Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray has admitted that the scale of Chinese espionage in the United States “blew [him] away,” citing the communist regime as the largest “threat to our ideas, innovation, and economic security.”
The news will serve to vindicate “China hawks” who have been warning about Beijing’s malign influence in the West for years, all the while pilloried as “conspiracy theorists” by the corporate media.
Wray – who has served as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director since 2017 – revealed the agency opens a new China-related counter-intelligence case every 12 hours, with over 2,000 such investigations underway.
“This one blew me away. And I’m not the kind of guy that uses words like ‘blown away’ easily,” he remarked.
“There is no country that presents a broader, more severe threat to our innovation, our ideas, and our economic security than China does,” Wray added during the NBC interview. “The scale of their hacking program, and the amount of personal and corporate data that their hackers have stolen, is greater than every other country combined.”
The interview follows high-profile cases of Chinese Communist Party spies targeting American politicians and the Department of Justice under the Trump administration launching the “China Initiative,” which sought to combat this infiltration. The Biden White House has signaled it may terminate the program, dropping one of its most infamous indictments against Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Gang Chen.
“China may be the first country to combine that kind of authoritarian ambition with cutting-edge technical capability. It’s like the surveillance nightmare of East Germany combined with the tech of Silicon Valley,” Wray said. Many American social media companies – including Twitter and Facebook – have cozied up to the Chinese Communist Party in recent years, sending executives to conferences in China hosted by foreign influence groups and placing party-linked individuals into advisory roles.
“Fact-checkers” hired by these platforms also received funding from Chinese Communist Party-linked companies.
