A judge banned a former RCMP officer, who was charged after a foreign interference investigation, from contacting a former FBI officer that he once described as a mentor.
Bill Majcher, who worked from 1985 to 2007 on undercover organized crime investigations, is accused of helping the People’s Republic of China illegally intimidate an individual.
In February 2019, Majcher told a meeting of U.K. lawmakers that he was helping one major client, China’s government, to recover US$1.2 trillion of fraudulently acquired money.
A judge in Longueuil, Quebec granted the 60-year-old bail on Tuesday. Conditions of his release include having no contact with former RCMP international organized crime unit commander Kim Marsh and former FBI supervisory special agent Ross Gaffney. Majcher, who normally resides in Hong Kong, had been in custody in the Vancouver area since his arrest last week.
Marsh is allegedly Majcher’s co-conspirator. Neither Marsh nor Gaffney have been charged.
Gaffney is a lawyer in Pompano Beach, Fla., who spent 17 of his 27 years with the FBI overseeing financial crime and international money laundering investigations in Miami.
Majcher and Gaffney worked together on the Operation Bermuda Short sting, which climaxed in 2002 and led to the conviction of Vancouver lawyer Martin Chambers for money laundering. They remembered their work together during a June 2020 interview with a former CIA agent who promoted their appearance on his website by claiming that “Wall Street's financial crime and money laundering is protected by Congressional treason.”
“[Gaffney] was a mentor to me at some points, and because of that vast experience he had in creating the White Collar Crime Task Force in the Caribbean, the Caribbean Financial Action Task Force with the U.K. Government,” Majcher told “Intelligence with Integrity” show host Robert David Steele.
“As Bill said, it was a target-rich environment and the numbers of individuals that we had not only predicated, but that we had strong cases against, rose to over 100,” Gaffney said. "And arbitrarily, the chief of the economic crimes unit in Miami, effectively said, no, we're going to cut it off at 58, and just let all of those other criminals go free. They wouldn't allow us to continue the operation and go after them.”
The tone of the interview shifted toward talk of political corruption and politicization of the FBI, with both guests noting the shift from combating financial crimes toward counterterrorism after the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.
The interview was conducted at the same time as riots across the U.S. after George Floyd died at the hands of Minneapolis police officers. Majcher said the incident triggered “rightful anger towards some policemen, no question, but not the majority of them.”
“Unfortunately, what we see for the last eight days, this massive, organized conspiracy of violence that is taking place across the United States, that's touching a number of different groups,” Majcher said. “But they all have one thing that links them all together. There’s a Marxist sort of strain of ideology, as well as, let’s everybody go after President Trump.”
Majcher suggested police officers were facing similar financial challenges as the protesters, because they were seeing their pensions and savings “raped and pillaged by the 1% of Wall Street, and the same guys with a smirk on their face going to the lobbyists in D.C.”
Host Steele, a 69-year-old pro-Trump promoter of the QAnon conspiracy, died in August 2021 after contracting COVID-19. He refused to be vaccinated and claimed the pandemic was a hoax.
In 2018, Gaffney appeared on a podcast guest-hosted by Majcher, called the “Intelligence Hour." Majcher wondered whether FBI investigations had been politicized or compromised by “political correctness run amok.” He also speculated that the National Security Agency may have spied on Americans without a warrant or used Five Eyes intelligence alliance partners in the U.K. and Canada to illegally gather evidence on Americans.
Majcher ended the podcast by reading a script that included a quote by former U.S. president Thomas Jefferson: “When people fear their government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people there's liberty.”
Majcher, who is accused of crimes between 2014 and 2019, is scheduled for another court appearance on Aug. 29. His bail conditions include a $50,000 bond, $200,000 surety, surrender of his passport and weekly visits to the Burnaby RCMP. He is represented by Vancouver defence lawyer Ian Donaldson.
