion dollar fine. At the end of the day, the status quo reigned supreme.
Finally, the RICO charge needs to be applied strategically and systematically in federal law enforcement investigations and indictments against the profits of illicit narcotics trafficking. The business of drugs is about making money. It's run from the top down.
The Mexican and Chinese governments are fully aware and complicit. That should not be an excuse for the abysmal US failure of the US government to enforce the law over a bizarre rendering of supposed sovereign immunity.
The prospect of a million dead Americans over the next decade should prompt authorities to embrace the war on drugs, starting with attacking the profits that underwrite mass murder via fentanyl.
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Watch Live: The CCP's Role in the Fentanyl Crisis
Via Zer0hedge
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