VANCOUVER, British Columbia (CN) — The specter of former President Donald Trump’s blustery pronouncements about the bid to extradite Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou came back to haunt court proceedings in Vancouver on Monday, as her lawyers urged the Canadian judge to stay the proceedings based on Trump’s “scandalous” comments about the case.
Meng’s lawyer Tony Paisana accused the former president of leveraging Meng’s case as a bargaining chip in pursuit of a trade deal with China. Trump, Meng’s lawyers said in court briefs, “expressed a repeated willingness to intervene in the applicant’s criminal case for arbitrary political reasons, contrary to the rule of law.”
Paisana on Monday invited Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes of the B.C. Supreme Court to imagine if a Canadian prime minister made similar comments about a domestic fraud prosecution.
“I don’t think that anyone would suggest that would be anything but scandalous in our democracy,” Paisana said. “And not a whole lot distinguishes what the president of the United States did in this case with that very scenario.”
Earlier Monday, Meng’s lawyer Richard Peck said Trump’s public comments reduced his client to a “chattel” or a “bargaining chip” in trade talks, indicating her freedom was subject to a deal.
“That’s the very definition of ransom. That’s what we’re dealing with here,” Peck said. “This is deeply offensive to the rule of law.”
The current hearings, scheduled until Aug. 20, began last week as the defense delved into the last of four branches of abuse of process applications leveled to halt the extradition of the embattled Chinese tech executive, nearly three years after her arrest. The four branches of abuse allegations all stem from the same tree, Paisana said Monday, and should the judge consider all the alleged misconduct cumulatively, the only remedy to sufficiently denounce it would be to stay the case and let her go.
Trump’s comments, coupled with Meng's claims of misfeasance on the part of Canadian border guards and police involved in her detention and what her lawyers have called misrepresentations and omissions in records of the case, all point to misconduct justifying such a drastic remedy, Meng’s lawyers claim. Paisana concluded his arguments Monday saying that Meng’s plight has dragged on for years as she’s been confined to her home under constant surveillance away from her husband and four children
She was initially “falsely portrayed” by the FBI and Royal Canadian Mounted Police as a “fugitive” and became a household name across the globe, personifying an ongoing “geopolitical struggle” in a case with very little connection to the U.S., Paisana said. He added the fraud his client’s accused of involved a foreign national allegedly lying to a foreign bank in a meeting in a foreign country.
“The requesting state is not in charge of policing the world,” he said, urging Holmes to stay the extradition bid.
Meng is accused of defrauding HSBC Bank in a meeting in Hong Kong in 2013 where she’s alleged to have given false assurances to an HSBC executive about Huawei’s dealings in Iran through a subsidiary called Skycom. At that meeting, Meng gave a PowerPoint presentation distancing the Chinese tech giant from Skycom, which U.S. prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York claim put the bank at risk of criminal and civil liability for violating sanctions on Iran by clearing transactions in U.S. dollars.
Crown prosecutor Robert Frater fired back at Meng's arguments Tuesday, telling the judge that no U.S. officials ever used the words “ransom” or “bargaining chip” in relation to Meng’s case, accusing the defense of failing to properly contextualize Trump’s comments in relation to other senior officials, including the current president’s.
“We agree with them that words have power,” Frater said. “Words may have more or less power when examined in relation to what others are saying … The former president’s words did not stand alone.”
The only misconduct prosecutors concede that occurred was the improper sharing of Meng’s electronic device passwords at the time of her arrest, Frater said, calling it “a mistake that caused no prejudice to Ms. Meng.” He also defended Canadian law enforcement witnesses who testified in earlier abuse of process application proceedings.
“No CBSA or RCMP witness lied to you. They were forthright in their testimony and admitted to errors where appropriate,” Frater told Holmes. “They made reasoned choices about how to proceed in a novel set of circumstances.”
In addition, Frater denied any misconduct by U.S. officials, reminding the judge that extradition partners must be presumed to be acting in good faith and such a finding cannot be taken lightly. Frater said that granting a stay of proceedings based on the claims of misconduct would not be justified since precedential cases where stays were granted involved serious misconduct and a “pattern of disregard” for an accused’s constitutional rights.
“There was no misconduct by the United States here,” he said. “Calling something an abuse of process does not make it so.”
Frater acknowledged HSBC Bank is hardly a “sympathetic victim” of Meng’s alleged fraud, but the fact that Huawei dispatched its CFO to reassure the “nervous bankers” about the parties’ relationship shows the seriousness of the alleged offences of which she’s accused. He said that Huawei took “decisive but misleading actions” to preserve Huawei’s relationship with the global banking giant to ensure “that HSBC would keep the taps open.”
Today’s hearing wrapped up defense applications on abuse of process, paving the way for the main committal arguments to begin Wednesday.
Should the B.C. Supreme Court order Meng extradited, the ultimate decision to send her to the U.S. rests with Canada’s Minister of Justice, whose decision is subject to judicial review in the Federal Court of Canada.
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