The Bureau Podcast

OTTAWA — In this conversation with BNN's Jason James, I wrestle with the central confusion surrounding the United States-Israel campaign in Iran. Is the objective regime change, the retrieval of enriched uranium, Israel's own objectives, or something deeper and more indirect — the culmination of a pivot from the Middle East, and a strategic warning to Xi Jinping and his axis partners in Russia and North Korea? My view is that the United States military would not have launched this campaign without a rigorous analysis of what it means for Taiwan.
I open by recounting a reporting trip to Taiwan in 2023 — the same year, we now know, that the Central Intelligence Agency director privately warned Silicon Valley executives that Xi could move on Taiwan by 2027. I left that trip with several firm convictions.
Xi Jinping was not a popular leader among his Red princeling cohort, and has vulnerabilities little understood in the West, including a coup-like challenge from within, prior to 2020. The current military upheaval under Xi has only deepened that assessment.
And in 2023, I gathered that the United States, likely supported by Japan, Taiwan, and Australia, will not allow Beijing to blockade or invade Taiwan — and the U.S.-led coalition believes it can defeat China’s military, a conviction that holds regardless of who occupies the White House.
The conversation ranges widely, from confusion surrounding Prime Minister Mark Carney’s position on Iran, to a potential trade resolution between Washington and Ottawa.
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LONDON — Jason Pack has spent his career advising Western governments and corporations on the Middle East, running a Libya oil-and-gas consulting firm, and briefing United Nations bureaucrats. Now a fellow at RUSI, the storied British defense and security think tank, his career has sometimes crossed paths with actors in the Western intelligence alliance.
That background provides solid fundamentals for understanding the world Jeffrey Epstein operated in — and the known knowns and known unknowns surrounding the recent US government disclosures. While the disclosures have led to new revelations, such as Bloomberg’s scoop on a DEA investigation into allegations that Epstein laundered money for organized crime while trafficking in synthetic narcotics and Eastern European women, Epstein’s sex crimes were an open secret covered up for too long, according to Pack.
“There has been a cover-up both at the governmental level and at the media level,” Pack told The Bureau podcast. “The media one outrages me even more.”
Pack’s explanation of Epstein’s origin story and accumulation of power is logical and grounded in the available evidence. A secular, middle-class kid from Long Island, Epstein got a teaching job at Dalton, the elite Manhattan private school, and used those connections to land at Bear Stearns. From Bear Stearns, he reached powerful clients. From powerful clients, he reached billionaires. At each rung, he found leverage — insider trading networks, offshore tax schemes, then something no amount of money could buy.
“He was a provider of non-monetary assets,” Pack said. “You can’t buy underage women. You can’t buy tax evasion. You can’t purchase, ‘I want to be invited to this party where there are models and media elites.’ That instantly crosses over into intelligence.”
The sex trafficking, Pack argues, was not primarily about gratification. It was about domination and psychological manipulation — a tool Epstein wielded over the powerful the same way he wielded it over teenagers. Pack calls it a revision of his own theory of power. Lord Acton’s famous formulation — power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely — may have it backwards. “What if people sought power because they were already twisted?”
On why Epstein was never reined in, Pack offered a framework he calls “too big to fail.” Once Epstein held compromising material on enough Democratic donors and Republican elites alike, prosecution became politically suicidal. “Biden couldn’t release information on Epstein because so many Democratic donors would be made to look bad,” he said. Neither political party could deploy the material as a weapon without the collateral damage destroying its own base.
Intelligence agencies, Pack argues, had their own calculus. He pointed to “The Rest is Classified” podcast’s reporting that CIA director William Burns helped rent an apartment for Epstein’s brother, at which young women were brought to associates — suggesting Epstein represented a collection asset too valuable to burn. “Every side thought it was beneficial for the guy to exist so long as they were in on it.”
Jason Pack hosts the Disorder Podcast, available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.


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The Bureau has been covering the war against Iran’s Islamic regime largely through American political and military sources — the strategic calculus, the intelligence assessments, the geopolitical reverberations reaching from Beijing to Moscow. But there is a different angle that comes from standing in a city under bombardment, and that is what Adam Zivo has been delivering from Tel Aviv.
We last talked when he was in Israel during the 12-day war last June. He returned to Tel Aviv roughly a week before this current campaign began, because his sources — political and journalistic — told him that what was coming would be severe.
What he has found since arriving is something that might surprise people who have never spent time in Israel, much less during a war. People at the beach. People at the cafes. An entire society that had made its psychological peace with the fact that conflict with an Islamic regime that has pledged to eradicate the state of Israel is inevitable, a matter of when, not if.
Adam walks us through the first day of incoming bomb warnings, to an increasing sense of normalcy and expectation of complete military victory for Israel and the United States. What comes next for the people of Iran is the big unknown.
He also walks us through the information war running parallel to the kinetic one — artificial intelligence-generated footage of a bomb-ravaged Tel Aviv that wildly distorts reality, the bot farms, the monetization structures on social media that reward emotions over accuracy, and the specific role of Qatar, a state that has long tried to play both sides of the civilizational divide and is now discovering what it means to be bombed by the regime it has been financing.
