Prelude To Detroit: The Tale Of Why Peter Duke & Tracy Connors Suck - Stealin' The Children, Land & Vote The GO BLUE - Detroit Land Bank Authority Model

Meet Peter Duke.

He is the political fashion photographer to all the co-conspirator stars of the 2016 election interference.

I would never have ever given him a second thought to his existence, but he attempted to summon the Celestial Goddess of the Woodshed, without going through the proper prayers, while contemporaneously invoking the names of Cernovich and Ali Alexander, in the same video, as 2016 election interference experts, which gave me all indicators that he is of similar ilk of these same vile creatures, for they were all mean to my Sweetie.

He said "#MeToo".

This means he knows my blog, leaving him no excuse to continue promulgating false claims in the public record for the purposes of cloaking the industry of trafficking tiny humans.

That is what I call dark magic because we have something called due process in this land, where, prayers are peaceably delivered to the individual who has received the transfer of the one's voice, through the vote.

This means, if there is a situation where one finds transgressions upon government, or with governance, there exists formal mechanisms, either through the administrative process of grievance to one's elected representative in request for constituency services to report such actions, or, in an exhaust of administrative remedy, in court of law, under oath of the seal, in bearing witness.

Alas, Peter likes to make modern day codexes, which is not included the formal process of heraldry, or rather preservation of the record, like what Jorge just did in beatification, for the posterity of society, under oath, because his endeavours are devoid of being granted a seal, or rather a crowdsourcing of manufactured, edited evidence, of false claims, which begs the question to the national sources of his funding.

So, I looked up to see if he had registered as a foreign agent under FARA.

The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) was enacted in 1938. FARA requires certain agents of foreign principals who are engaged in political activities or other activities specified under the statute to make periodic public disclosure of their relationship with the foreign principal, as well as activities, receipts and disbursements in support of those activities.  Disclosure of the required information facilitates evaluation by the government and the American people of the activities of such persons in light of their function as foreign agents. The FARA Unit of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section (CES) in the National Security Division (NSD) is responsible for the administration and enforcement of FARA.

Due to health concerns regarding COVID-19, the FARA Public Office will be closed until further notice. Should you need access to information that is unavailable online, please contact the FARA Unit at fara.public@usdoj.gov for assistance.

I did not find any seals so I looked up his NGO association and found this.

And, I found this...

2008 is the last filing for Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation

Then, I found this, where the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation seems to have gone through the Corporate Shape Shifting metamorphis to magically become the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, because I could not produce any state or federal corporate findings, nor UCC, to demonstrate the contrary to my premise that the corporate parental right to keep and bear the arms of the United States were terminated,  which automatically led me to experience a severe episode of Post Traumatic Fraud Disorders, because I have just found myself another one of those transposable models, like the Detroit Land Bank Authority and the Clinton Foundation, where they like to use big institutions like banking or universities to launder money out the country through those glorious tiny human trust funds transposable models, like Michigan State University, University of Michigan, Grand Valley State, and the many other universities which are at the threshold of a SCOTUS review.

https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/

Then, I found lots of living and dead trademarks, which automatically demonstrates that there was some serious trafficking tiny humans operations going on, because I can see the transposable model.

Trademarks of the Shoah Corporate Shape Shifter

Word Mark	I WITNESS USC SHOAH FOUNDATION
Goods and Services	IC 041. US 100 101 107. G & S: Providing a website featuring non-downloadable video testimonies of survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust and other genocides; educational services, namely providing multimedia learning activities in the nature of online interactive instructional courses featuring information and guided learning activities in the field of Holocaust studies and other genocides. FIRST USE: 20120123. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20120123
Standard Characters Claimed
Mark Drawing Code	(4) STANDARD CHARACTER MARK
Serial Number	86773638
Filing Date	September 30, 2015
Current Basis	1A
Original Filing Basis	1A
Published for Opposition	April 12, 2016
Registration Number	4986911
Registration Date	June 28, 2016
Owner	(REGISTRANT) University of Southern California CORPORATION CALIFORNIA University Park, ADM 352 Los Angeles CALIFORNIA 900895013
Attorney of Record	Scott A. Edelman
Prior Registrations	3761334;4000120;4110643
Disclaimer	NO CLAIM IS MADE TO THE EXCLUSIVE RIGHT TO USE "FOUNDATION" APART FROM THE MARK AS SHOWN
Type of Mark	SERVICE MARK
Register	PRINCIPAL-2(F)-IN PART
Live/Dead Indicator	LIVE
Distinctiveness Limitation Statement	as to "SHOAH FOUNDATION"

