FBI Director Kash Patel says his agency has resumed an aggressive counterintelligence offensive against China and its Communist Party (CCP) that had been sidelined during the Biden presidency but is concerned the prior administration may have "buried" the truth about dangerous biolabs on U.S. soil tied to Beijing. 

“This FBI, under this leadership, has prioritized the threat against it by the CCP against us, and we've taken swift action,” Patel said Friday in an interview with the Just the News, No Noise television show that focused on China’s threat to U.S. national security and the bureau’s efforts to handle the Chinese Communist Party.

The FBI boss said the renewed efforts have already resulted in a 40% increase in Chinese espionage arrests in the first year of the second Trump administration.

“What we did in the last year with President Trump and the attorney general and the Department of Justice is reprioritize our dynamic threat landscape, going after and disrupting and looking after the criminal activity from the CCP,” he explained.

Just the News reported this week that an illegal biolab in California searched by local, state, and federal authorities in 2023 and a separate hazardous lab inside a Las Vegas garage raided by the FBI over the weekend are both tied to a Chinese national currently awaiting trial for fraud, false statements, and adulteration of medical devices, according to court filings, police officials and members of Congress.

Just the News also reported on findings by the conservative American Accountability Foundation that raised concerns that at least 20 Chinese scientists ensconced inside American academia and at cutting-edge U.S. labs appear to be members of the CCP, are affiliated with Chinese projects aimed at stealing U.S. technology, or are involved with universities or companies tied to the People’s Liberation Army and Beijing's defense sector.

NIH boss concerned labs were 'flying under the radar'

Those research ties are even more concerning given the discoveries in 2023 in Reedley, Calif., and 2026 in Las Vegas, Nev., of the two illicit, makeshift biolabs that are suspected of using dangerous pathogens, said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health.

"When you do research like this, potentially in an environment where there's very little biosecurity, you're posing hazards to everyone around you. And the fact is these were completely flying under the radar screen," Bhattacharya told Just the News.

"We need a better system for detecting and preventing these kinds of labs from popping up, so that they don't cause the kind of havoc, the sort of the worst kinds of stories," he added.

Bhattacharya declined to speculate on the motivations behind setting up risky biolabs in California and Vegas, but stressed that “it's very, very dangerous what defined the kinds of agents that have been reported publicly."

Concerns Biden-era FBI misled public on biolab ties to China

Patel promised complete transparency on the Vegas lab incident but raised concern that his predecessor, former Director Christopher Wray, and others in the Biden administration may have misled the public about the Chinese government's ties to the California biolab incident in 2023.

"If you recall, a similar incident in Reedley, California from a few years ago was evidently buried by the prior administration, and they said it had no connection to the CCP," he said.

“When we discovered that, we took swift action to course correct the intelligence and figure out why the American public was misled by individuals in this institution, including my predecessor. We're going to get to the bottom of it. We're just awaiting the lab results, and we're going to keep going," he said.

He added that under his leadership the FBI would not do the same with information about the Vegas lab.

“We knew about this information and worked with the state law enforcement authorities there in Las Vegas to execute these search warrants and collect over 1000 samples of material that has now been sent back to the FBI lab for analysis,” Patel said. “And this is something that we're going to keep continuing to uncover." 

Jia Bei Zhu was arrested in 2023 on allegations he was running an illegal biological laboratory in Reedley, Calif. On Saturday, the FBI and local police raided a similar biolab in Vegas, arresting the home’s property manager, Ori Salomon. Police and lawmakers say the two labs are closely connected.

Congress had its own concerns

The House Select Committee on the CCP had highlighted Zhu’s links to the Chinese government and the CCP in a 2023 report.

The report said that, prior to coming to North America, Zhu “served as the Vice Chairman of a PRC state-controlled enterprise” which had ties to “a company involved in military-civil fusion for the PRC.” The House report also said that Zhu “served as Chairman” of another Chinese company “whose directors included an executive for a PRC defense firm.”

The House report also said that, once in the U.S., Zhu hired “Accountant 1” to help him set up and run several companies in the U.S., and that “Accountant 1” had also “incorporated and performed work for organizations whose leadership is linked to CCP leadership and to the United Front Work Department.”

The report also pointed to Zhu “stealing American intellectual property and transferring it to the PRC” while in Canada, and said that Zhu and his associates had been “purchasing counterfeit test kits from the PRC and re-selling them in the United States” as being “Made in the USA.”

While he engaged in this criminal activity, the House report said that Zhu was also “receiving unexplained payments” — totaling more than one million dollars — “via wire transfer from PRC banks.”

The House report released in 2023 saved most of its criticisms for the CDC, but shed some light on why the FBI allegedly shut down its own inquiry.