And we get into the deeper question — the one that will define the next decade of Middle Eastern politics: what comes after? Is there a democratic Iran on the other side of this? What is the role of exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi? And where does China fit in an alliance of authoritarian states that Israel and the United States are now, whether Washington says it plainly or not, confronting as a unified bloc?
Adam Zivo reports from Tel Aviv.
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OTTAWA — In this episode, former senior Mountie Garry Clement joins Sam Cooper to answer a question that should unsettle every Canadian: how does a figure like Ryan Wedding — an Olympic athlete from Coquitlam — end up becoming one of the most feared Sinaloa Cartel operatives in North America? The answer, Clement argues, has less to do with Wedding himself than with the country that made his rise possible.
Clement spent 34 years in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, including deep-cover undercover operations in British Columbia and an extraordinary posting to Hong Kong in the early 1990s, where he and immigration control officer Brian McAdam came face to face with the top tier of Chinese transnational crime — Stanley Ho, 14K Triad leadership and elite businessmen like Li Ka Shing, whose shipping entities were recently barred from the Panama Canal under US pressure — while watching Canadian diplomatic officials accept red envelopes of casino cash and look the other way. Clement watched a system designed to stop dirty money instead absorb it. He is now watching history repeat itself, at industrial scale.
On Wedding specifically, Clement is blunt: the former Olympian had the profile of every major trafficker he ever investigated — the ego, the drive, the early dabbling with no consequences, a prison stint that functioned as a graduate seminar in criminal networking. Wedding’s athletic psychology, Cooper suggests, may have been an accelerant rather than an anomaly — the same ruthless focus that puts an athlete on a podium, possibly the unbound ego of a sociopath that never faced correction while pushing boundaries in pot-permissive British Columbia at a young age, now applied without correction to a criminal enterprise.
One of the episode’s most arresting moments comes when Clement, a veteran of hundreds of undercover operations, describes buying three kilos of cocaine in the 1970s from a young woman who had rescheduled their meeting because she was singing in a church choir. She drove up alone, no protection, product on the front seat. “That’s how people that are really egotistical believe they’re untouchable,” he says. “Ryan Wedding was that magnified by a thousand.”
Cooper connects Wedding’s rise to a longer arc of institutional failure that Clement traces back decades: the dismantling of port policing in Vancouver in the early 1980s, which he says opened the door to Chinese-linked criminal control of the docks; the penetration of government databases by organized crime through corrupt officers; and an immigration system in Hong Kong that, Clement alleges, effectively sold Canadian passports to figures including Stanley Ho — who Jeffrey Epstein’s files, Cooper notes, identified as the boss of the Chinese mob. Clement says he was personally forbidden from interviewing Ho. Shortly afterward, Ho received what Clement flatly calls “a passport of convenience.”
The conversation turns to North Toronto — Willowdale, Thornhill, the corridor above Highway 401 — which Cooper identifies as a node of Iranian Revolutionary Guard money laundering, a claim he says has now been punctuated by recent shootings at a boxing gym and a synagogue. Clement recalls walking that stretch with Iranian currency trader sources in the 1990s, watching unregistered traders transfer money directly to Iranian banks while enforcement looked the other way.
The thread running through all of it, Clement argues, is the same: a country that repeatedly chose not to look. Not at the casinos. Not at the ports. Not at the politicians photographed beside organized crime figures — including, he says, a then-mayor of Vancouver standing with the father of the head of the Sun Yee On Triad Society, a photo that ran on the front page of the South China Morning Post the next morning. “They don’t do this because they want to be seen as in the hands of the politician,” Clement says. “They’re doing it because they want to earn credibility.”
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OTTAWA — In this episode, I dug deeper into the Epstein network revelations with Jason James.
Building on our earlier conversation in the Christmas special—where we explored the global networks that can bridge Western leaders and bankers, including Mark Carney, with Chinese Communist Party–linked investment funds—I said the late-2025 and early 2026 picture of Jeffrey Epstein had come into sharper focus: not only as a potential intelligence asset of any single nation, but as a fixer and facilitator moving among elites worldwide.
I will develop this thread in the coming days, as additional evidence emerges suggesting Epstein had been introduced into the orbit of CITIC Group—described as a Chinese military- and intelligence-connected global investment ecosystem with deep ties to Canadian Liberal Party business backers and former prime minister Jean Chrétien—and tentacles that reached back into the 1990s-era “Clintongate” Chinese influence scandal.
On the China theme, we also dug deeper into turmoil inside General Secretary Xi Jinping’s domain. We discussed how a purge or potential counter-coup involving respected PLA leader Zhang Youxia appeared to be unfolding in recent weeks, and what that kind of internal instability could signal for Beijing’s decision-making and external posture.
All of it, I told Jason, pointed to a simple conclusion: over the past month as Mark Carney and Keir Starmer traveled to Beijing—with photo-op diplomacy projecting the wisdom of leadership and solidity of statesmanship—there were mounting signs that something more volatile could have been boiling underneath. I said that, in that environment, the most plausible explanation was not that these leaders lacked good intelligence and advice as they dove deeper into relationships with a fragile superpower, but, more likely, that they disregarded notes of caution from CSIS and MI6 respectively.
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