Scott A. Edelman

Partner

VCARD FULL BIO PDF SHARE

CONTACT

sedelman@milbank.com

T +1 212.530.5149

F +1 212.822.5149

New York

Scott A. Edelman is Chairman of Milbank LLP and a member of the firm’s Litigation & Arbitration Group. Recognized as one of the country’s top litigators and corporate advisers, he specializes in high-stakes, bet-the-company litigation and trials across several substantive areas of the law, including securities, commercial and white collar.

Primary Focus & Experience

While serving as Chairman of Milbank, Mr. Edelman maintains a busy and active litigation practice, which includes trials, appeals, white collar and regulatory matters, and corporate governance issues. 

Over the course of his career, Mr. Edelman has taken more than 18 cases to trial and argued dozens of appeals, accumulating a slew of honors along the way. He has tried dozens of civil and criminal cases representing numerous corporations and individuals. In 2017, Mr. Edelman was inducted as a fellow into The American College of Trial Lawyers (ACTL). Mr. Edelman has successfully led trial teams in a string of high-profile victories. In 2016, he secured a significant victory against the DOJ on behalf of Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) on music licensing affecting the more than $2 billion music performing industry which garnered him recognition by The American Lawyer as “Litigator of the Week.” He also prevailed on behalf of BMI in a trial victory against Pandora in 2015 in the historic music licensing rate case that set the new market rate for all digital music services and awarded BMI a significant fee increase of revenue from Pandora. On behalf of Citi Global Markets in 2014, he secured an injunction preventing an arbitration under FINRA in a high-profile case brought by a Saudi investor. Mr. Edelman also won a major trial victory for Cerberus Capital Management related to the multi-billion dollar merger with United Rentals in the first M&A litigation arising out of the troubled credit markets to proceed to trial in Delaware in 2007.

Highly regarded for his extensive legal skills in and out of the courtroom, clients describe Mr. Edelman as “a phenomenal attorney whose courtroom style is nothing short of perfection” (Chambers). As one of the most versatile litigators in the country, Mr. Edelman is the only attorney in New York who is ranked by Chambers as a leading lawyer in each of the following areas: Securities Litigation, General Commercial Litigation and White Collar Crime and Government Investigations.

Current or Recent Representative Matters

Securities

Represents Vereit, Inc. (formerly American Realty Capital Properties, Inc.) in securities fraud actions filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, including putative class actions and shareholder derivative actions. 

Represents SQM, the world’s largest producer of specialty fertilizers and iodine in securities class action relating to investigations by Chilean government authorities concerning alleged improper payments to Chilean political officials.

Represents Eldorado Resorts in a securities fraud class action filed in the District of New Jersey.

Represents the former CEO of LendingClub Corp. in securities class actions and derivative actions filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California, the Superior Court of California, San Mateo County, and the Delaware Chancery Court.

Represents a group of underwriters in connection with a securities class action in the Supreme Court of New York against Camping World Holdings, Inc. and others arising out of Camping World's October 2017 secondary offering of common stock.

Represents the underwriters of a September 2018 initial public offering of common stock of NIO, Inc., a Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer. The underwriters have been named in a putative class action asserting claims under the Securities Act of 1933.

Represented underwriters named as defendants in other securities class action, including matters related to offerings by Endo International, Forterra Inc., and Tile Shop Holdings, Inc.

Represented American Renal Associates Holdings, Inc. as a defendant in a securities class action in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

Represented Ambac Financial Group, Inc. in a securities fraud action filed in SDNY arising from the company’s exposure to Puerto Rican debt. Case was dismissed on motion to dismiss. Wilbush v. Ambac Fin. Grp., Inc., 271 F. Supp. 3d 473 (S.D.N.Y. 2017).

