Here is an excerpt focusing on Rep. Adam Schiff, the Los Angeles-area Democrat and persistent Donald Trump antagonist touted to become California’s next United States Senator. (The text’s numerous supporting footnotes are omitted here.)
The fentanyl epidemic has not spared wealthy areas such as Burbank, California, where at least seven high school students have overdosed on fentanyl. The situation is so bad that the Burbank Unified School District, like many others around the country, started requiring schools to stock up on naloxone, a drug to contain the effects of a fentanyl overdose. In 2022, two men were arrested in Burbank with a hundred thousand counterfeit oxycodone pills laced with fentanyl. Nineteen-year-old TikTok influencer Cooper Noriega was found dead in a Burbank park with fentanyl in his system.
Burbank falls within the district of California congressman Adam Schiff, one of the most powerful and influential elected officials in America. A former prosecutor, Schiff has been in Congress since 2000, rising to serve as the chairman of the secretive and powerful House Intelligence Committee between 2017 and 2023. From his perch, Schiff had responsibility for, among other things, US national security. Schiff has been outspoken on numerous national security threats, but not when it comes to fentanyl, even though fentanyl deaths in the Los Angeles area rose by a stunning 1,208 percent from 2016 to 2022. If you go to the Intelligence Committee’s webpage that describes its work under his tenure, the word “fentanyl” yields no results. That is to say, the Intelligence Committee under his leadership, by its own account, did nothing on a topic that the Obama administration had declared a threat to our national security in 2017. A search of Schiff’s congressional webpage yields a lone mention of “fentanyl,” a brief reference to a single piece of legislation.
Fentanyl is clearly not Schiff’s priority.
Voters in his district have noticed the silence.
“According to the United States Attorney’s office for the Southern District of California in San Diego, more deadly Fentanyl is being seized by border officials in San Diego and Imperial counties than at any of the nation’s 300 plus ports of entry, making this federal district an epicenter for Fentanyl trafficking into the United States,” one constituent noted in the Glendale News-Press, a local paper. “The city of Glendale is about a two-hour drive from our southern border and California Rep. Adam Schiff’s district since 2013. Not surprisingly, on Dec. 31, 2022, we received another piece of mail from the Congressman’s office with no reference to the Fentanyl crisis. Congressman Schiff often writes in the local newspapers without reference to the Fentanyl problem in his district.”
In contrast, Schiff was outspoken on the far, far less dangerous outbreak of monkeypox, demanding more action on a vaccine, even though it has killed no one in the United States at the time of this writing. Schiff also gave numerous interviews on CNN, MSNBC, and other news outlets about the Ebola virus, which at the time had killed just one American.
Why Congressman Schiff has little to say about the deadly fentanyl crisis is an abiding mystery. Part of the reason may be that raising the issue might cause undue attention to his financial connections to individuals involved with criminal networks in Southern California, many of whom are tied to money laundering and the drug trade.
Encompassing Hollywood, Burbank, and Glendale, California, Schiff’s congressional district has long been a hub of organized criminal activity. Beginning in the early 1990s, the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers in the region began reporting on the rise of Armenian gangs in the district. These gangs, not to mention those from Central and South America and China, are involved in all kinds of violent crime, including drug trafficking, gunrunning, murder, extortion, and white-collar crimes such as money laundering.
Some of Schiff’s work in the state senate, before he was elected to Congress, fueled financial crimes in his district. One bill related to Medi-Cal created a gateway for considerable fraud, which an organized crime syndicate in his district seized upon, perpetuating the largest Medicaid fraud case in history at the time. California business leaders warned Schiff about the fraud they were witnessing, but he appears to have ignored it. In 2010, four hundred FBI agents executed a massive investigation and arrested seventy Armenian mobsters. The criminals ran 118 phantom clinics, many of them in Schiff’s district. The ringleader, Armen Kazarian, lived in Schiff’s district.
Once in Washington, Schiff opposed legislation that would have cracked down on criminal money-laundering networks. In 2005, a bill was introduced onto the House floor to expand the role the federal government would have in fighting gang violence by creating “an anti-racketeering statute similar to the one used against the Mafia dons to prosecute criminal street gangs.” But Schiff opposed the bill. Armenian organized crime continued to expand in Schiff’s district, and his connections to some of the players involved are concerning.
In 2017, Schiff established a joint fundraising committee with California senator Barbara Boxer called PAC for a Change. One of the largest donations—$95,000—came from the head of a sketchy firm located in Schiff’s district called Allied Wallet. The company was run by Andy Khawaja, an executive who would come under investigation by federal authorities and whose business was tied to money laundering, with a major footprint in China.
Money also flowed to the campaign in other ways.
Schiff’s congressional campaign took in at least $36,000 in donations from executives at Allied Wallet. Another $16,100 came from Khawaja, and two additional $10,000 contributions came from two other executives of the company. While Schiff was accepting those donations, it was publicly known that Allied Wallet had been under FBI investigation. It was not the first time: in 2010, Allied Wallet had been forced by federal authorities to forfeit $13 million for its involvement in an illegal gambling scheme. At the time Schiff accepted donations from the executives, the company was being investigated for its ties to “illegal pharma” companies around the world. Khawaja threw a lot of money around, clearly in search of political access. During the 2016 presidential campaign, he first backed Hillary Clinton and then switched to Donald Trump. In the case of Schiff, he clearly gained access. On October 16, 2016, Khawaja and Schiff sat down for a private meeting with Saudi prince Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud in Beverly Hills.
