Former RCMP officer Cameron Ortiz accused of leaking secrets says he did nothing wrong

Cameron Ortiz, a former high-ranking RCMP intelligence officer accused of leaking top-secret intelligence on police targets, recently told a court that although he has some regrets, his actions “were not wrong.”

The Crown alleges that Ortiz used his position as head of a highly secret unit within the RCMP to attempt to sell information to Canada and the intelligence it collected. five eyes ally For persons associated with the criminal underworld.

Ortiz has pleaded not guilty to all six charges against him. His defense team says he was acting on “classified information” sent by a foreign agency to protect Canada from “serious and imminent threats.”

Ortiz began testifying in his own defense behind closed doors last week. A redacted transcript of what he told the jury a week ago was released to reporters Thursday night.

The former civilian member of the RCMP told the jury that his “mission was to deal with threats to the security of Canada.”

“Do you regret acting now?” asked his defense attorney, Mark Ertel.

“I don’t make decisions based on my career or career prospects, but I never imagined or imagined that this would happen,” Ortiz said.

“Of course, in some ways I regret what happened to everyone over the last four years, but what I did was not wrong.”

Ortiz said his arrest has been personally “devastating.”

He said his pension and assets were “all gone” and his reputation was “completely destroyed”.

“Family stood by me. Friends did not,” he said.

“Old friends in British Columbia, who I’ve known for a long time, are standing with me, but friends and colleagues and professional contacts in Ottawa are not standing with me.”

Ortiz says he was asked to commit money-laundering

The 51-year-old faces six charges, including several counts under the Security of Information Act, a law meant to protect Canadian secrets. He is accused of “knowingly and without authority” sharing special operational information with three people and attempting to share the information with another.

During the first few hours of his testimony, he described how he joined the RCMP and started a unit called Operations Research (OR), whose purpose was to inform senior leadership on emerging threats based on intelligence gathered by Canada and its allies. Had to give information.

The unit began dealing with counter-terrorism files, but also began working on international organized crime through a file known to the RCMP as “Skyfall”.

“This was money laundering that was threatening the integrity and structure of the Canadian financial system,” Ortiz said.

“I observed some unique reporting during the normal course of triage that explained, described and outlined the threat to Canada and the banking system. The laundering of an extraordinary amount of money through Canada and its closest partners and the actors involved. Was being done with that money laundering.”

He said those “actors” were hostile state actors – “enemies of the Western world.”

Ortiz said he decided to create an infographic on what he learned to present a briefing to the RCMP’s senior command chain – assistant commissioners, deputy commissioners and commissioners.

“This was well within the RCMP’s jurisdiction in terms of money laundering as part of high-level organized crime; the scale and scope of it, at least in my experience, was like nothing I had ever seen before,” he said.

Ertel asked Ortiz if he got the sense after the briefing that the issue was something his superiors wanted him to pursue.

“That’s right,” Ortiz said.

“I was told, I can sum it up, ‘Work on it.'”

The transcript provided to the media Thursday night ends at the point when the court took a lunch recess on November 2.

A consortium of media organizations, including CBC News, fought against the move to restrict access to Ortiz’s testimony.

Other details of the privacy measures are subject to publication restrictions.