Represented former executive officer of Third Avenue Management, LLC in three separate litigations arising from the liquidation of the Third Avenue Focused Credit Fund.

Commercial Litigation

Represented Dycom Industries, Inc. in 2017 in a lawsuit that culminated in a five-day trial relating to disputes arising out of non-competition and related provisions in a Stock Purchase Agreement. The case settled after trial.

Represents private equity fund in fraudulent conveyance claims pending in Delaware Bankruptcy Court arising out of recapitalization of DSI Renal.

Represents Atrium Holding Company and certain of its affiliates in litigations that have included matters before the Delaware Chancery Court and Kansas Bankruptcy Court regarding a Right of First Refusal on a portfolio of hotels owned by The John Q. Hammons Revocable Trust.

Represents Broadcast Music, Inc. in connection with multiple matters, including a rate court proceeding against the Radio Music License Committee scheduled for trial in February 2020, and another rate court proceeding against the live concert industry.

Represented trustees of a multi-hundred million dollar trust in connection with claims brought by the trust’s beneficiaries in Florida state court.

White Collar

Multiple non-public representations of CEOs, CFOs, general counsels, entrepreneurs and others in criminal, regulatory, and congressional investigations.

Corporate Governance

Edelman has represented and advised numerous boards of directors, special committees of boards and individual directors on corporate governance and fiduciary duties.

Recognition & Accomplishments

Mr. Edelman joined Milbank in 1994 and became a partner in 1995. Prior to joining Milbank, Mr. Edelman served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York from 1990 to 1994. He started his career at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. He received his law degree from Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Harvard Law Review and a John Olin Fellow in Law and Economics and received his B.A. (summa cum laude) and M.A. degrees, both in Economics, from Yale University.

Then, I found Nirvana...

Steven Spielberg And USC Shoah Foundation To Honor William Clay Ford, Jr., Executive Chairman Of Ford Motor Company, At Ambassadors For Humanity Gala In Detroit

USC Shoah Foundation logo

NEWS PROVIDED BY

USC Shoah Foundation Institute 

May 13, 2015, 10:07 ET

     

DETROIT, May 13, 2015 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Steven Spielberg, founder of USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education, will present William Clay Ford, Jr., executive chairman of Ford Motor Company, with the Institute's Ambassador for Humanity Award at the organization's annual gala, taking place this year in Detroit on Sept. 10. Ford will be recognized for his leadership and corporate citizenry around education and community. Mickey Shapiro, real estate developer and longstanding member of the Institute's Board of Councilors, is the event's co-chairman. The gala vice chairs and benefit committee will comprise leaders from the local community and from around the nation.

The September gala will provide the opportunity to highlight the Institute's global work in making the 53,000 audio-visual interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides in its Visual History Archive a compelling voice for education and action.

USC Shoah Foundation has a long history in Michigan and with Ford Motor Company, which was the sole sponsor of the 1997 NBC broadcast of the Academy Award® winning "Schindler's List,"' the film that inspired the establishment of the Institute. The Institute collected 335 testimonies with Holocaust survivors and witnesses in the Detroit area, with local videographers and interviewers specially trained for the job.

The Visual History Archive is also available on two campuses in Michigan, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor and University of Michigan - Flint.

The event will also shine a light on the emerging partnership between USC Shoah Foundation and Ford Motor Company to expand the Institute's IWitness educational platform in the Detroit area. IWitness brings the first-person stories of survivors and witnesses of genocide from the Institute's Visual History Archive to students via multimedia-learning activities that are accessible via Macs, PCs, iPads, and tablet devices connected to the Internet.

They all have trafficking tiny humans trust funds

Currently, 100 educators in Michigan – and over 6,500 globally – use IWitness. In addition, more than 250 educators in Michigan, and over 15,000 nationally, have been trained on Echoes and Reflections, a multimedia Holocaust curriculum developed by the Institute and partners, the Anti-Defamation League and Yad Vashem.

This is that database David Whelan, brother of Paul Whelan, the one who did the Clinton Foundation
database, set up the University of Michigan library system for the State of Michigan, where I still have access, as soon as I update my stuff, because I am pretty damn sure I worked on the initial stages of the design out University of Michigan Dearborn with my Psychobabies. This is a human asset management database of identities, where, you can search for the right made up crap to formally present as evidence because they make up the facts through the use of predictive modeling crap. I am having another Post Traumatic Fraud Seizure...

