Patel’s FBI announces that it has found two new allies in the fight against crime: Russia and China

The Director of the FBI, Kash Patel, announced yesterday that he has two new allies in the fight against transnational crime: Russia and China. The FBI director has reportedly been working on this alleged and surprising collaboration with two countries he described as “non-traditional partners” for some time: according to the American media, the agency is planning a trip for Patel to Moscow and St Petersburg in October, whilst just over a week ago the director returned from a trip to China, where he also met Wang Xiaohong, Minister of Public Security of the People’s Republic. In the Trumpian world, hostile actors can become allies in the blink of an eye. 

The trip to Beijing was the most high-profile stage of a dialogue which, Patel told Reuters yesterday, has been ongoing for months and is said to have begun following Donald Trump’s meeting with Xi Jinping in Busan in 2025. In the Chinese capital, the FBI director and representatives of the Chinese leadership agreed to strengthen what Beijing has termed ‘practical cooperation’. Patel revealed to Reuters that the collaboration is now well-established and up and running: every month, operational officials from the Chinese Ministry of Public Security travel to the United States, and the following month an FBI delegation flies to China. The two sides are working within four permanent working groups – on drug trafficking, cybercrime, offences against children and the search for fugitives – sharing information and, in some cases, conducting joint operations. In 2024, when the Biden administration had attempted to do the same – that is, to maintain an open dialogue with China, particularly on issues of transnational crime, and specifically on fentanyl trafficking – the two public meetings between the then US Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, and Wang Xiaohong were fiercely criticised by the media and conservative commentators aligned with the MAGA movement. When Mayorkas held high-level talks with Wang in Vienna in February 2024, the National Review wrote that Washington was legitimising a senior official directly involved in the Chinese Communist Party’s repressive activities, and that Wang was not a standard law-enforcement counterpart, but one of the main architects of Beijing’s domestic and transnational repression.

At the time, a group of Republicans particularly close to Trump, led by James Comer, sent a letter to Mayorkas asking for detailed explanations regarding meetings with the Minister of Public Security in Beijing, accusing the Biden administration of downplaying the dangers of dialogue with China, which poses a threat to the security of democracy. Now, however, things have clearly changed, and the head of the FBI has even given an interview to announce and take credit for the launch of this cooperation, citing concrete examples – in May, for instance, the FBI, the Chinese police and the authorities in Dubai took part in Operation ‘Sand Dollar’ against an online fraud hub, resulting in over three hundred arrests. According to Patel, cooperation with Beijing has also made it possible to target Chinese chemical companies involved in the production of fentanyl precursors, thereby contributing “to the decline in overdose deaths in the United States” (many experts have serious doubts about this link). “The fact that we managed to do this with China,” Patel told Reuters, “when everyone was saying, ‘Don’t do it’ and ‘it’s not possible’, shows what we can achieve with practically anyone.”

Direct cooperation with Chinese law enforcement and security agencies, involving a constant flow of officers between the United States and China, risks heightening the suspicions of Washington’s traditional allies – those who have always worked alongside the FBI. There is no shortage of precedents where cooperation with China has ended badly, and these affect us too. Italy, for example, was among the first countries to venture into a closer relationship with the Chinese Ministry of Public Security: despite the crisis caused by the virtual police stations on Italian territory, the Minister of the Interior, Matteo Piantedosi, had attempted to initiate direct dialogue with the Chinese authorities in 2024, seeking an ally in the fight against Chinese organised crime in Italy. Less than two years later, the Ministry of the Interior suddenly suspended all forms of cooperation, after suffering a cyberattack from China aimed at obtaining more information than had been agreed upon by the Italian side, including the names of the DIGOS officers tasked with protecting Chinese dissidents in Italy. Jeff Crocker, a former FBI supervisory agent, told Reuters yesterday that granting Chinese officials access to intelligence, diplomatic personnel and government facilities “is a major risk. It provides them with excellent cover”. Italy has learnt this the hard way. The Trump administration, meanwhile, has changed its mind.