FBI Director Chris Wray again sounded the alarm this week on the possibility of a potential terrorist attack on U.S. soil, saying it could be similar to the attack that targeted a Moscow concert hall.
In an interview with NBC News released Wednesday, Mr. Wray said that he is worried about a potential foreign threat that “may be not that different from what you saw against the concert hall in Russia a few weeks ago from ISIS-K,” referring to the terrorist attack that left around 140 people dead.
The ISIS-K, or Islamic State Khorosan, attack in Russia in March left 145 people dead and 180 people injured, officials have said. U.S. intelligence officials have pinned the attack on the ISIS affiliate that emerged in Afghanistan in recent years.
The FBI director has made similar comments about the potential for a terrorist attack on U.S. soil in recent months, namely after Hamas launched attacks in Israel on Oct. 7 that left 1,200 civilians dead and led to more than 250 people being taken hostage.
But in the Wednesday interview, Mr. Wray said that officials believed the terror potential was high “even before October 7” before pivoting to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
“Whether it’s the threat from China, Russia, Iran, [there are] terrorism threats both foreign terrorism threats and domestic terrorist threats,” he added.
The FBI, Wray said, is concerned about “spillover” from the Israel–Hamas conflict. When he was asked by NBC’s Lester Holt if the FBI was monitoring protests backing Palestine on college campuses and elsewhere, the FBI director claimed that “demonstrations themselves are not something that ... the FBI ever gets involved in.”
He noted, however, that the FBI has shared “intelligence about specific threats of violence” with universities and local law enforcement officials.
Earlier this month, Mr. Wray appeared in a congressional hearing to issue similar warnings about a possible terrorist threat after the Moscow attack, doing so to push the House and Senate to pass a measure that would renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the United States to collect information from non-citizens who live overseas and who use American-based platforms without using a warrant.
The Chinese Communist regime “plays the long game,” he said at the time. “To put it simply, [the Chinese Communist Party] is throwing its whole government at undermining the security and economy of the rule-of-law world,” added Mr. Wray, noting that the CCP’s hacking program is significantly larger than the United States’ and any other country’s cybersecurity efforts.
“The Russian government continues to invest heavily in their cyber operations, in part because they see cyber as an asymmetric weapon to keep up with us,” Mr. Wray said at the event, adding that it will continue to “target critical infrastructure” such as underwater cables and industrial systems.
“We’ve seen Russia conducting reconnaissance on the U.S. energy sector” since the Ukraine war started, Mr. Wray said.
Several weeks ago, the White House dismissed Russia’s allegations that Ukraine was involved in the Moscow terrorist attack and said it was only ISIS-K that was responsible. Russia’s Investigative Committee had said it had uncovered evidence that the four terrorists who carried out last Friday’s attack were linked to nationalists in Ukraine in the midst of the two-year-long war.
In a briefing to reporters in March, White House national security spokesman John Kirby said that the United States passed to Russian security services a written warning of an extremist attack on large gatherings in Moscow, one of many provided in advance.
“It is abundantly clear that ISIS was solely responsible for the horrific attack in Moscow last week,” Mr. Kirby said. “In fact, the United States tried to help prevent this terrorist attack and the Kremlin knows this.”
The U.S. government had passed “following normal procedures and through established channels that have been employed many times previously ... a warning in writing to Russian security services,” Mr. Kirby stated.