A significant portion of the proceeds raised at the gala will remain in the region, where the funds will be utilized for educational programs in secondary schools. 

This is code for Detroit Children's Fund where they probably invested in some of those Detroit Land Bank Authority properties so they could run merrily through the streets of Detroit, creating and flipping those fake ass TARP mortgages because it is in partnership with USC and University of Michigan, just like how the Emergency Manager Law of Jones Day was implemented after it was generated out of those fake ass Public Private Partnerships like with Kevyn Orr and the PriceWaterHouse USC School of Public Policy that utilized that Archdiocese of Detroit model to go a-stealin' the children, land & vote.....I got some serious boos boos I am putting on my special "honey do" list.

Steven Spielberg, founder of USC Shoah Foundation and chairman of the Ambassadors gala said, "Working with Bill Ford and Ford Motor Company to further explore ways to share the work of the Institute with the people of Michigan is a wonderful opportunity. Reaching people when they're young is the key to changing the world with testimony. IWitness and its ability to deliver tolerance education to the Detroit region gives me great hope that together we can affect significant change. The commitment of Bill Ford and Ford Motor Company to support new approaches to learning, to provide scholarships, and to help deserving students attain higher education, makes him a great ambassador, and I am proud to recognize him for his efforts."

Behold, the trafficking of tiny humans, straight out Detroit.

FUN FACT! THE FORD MOTOR COMPANY IS UNDER A FEDERAL COLLABORATIVE INVESTIGATION PERTAINING TO THESE AFOREMENTIONED ACTIVITIES

"The USC Shoah Foundation stands as an enormous point of pride for USC, and has seen its efforts advanced greatly through the support of individuals and organizations that recognize its value as a truly transformational tool for education. Mr. Ford is a visionary leader who understands the contribution that USC Shoah Foundation makes to the world, and we are honored to recognize him for his corporate citizenry and leadership," said University of Southern California President C. L. Max Nikias.

"I am so pleased that USC Shoah Foundation will be joining forces with Ford Motor Company and the local Detroit community to explore new ways to utilize IWitness as an educational tool, and endeavor to reach a growing number of educators and students across the Detroit region," said USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Stephen D. Smith.

For more information about the gala call the Event Office at 248-593-9743, the USC Shoah Foundation Benefit at 818-777-7876 or email ambassadorsgala2015@usc.edu. Donations are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by law.

About USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education

USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education is dedicated to making audiovisual interviews with survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides, a compelling voice for education and action. The Institute's current collection of over 53,000 eyewitness testimonies preserves history as told by the people who lived it, and lived through it. Housed at the University of Southern California, within the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, the Institute works with partners around the world to advance scholarship and research, to provide resources and online tools for educators, and to disseminate the testimonies for educational purposes. For more information about USC Shoah Foundation, please go to sfi.usc.edu.

Then, I found this...

Submitted by webmaster on Fri, 04/03/2015 - 1:27pm

IL Link to Wikipedia article  Hebrew Yiddish

• 2016: Lesly Culp, USC Shoah Foundation Senior Education Content Specialist and Trainer, gives a presentation about IWitness at Yad Vashem.
• 2013: Czech Teacher Seminar in Jerusalem that introduced IWitness to 25 educators.
• 2012: Partnership with Yad Vashem and the Anti-Defamation League (5th year) Echoes and Reflections
• 2011: USC Shoah Foundation presented the IWitness platform at the 8th international conference of Yad Vashem.
• 2011: USC Shoah Foundation participated in the Yad Vashem seminar for Czech teachers. Several workshops and presentations by the USC SF representative on using testimony in education, the methodology, the need for local context, and the role of propaganda.
• 2010: USC Shoah Foundation conducted half-day workshop on the USC Shoah Foundation methodology and use of local testimony for Lithuanian teachers at the Yad Vashem, with DVD handouts (October 13) and for Czech teachers participating in a similar YVS teacher-training program.

• 2015: USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Stephen Smith gave the keynote address at a Holocaust seminar in Tel Aviv. 

