Giuseppe Bianchin, as best as I can tell, is, in fact, an actual person.
This isn’t a trivial matter: Bianchin is the unlikely author of what may be the most peculiar forensic typographical investigation in Canadian history.
In September 2025, Chris Alexander—formerly Stephen Harper’s immigration minister—told The Walrus that he thought “Giuseppe Bianchin” was a fiction, and that his investigation was equally fraudulent.
The magazine had contacted Alexander while fact-checking my article concerning his accusation that veteran defence reporter David Pugliese was a Russian intelligence asset. I reported that Alexander’s allegations about Pugliese, made on October 24, 2024, to Parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, were false and defamatory, and appeared to be based on forged documents.
He has not repeated this statement outside of parliamentary privilege, nor has anything come of his extraordinary claims in the year that’s passed since.
Bianchin, an Italian-born engineer who now lives and works in the United States, took it upon himself to investigate Alexander’s claims. He published his 79-page report in July 2025. It is not a peer-reviewed academic article, nor does it claim to be, but it is thorough and comprehensive. Bianchin sought out leading forensic analysts and experts in the field of typography.
The conclusion of Bianchin’s report—and of the experts he consulted—is unambiguous: the documents Alexander presented to the parliamentary committee are forgeries.
How Bianchin fell down this particular rabbit hole is a story in its own right, as it provides additional detail that both buttresses his conclusions and helps explain how Alexander’s claims could ever have been taken seriously in the first place.
And now Bianchin is back in the news. It has emerged that the charge against Canadian military intelligence officer Matthew Robar for allegedly leaking secrets to Ukraine grew out of a 2023 investigation into claims that Pugliese was a Russian spy—claims based on the very dossier Bianchin has debunked.
That makes this a useful moment to publish a transcript of my September 24, 2025 call with Bianchin. We spoke for about forty-five minutes over Zoom. What’s here has been edited for length and clarity.
Perhaps we can start off with some biographical information. Tell me a little about who you are and where you live.
I live in Michigan and I am an automotive engineer. Specifically, I am an interior seat engineer. I came from Italy in 2009 and I’ve been here for the last sixteen years.
Where in Italy are you from?
Venice.
How did you find out about the situation with David Pugliese?
As I live about an hour from the border with Canada, I’ve visited the country regularly. Not only Windsor or Sarnia, but all the way to Hamilton, to Kingston, even to Halifax. So my interest in keeping up to date with what happens in Canada comes naturally.
I was following a Twitter account, Chuck Pfarrer, who analyzes the conflict in Ukraine. On the day that Chris Alexander was at the hearing, Pfarrer was live-tweeting what was going on and published two or three pages of the dossier just as Alexander was speaking about it. That caught my eye immediately. I was like, “What is this?” That’s how I got the first wave of news about Pugliese, who I didn’t know about before, and Alexander, who was also unfamiliar to me.
Why did this interest you? I mean, I’m assuming you have a full-time job. This is very different from your line of work.
My academic training is in communications. I studied propaganda and disinformation. I completed college in 2003, then moved to the United States and switched to automotive engineering. But I never lost that critical eye for reading news. I also keep up to date with the political and geopolitical spectrum of what’s going on.
The first thing that you learn in communications is that information is not neutral. You have a source that emits it for a purpose and a source it’s intended for. From the day I understood this loop, I stopped taking news at face value. I ask, Where are they going with this? What are we being asked to believe? Why is this information coming out now?
Why did you start asking those questions when it comes to Pugliese?
I saw a journalist being accused of being a spy, using Russian documents, and wanted to know more.
Yes. In engineering, when you’re given something confusing, you go through it line by line. If there’s a rule, you open the manual and read what that rule means. If you have to do a test, you don’t simply run it. You go through the entire guide for testing, page by page, to understand what each test means. This is good engineering. I approached these documents the same way. I needed to know anything and everything about them.
What caught your attention at first?
How convenient it was that the typewritten pages were impossible to understand—everything is in Cyrillic—but you clearly saw “David Pugliese” and “Ottawa Citizen.”
Right. Why type out those words in Latin script if these were internal reports passed between Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking KGB agents. Can you tell me who translated the documents for you?
Initially I turned to Russian-speaking ex-coworkers. They are Russian-native Americans. Some are born in Russia, another was born in Crimea, and considered herself ethnic Ukrainian, but with a Russian passport. It was fairly easy for them. Then I had the pages reviewed by someone named Liudmila Buglakova, a friend of the family. I mention her in my report. Liudmila is a Belarusian who lives in Italy and is a professor at the University of Bologna, where she teaches Russian language. She took the entire translation, made minor adjustments, and gave it back to me.
How did you find the experts you consulted?
The translation led to questions. Take the typewritten page I mentioned earlier. It featured the words “Ottawa Citizen.” Now, what’s the likelihood there exists a double-language typewriter? If I’m rolling a piece of paper up in a typewriter and I type in Cyrillic, how do I include a second language? I had no clue. So on Reddit I found a group of typewriter fanatics. They told me to reach out to another group on Discord. I did. And that started a conversation about something called a Siamese twin typewriter—a gigantic machine with dual typewriters that share a single carriage. You can type in Cyrillic on one side, Latin on the other, and go back and forth. Then there’s a typewriter called a polyglot, which has a larger keyboard that allows you to switch to a second language.
