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LONDON – FBI Director Chris Wray calls China the biggest long-term threat to the U.S. and said the CCP’s cyberattacks are a threat to both Wall Street and Main Street.
“Americans should be concerned because the Chinese government’s attempts to steal our innovation, our intellectual property effects American jobs, we’re talking about American jobs, American consumers being directly affected,” said Wray. “There was a case not that long ago where an American company was essentially fleeced by a Chinese company, and that caused the company’s stock value to drop by something like 85% and hundreds and hundreds of jobs lost. And so that’s real impact, not just on Wall Street, but on Main Street.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray testifies during the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing titled Threats to the Homeland in Dirksen Senate Office Building on Thursday, Sept. 24, 2020. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images/Pool)
Director Wray sat down with Fox News in a wide-ranging interview, along with Ken McCallum, the Director General of the MI5. Wray is in London this week visiting with senior U.K. law enforcement colleagues as well as senior government officials.
The Department of Justice recently scrapped a program called ‘The China Initiative,’ which had been aimed at countering Chinese espionage but was ultimately canceled over fears of an appearance of racial profiling.
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When asked if losing the program was a mistake, Wray maintained the FBI’s approach has remained consistent:
“We are not going to engage in profiling by ethnicity or national origin, and we haven’t… And when law enforcement action is the appropriate tool to be used. We’re going to use that tool. And we won’t hesitate to do that, but we’re going to follow the facts and the law as we have consistently and will continue to.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray testifies during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing titled Oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation: the January 6 Insurrection, Domestic Terrorism, and Other Threats in Hart Building on Tuesday, March 2, 2021. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Wray talked to Fox alongside McCallum, the Director General of the MI5, an intelligence agency tasked with protecting the U.K.’s homeland.
McCallum stressed that the two nations have no problem with the Chinese people, only the Chinese government.
“The U.K. wants to welcome Chinese people,” said McCallum. “We have almost 150,000 Chinese students in our universities, for example, and in almost all cases, that is good for them and good for us. The U.K.-Chinese diaspora makes a very positive contribution to U.K. life, but we do need to send a clear signal about the activities of the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese intelligence services and certain parts of the Chinese state which are engaging in intellectual property theft, and they are mounting hidden interference campaigns attempting to manipulate the West. This matters. We need to take a stand on it.”
With violent crime rates continuing to spike in the U.S., the man in charge of the country’s premier law enforcement agency expressed frustration that criminals who should remain behind bars are being released into American communities.
“More and more. Some of the worst offenders one way or another continue to find themselves back out on the street,” said Wray. “And if there’s anything more frustrating to a law enforcement officer than putting a bad guy behind bars who should have been behind bars, it’s putting the same bad guy behind bars. Over and over again.”
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Director Wray also confirmed that there has been a spike in attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers in the wake of the Supreme Court decision striking down Roe v Wade:
“Certainly, we have seen an uptick in attacks and threats of different sorts against establishments that are more on the pro-life side than we had before…so that’s been a change. We had seen attacks of the other sword over the years before, so we see both in that sense, but again, I think the point that people need to understand is that it doesn’t matter what side of that issue or the abortion issue or any other issue you’re on. We guard, very jealously, Americans’ rights to express themselves under our First Amendment, but when they engage in violence or destruction of property, we are not going to tolerate that.”