Examining Policies to Counter China: U.S. efforts to Counter Illicit Fentanyl Trafficking and Related Money Laundering by the People’s Republic of China (Testimony of John A. Cassara)
ICAIE’s Board Member and Senior Advisor, John Cassara testified this morning before the U.S. House Financial Services Committee (HFSC), United States Congress hearing on “Examining Policies to Counter China” and one of focused thematic areas on “U.S. efforts to Counter Illicit Fentanyl Trafficking and Related Money Laundering by the People’s Republic of China”.
ICAIE continues to advance a needed policy position that as part of the full spectrum U.S. national security responses to fight today’s Mexican cartels and other transnational criminal organizations, we must also augment these American efforts and leveraged authorities towards fully optimizing llicit finance actions and tools including to more robustly target the illicit finance enablers of today’s drug trafficking networks including Chinese money laundering organizations (CMLOs) in the United States, Canada, Mexico, China, and where threat intelligence directs us to numerous financial safe havens and hubs of illicit trade arounds the world.
ICAIE has also provided insights into how dirty monies and value trails from drug trafficking and global illicit trade flow through China. As Mr. Cassara underscored in his testimony, CCP Inc. and Chinese money laundering organizations (CMLOs) leverage underground banking system that has long served China’s immigrant diaspora, and have become the go-to partners for Mexican fentanyl traffickers and other transnational criminal organizations needing to launder profits from the illegal fentanyl trade, drug trafficking operations, and an array of other criminal activities around the globe. CMLOs represent one of the most worrisome new threats in combating transnational organized crime. CMLOs, many associated with China-based criminal organizations, have become key players in the multi-billion-dollar criminal empires run by Mexican-based cartels and other transnational criminal organizations (TCOs).
In fact, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and CMLOs are arguably one of the world’s biggest transnational illicit trade syndicates and a prolific enabler of crime and corruption globally, whose complicity in the fentanyl illegal trade is killing tens of thousands of Americans every month.
ICAIE has in recent years reported on how CCP Inc. has leveraged corruption, illicit markets, and predatory trade and lending practices to become the world’s largest player in almost every major sector of transnational crime and related money laundering including: narcotics, illegal fentanyl trade, counterfeits, trafficking in weapons, humans, wildlife, illegally-harvested timber, fish, and natural resources, theft of IP and trade secrets, illicit tobacco, organ harvesting, and other crimes.
Several trillion U.S. dollars in illicit proceeds every year are generated from predicate offenses for money laundering that touch China’s jurisdiction and markets, and are often used to finance China’s authoritarian regime and to leverage its strategic corruption as part of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) — and in a Great Power Competition (GPC) and threat convergence world — other CCP-inspired foreign policies aimed to destabilize American national security and national economic interests around the world.
Find Mr. Cassara’s recent written testimomy and other HFSC’s testimony at the 25 February 2025 hearing at the HFSC’s Congressional webpage.
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