In other words, these are very specialized pieces of equipment.
Yes, but that didn’t answer the question. Polyglot typewriters can type in two scripts but can’t type in the upper and lower cases of both scripts.
Which is exactly the kind of thing you found in one of the alleged KGB documents.
Yes. Then another Reddit user said Cyrillic keys are “front heavy,” meaning they would hit straight and leave a very even black mark. Latin script, from the typewriters that we use, hits from below—the bottom hits first. And that’s why it’s called “bottom heavy.” So when you go back and look at “Ottawa Citizen” you will notice that the bottom of the T and the W and the A and the C and the Z all have darker marking at the bottom and lighter at the top.
So then there was a second typewriter?
Maybe, but the ink and the alignment was apparently too precise. Everyone was saying, this doesn’t look right. It looks like it could be a font. When I asked which font, someone said it could be FF Trixie, and posted a link to it in Adobe Photoshop. They suggested I contact Dr. Bernhard Haas. He is a German gentleman, based in Stuttgart, and a third-generation forensic examiner specializing in typography and typewriter identification. The entire family deals with Russian, Eastern European, and East German documentation. Grandfather, father, and son even put together a database of hundreds of thousands of typefaces that they sell to forensics examiners. He is prominent figure among typography experts.
So you wrote to him?
Not immediately. I thought someone like him was a long shot. But when I looked at the link on Adobe Photoshop, I saw another name, Erik van Blokland. I wrote to him.
Did you know who he was?
I had no idea. I thought he was a nerd who simply made fonts. It turns out that he’s a professor at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. He’s a very respected, well-known typeface designer. And he created FF Trixie. The first thing he will tell you is the font was used in the TV show The X-Files—it’s the “X” of X-Files. That’s what made him, for a time, pretty famous.
So you reached out to both Haas and van Blokland?
Yes, and at the same time I was also conferring with former classmates. We have a WhatsApp group chat—there’s thirty people there. I told them that when I looked across the different handwritten pages, some of the numbers and letters were starting to look too similar to me, especially with David Pugliese—the D and the P. One of my friends said that his partner was a lawyer and he works with Dr. Ira Boato, a forensic graphologist. I reached out to her and she was happy to take the challenge. Per her evaluation, she said it’s one person who wrote all these documents from beginning to the end.
To clarify, the handwritten documents were purportedly written by different people, in different locations, and in different years. Boato found the cursive was all identical. Had you shared your suspicions with her when you reached out?
I had a very reserved approach. I said nothing about my suspicions and nothing about opinions that others were giving me about the documentation. When I reached out to van Blokland, I said, “What can you tell me?” When I reached out to Boato, I said, “Can you analyze this for me?” And I did the same with Dr. Haas. I said, “I’m having an issue understanding: Is this two typewriters? Is this one?” I didn’t say these documents are false. I simply said, “Could you look into this for a minute?”
So you’re cold-calling experts in various fields, in at least three different countries, and you’re not providing them with context as to why you’re reaching out. Were they immediately responsive?
It took Dr. Haas many emails to respond to me. With van Blokland, it was easy. I sent him one page, the one with the “Ottawa Citizen” script. That was it. And he said, “This is mine.” That was his first answer to me. “This is my font.” And I asked him, “How can you know that? Why can you tell me this your font? Walk me through it.” By the time he completed the six or seven pages of proofs showing me how he could tell that it was a font and not a typewriter, Dr. Haas replied to me.
And how did you answer?
I immediately proposed to Dr. Haas that he cross-examine what van Blokland had sent me. What was his opinion? And Dr. Haas told me the speck of dust is undoubtedly a font.
To clarify, here you’re referring to the identical speck of dust that appears to repeat with certain letters throughout all the so-called KGB documents—documents that were allegedly typed on different machines, years apart. And that would be impossible, right? The imprint of a speck of dust wouldn’t even be consistent within the same typewritten document.
The dust speck cannot repeat in nature precisely like that multiple times in several documents. And so the proof of van Blokland’s ownership of the font matched Haas’s cross-examination. Haas looked at van Blokland’s findings, and he said, “I see what he’s saying. You have a forgery on your hands.”
The issue here is people turning that back on you and suggesting that you do not exist. And that your report is fraudulent.
I know.
How do you know people are already saying that about you?
Because other reporters are asking to talk to me because Chris Alexander is saying that I don’t exist.
Have you spoken to Pugliese?
I wrote an email to Pugliese in March. Then we had a phone call where I told him about my report and that I was going to pass it to him.
I respect the fact that you’ve gone out on a limb here to provide information. And I think you know that the proof of your report lies primarily in the experts you’ve contacted.
Correct. But I am personally frightened by the people responsible for circulating these documents. I approached the material in good faith. I tried to prove their authenticity, and, after seven months, it turns out that I cannot deny they are forgeries—forgeries being used to defame Pugliese. But if individuals are willing to go on parliamentary record to smear a journalist, I can’t imagine what they could say about me, or do to me. I care about my career in the automotive industry. I don’t want anyone calling my employer and harassing them.
I understand.
The story isn’t about me. The story is that forgeries were submitted into the government record. If Canada wants to take my report and throw it in the garbage and start all over, they are more than welcome. But the results will be the same.
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