The House report said that local code enforcement officer Jesalyn Harper “referred the matter to Fresno County and to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

“Approximately two months later and according to local officials, the FBI informed her that it had closed its investigation because the Bureau believed that there were no weapons of mass destruction on the property,” the report said. “The FBI continued to engage with local officials. As detailed later in this report, Zhu was subsequently charged with federal offenses relating to fraud and false statements in an FDA-led investigation.”

The House report argued that the “CDC’s response was inadequate and raises serious questions about its standard practices.”

“At a minimum, the Reedley Biolab shows the profound threat that unlicensed and unknown biolabs pose to our country,” the 2023 report said. “At worst, this investigation revealed significant gaps in our nation’s defenses and pathogen-related regulations that present a grave national security risk that could be exploited in the future.”

Biden administration decision to shut down China Initiative inside FBI boomerangs

Patel said Friday that “this FBI has made it a priority to continuously get after” the threat posed by the CCP, “and you saw that when we raided the lab with the state authorities in Las Vegas. And once those test results are back, we'll go public with what we found, and we'll also be talking to our partners in Congress to say, hey, this intelligence that you were given and this summary you were given previously was dead wrong, and I'm not going to mince any words about that.”

The FBI director said China had malign intentions toward the U.S., and so “what we have to do is continuously work the interagency process to make sure that we are attacking every point in which the CCP is coming into our country to attack us. And we're not going to stop.”

He excoriated the Biden administration for shutting down the China Initiative, the FBI's main counterintelligence effort to find Chinese security threats inside academia, saying it has led to an explosion of CCP activities on U.S. soil.

"This is just another disastrous example of failing to protect national security by the Biden administration. Who takes down an initiative against our number one adversary, the CCP, when they are not only conducting counterespionage activities here in the homeland against Americans, but also overseas, and importing illegal bio pathogens to harm our way of life?" Kash asked.

"That is an intentional poor decision to the detriment of our national security. President Trump came in and said we're reversing course. We don't necessarily need a new initiative. We just need the FBI all in against the CCP, and that's what we've done," he said.

Patel says Chinese students in Michigan sought to “attack” U.S. industry

Patel on Friday also pointed to a string of federal arrests linked to Chinese students at the University of Michigan who had engaged in a scheme to smuggle biohazardous pathogens into the U.S. for experimentation.

“Just last year in Michigan, we arrested three individual researchers at the University of Michigan who were trying — not trying, did — import illegally biohazardous materials and pathogens into the United States of America to not only destroy our ability to successfully have scientific labs that are pro-America, but also attack our agricultural and bioseed industry. And so we've been on it since then.”

The Justice Department announced in June that two Chinese nationals — Yunqing Jian and Zunyong Liu — had been charged with “conspiracy, smuggling goods into the United States, false statements, and visa fraud.” Jian had been a scholar at the University of Michigan while her boyfriend, Liu, had been at a Chinese university.

The DOJ said the bureau had “arrested Jian in connection with allegations related to Jian’s and Liu’s smuggling into America a fungus called Fusarium graminearum, which scientific literature classifies as a potential agroterrorism weapon.”

The DOJ also announced in September that Chengxuan Han of China had “pleaded guilty to three smuggling charges and to making false statements to U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officers.” The DOJ said that “Han sent multiple packages to the United States from the PRC containing concealed biological material” and that “these packages were addressed to individuals associated with a laboratory at the University of Michigan.”

Federal investigators announced in November that Jian had “pleaded guilty to charges of smuggling a biological pathogen into the United States and then lying to FBI agents about it.”

The DOJ then announced that same month that three additional Chinese scholars were charged with a “conspiracy to smuggle biological materials into the United States and for making false statements” to CBP officers, calling it “the latest charges in a long string of cases stemming from University of Michigan international research activities.”

Better vetting of Chinese academics on U.S. soil

Bhattacharya also spoke about the Trump administration’s efforts aimed at more aggressively vetting Chinese scientists working inside the United States.

“For the last several decades, the U.S. has had a close collaboration with Chinese scientists… I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the U.S. funded the rise in the Chinese biomedical research enterprise,” Bhattacharya said. “And some of that involved, essentially, the Chinese authorities taking advantage of that investment. You know, there are stories of foreign influence in universities going back now a couple of decades.”

The NIH announced in May of last year the “lack of transparency” in NIH-backed research “is particularly concerning in the case of foreign subawards, in which the United States government has a need to maintain national security.” The federal agency said that the NIH “must ensure it can transparently and reliably report on each dollar spent” and so it was “establishing a new award structure that will prohibit foreign subawards from being nested under the parent grant.”

The NIH said at the time that it “will not issue awards to domestic or foreign entities that include a subaward to a foreign entity” including China.

“We need safeguards that make sure that the American investments don't result in threats and harms to America,” Bhattacharya said Friday. “And I think a lot of the investments we made in China and other countries of concern, in retrospect, probably there should have been much better safeguards in place.”