Allied Wallet made money processing credit card payments for “‘high-risk’ online retailers that traditional financial institutions avoid.” They included criminal organizations “that apparently break the law in underhanded and odious ways.”
Allied Wallet also had a partnership with a Chinese company called China UnionPay, which Chinese triads used to launder money. China UnionPay is a Chinese state-owned entity with close ties to the CCP and a card brand that “is often seen as an arm of Chinese state policy.” UnionPay has been used by organized crime groups and drug traffickers all around the world, including the Chinese triads. Allied Wallet seemed to function “as a sort of credit card processor for fraudsters, swindlers, and rip-off artists bilking the public out of more than $100 million.”
Arthur Charchian is a Glendale, California, lawyer who was involved in a money-laundering scheme. Charchian is the head of Southern California Armenian Democrats and a Schiff booster. Shortly after Schiff introduced legislation on the Armenian genocide, another Armenian, gang leader Pogos Satamyan, donated $10,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In 2019, Democratic megadonor Ed Buck was charged with drug trafficking and “operating a drug house.” Buck was a donor to Schiff’s campaign and a social acquaintance as well.
Openly pressing for aggressive action to deal with the Chinese-linked fentanyl networks might lead to open discussions of money-laundering networks operating in the United States and raise some difficult questions for Schiff.
Schiff represents a congressional district that is at the heart of the American entertainment industry, including the cities of Burbank and Hollywood. Hollywood titans who finance his campaigns rely on access to the Chinese market for a sizable portion of their profits. From his earliest national elections, Schiff received the backing of entertainment industry titans such as Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg.
Their partner at DreamWorks, David Geffen, promised to raise however many millions of dollars were needed to defeat his opponent in 2000. … These titans have deep, abiding, and lucrative ties to the Chinese government that they do not want disturbed. DreamWorks has modified films for American audiences at the request of the Communist Chinese government, pushing CCP propaganda both subtly and not so subtly.
Taking aggressive action against China for its fentanyl activities could disrupt these relationships.
Schiff is not alone for strangely avoiding the topic of China’s involvement in fentanyl. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represents the Bronx and Queens, and those communities have also been shattered by fentanyl overdoses.
And yet Ocasio-Cortez, who serves as the vice ranking member of the powerful House Oversight Committee, has been weirdly silent on fentanyl and China’s role. Her congressional website yields plenty of mentions of her passionate work on topics like taxes and gun control, but there is not a single mention of fentanyl as of this writing.
China’s ambassador to the United States, Qin Gang, absurdly insists that his country is not involved in the fentanyl trade. The ambassador proudly stated that since 2019, “not a single criminal case has been opened in China that involves the manufacturing, trafficking and smuggling of fentanyl-related substances.”
Like a murderer mingling with onlookers at the scene of his crime, Beijing mocks America for the fentanyl crisis. Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, posted on social media a series of messages declaring that “China won’t become the U.S.” At one point, she wrote, “China does not allow the drug problem to haunt the nation and kill 100,000+ per year.”
The irony of that comment has reached beyond fentanyl – for example, to what appeared to be ordinary California homes in quiet, sometimes upscale, residential neighborhoods. … The 130 houses were, in fact, involved in a massive illegal marijuana-growing operation. Dozens of Chinese nationals purchased the homes in Sacramento, the state capital, with money wired from criminal gangs in Fujian province, China.
US federal officials, who had been tipped off about unusually high utility bills in the homes, eventually figured out what was going on. “This was a large-scale operation, with millions of dollars coming into the US from China,” recounted Cindy Chen, an assistant special agent in charge at the IRS. The Los Angeles Times said that “nearly half of the 21 people charged were Chinese citizens.” The money and people involved were part of another front on the drug war. Federal officials seized 61,000 marijuana plants and 441 pounds of processed dope when they broke up the operation.
In short, organized Chinese networks are moving into the American illegal marijuana business. And it’s not just happening in Sacramento.
In Seattle, money from mainland China was used to purchase prop- erties in the Puget Sound area to grow illegal marijuana. In Oklahoma, law enforcement officials say that 75 percent of the illegal marijuana operations they’ve shut down are connected to “Chinese investors and Chinese organized crime.” In San Bernardino County, California, authorities served a stunning 2,100 search warrants and seized more than $1 billion in processed cannabis and marijuana plants. Again, Chinese nationals were bringing money from the mainland and purchasing property in which to set up massive illegal dope operations, this time in the Chino-Ontario area in California. “My best estimate is probably 97% to 98% of all of our indoor marijuana cultivations are run by Chinese nationals,” said Sergeant Rich Debevec of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Marijuana Enforcement Team.
In the small, rural state of Maine, according to a leaked U.S. Border Patrol memo, there are estimated to be 270 illegal marijuana operations owned by Chinese nationals growing more than $4 billion worth of the drug. The state’s entire congressional delegation has asked the DOJ to shut them down.
The marijuana these operations produce is highly potent, roughly three times as strong as the illegal marijuana sold in the 1990s. And illegal marijuana is increasingly being laced with fentanyl.
Despite all the evidence, Beijing denies that it has anything to do with the fentanyl trade and feigns offense that the United States is blaming it for an American cultural problem. In other words, it would have the world believe that the fentanyl problem is evidence of a weak American society, a demand problem rather than a supply problem. Somehow, based on the denial narrative that it has created, it would have the world overlook the fact that this particular drug is the product of an international supply chain that stretches from Chinese factories to the American heartland.
