Samuel Case, FISM News
FBI Director Christopher Wray said he believes the Chinese Communist Party represents the largest threat to the United States, with their goal being to replace the U.S. as the world’s greatest superpower. Director Wray warned of China’s threat at the Reagan Library on Monday and reiterated his concerns during an interview with NBC the following day.
Speaking at the library on Monday, Wray compared the CCP to the Soviet Union – both rejecting “the fundamental freedoms, basic human rights, and democratic norms we value as Americans.” The FBI director, however, said the similarities stop there, warning that the Chinese threat to the U.S. is far greater because of the economic ties between the two nations.
“The Soviet Union didn’t make much that anyone in America wanted to buy. We didn’t invest in each other’s economies or send huge numbers of students to study in each other’s universities. The U.S. and today’s China are far more interconnected than the U.S. and the old U.S.S.R. ever were, and China is an economic power on a level the Soviets could never have dreamed of being,” Wray said.
“The complexity of the threat posed by the Chinese government flows from those new realities, because China’s government has the global reach and presence of a great nation, but it refuses to act the part and too often uses its capabilities to steal and threaten, rather than to cooperate and build.” He continued “That theft, those threats, are happening right here in America, literally every day.”
Tuesday, in an interview with NBC, Wray said he would “argue that there is no country that presents a broader, more severe threat to our ideas and our economic security than China does,” saying the CCP’s goal is “to replace the United States as the world’s greatest superpower.”
China’s spying and intelligence theft is so rampant that the FBI is launching new counterintelligence investigations every 12 hours, adding daily to the already existing 2,000 plus cases, Wray told NBC.
TONIGHT: FBI Director Christopher Wray speaks with @PeteWilliamsNBC in an exclusive interview about the threat of espionage from China
Wray: The FBI is opening a China-related counterintelligence investigation "about every 12 hours"
Watch at 6:30 ET / 5:30 CT on @NBCNightlyNews pic.twitter.com/2Ksf2K4MKD
— NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt (@NBCNightlyNews) February 1, 2022
“China’s cyber threat is greater than any other nation,” The FBI Director explained. “Their hacking program is greater than every other major country combined, 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.” Wray has said in the past that the Chinese government likely has the personal data of every American adult.
Wray’s warnings come as the 2022 Winter Olympics begins on Friday, Feb. 4. In preparation for the games the U.S. and other Western countries are urging their athletes to leave their personal cell phones at home and use burner phones instead, out of concern of Chinese surveillance.