By Jack Phillips
Contributing Writer
FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino provided an update on Wednesday about what “threat picture” the United States currently faces, citing drone attacks, artificial intelligence and Chinese infiltration.
“The threat picture now for the United States is dramatic,” Bongino told Fox News’s Sean Hannity in an interview, adding later: “When you get the president’s daily brief every morning like the director and I do for this … you go out of there [and] your blood pressure is through the roof. It’s so many different things.”
“You ask me what is the biggest threat right now, people say, ‘What keeps you up at night?’ Well, the answer is, I would never sleep if I thought about the stuff all the time. But it all keeps me up at night,” he said.
“The drone threat, this is a perilous, acute threat; it is not here tomorrow, it is here today. Everybody saw what happened in Russia. It’s only a matter of time.”
Bongino then cited the “threat of China infiltration into our systems” and “the threat of AI alignment.”
President Donald Trump nominated longtime supporter Bongino, a former U.S. Secret Service agent and radio personality, to be the FBI’s second in command in February.
Bongino said in the interview that both he and FBI Director Kash Patel have sought to increase public trust in federal law enforcement through what they say is reform.
“Without reform, we’re not going to have anything, because the American people won’t trust us,” Bongino said.
His comments come as Patel confirmed and other U.S. officials warned about threats posed by the Chinese regime. Patel said in a Wednesday post on social media platform X that the FBI arrested a Chinese national, Jian Yunqing, who had “allegedly smuggled a dangerous biological pathogen” into the United States.
The pathogen, identified as Fusarium graminearum, is considered “an agroterrorism agent” in the United States for research at the University of Michigan, where Jian works, he added.
“It is responsible for billions of dollars in economic losses worldwide each year,” Patel wrote. “Evidence also indicates Jian had expressed loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party and had received funding from the Chinese government for similar work on this pathogen in China.”
Her boyfriend, Liu Zunyong, was also charged in the complaint, the FBI director said. Liu works at a university in China, where he carries out research on the same type of pathogen, which Patel says can cause health issues in livestock and people, as well as economic damage.
“The alleged actions of these Chinese nationals — including a loyal member of the Chinese Communist Party — are of the gravest national security concerns,” U.S. Attorney Jerome Gorgon said in a statement on Wednesday.
“These two aliens have been charged with smuggling a fungus that has been described as a ‘potential agroterrorism weapon’ into the heartland of America, where they apparently intended to use a University of Michigan laboratory to further their scheme.”
In his Hannity interview, Bongino provided more details about video footage and agency files that he says confirm the suicide death of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Over the years, Epstein’s brother and a former medical examiner have said that the well-connected financier didn’t kill himself. Still, the official medical examiner’s record says that he died via hanging in his jail cell and that his manner of death was a suicide.
“The evidence we have in our files clearly indicates that it was, in fact, a suicide,” Bongino said. “We do have video. It’s not the greatest video in the world. I don’t want to set expectations on fire.”
The video footage taken at a jail where Epstein died in 2019 “does show in that specific block, that he goes in, made a phone call; you’ll see 12 hours of guards going in basically [to] check on him, come back,” he said. “You’ll see nobody really comes out of that bay in that area [other] than him. There’s no one in there.”
Last month, Bongino indicated that the FBI was reviewing the video footage and will release it to the public.