• 2016: The “Jews of the Middle East in the Shadow of the Holocaust” conference in Jerusalem discussed Visual History Archive testimonies.
• 2012: Haifa Conference: Bridging the Divide in Holocaust and Genocide Studies: Towards a Cross-Cultural Interdisciplinary Dialogue
• 2012: Western Galilee College Testimony Conference
• 2008: USC Shoah Foundation participated in the 6th International Conference on Holocaust Education in Jerusalem.

Additional educational resources

• 2013: USC SF testimony included in Yad Vashem’s multimedia classroom lesson Studying Genocide in the Context of the Holocaust.

Israel

https://sfi.usc.edu/country/il

Then, I found Detroit...

Looking for someone to be your domestic or foreign spokestoken like what Peter's grooming, or just to hire an international trustee of your children's trust fund to launder your tax aversive funds you pilfered from the children's trusts out the United States as a Public Private Partnership in the name of the lord? Well, you can search here:

https://www.temple-israel.org/

A Plausible Explanation As To Why WXYZ Released Ann Marie LaFlamme - The Well Of Tiny Humans

Then, I found University of Michigan...

Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive Online (catalog & sample testimonies only)

Add to my temporary Databases list

Available to the general public, this version of the Visual History Archive provides access to the full metadata covering 55,000 interviews found in the Visual History Archive. Users can search the archive in a number of ways including name, experience, place, and language. In addition, a select number of English-language testimonies are available for viewing. To view testimonies not included in this sample set, see the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, www.lib.umich.edu/database/link/27807. 

Record info:

Database type

Database

Video

Access Type

Open access for all users

Permalink

https://apps.lib.umich.edu/database/link/11541

Alternative Title(s)

USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive

Shoah VHA

SVHA

Academic Discipline

Humanities

International Studies

Social Sciences

I also found the University of Indiana which makes me think of Tyler Technologies.

https://libraries.indiana.edu/databases/vha

The USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive allows users to search through and view the 51,537 video testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide currently available in the Archive that were conducted in 61 countries and 39 languages. Initially a repository of Holocaust testimony, the Visual History Archive has expanded to include testimonies from the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in China and the 1994 Rwandan Tutsi Genocide.

https://libraries.indiana.edu/shoah-foundation-visual-history-archive

Now, meet Tracy Connors, of whom there is scant information about, which leads me to question the content of her character and her allodial attachment to a land.

Tracy may not know this, but she just entered her testimony into the public record on the history of the Civil Rights movement in the United States with the Black Panthers Foundation, which is now called the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, and its journey to Cuba and back, which just so happens to have had its parental rights to keep and bear the arms of the United States, terminated, just like the Shoah Corporate Shape Shifter.

And, on that note, I need to take a personal moment because Peter impugned my intelligence, which is never a very wise thing to do, which is why he sucks, and so does Tracy, until she can disprove my claims, under oath, in bondage of her body and spirit, because the cases of USC, et al trafficking tiny humans Trust Funds are already in SCOTUS, where we are going all out, old school, full maternal. 

This is not a Youtube nor Hollywood production, this is about the resurrection for the messiah cometh.

 מלך המשיח

The moral of the story is, "Do not be mean to my Sweetie. Period."

#maytheheavensfall

Voting is beautiful, be beautiful ~ vote.©

Tales Of The New Crown: FBI & White House Take Action On Cyber Intrusions Of The Absolutely Brilliant Online Investigative Journalists

Thou shalt not bear false witness online, and thou better not be found generating revenue while doing it.

With that said, I strongly encourage the cyberblasphemers to put a disclaimer on your work as a fiction or you shall be called to bear witness, under oath, with your body as your bond, in a court of law, but hey, what do I know?

I know lots and lots of Absolutely  Brilliant Online Investigative Journalists who know all about the 2016 Election.

Yippers.

I most certainly do!

#maytheheavensfall

Statement Before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee

Washington, D.C.

September 24, 2020

Worldwide Threats to the Homeland

Statement for the Record

Good afternoon, Chairman Johnson, Ranking Member Peters, and members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss the current threats to the United States homeland. I am pleased to be here representing the nearly 37,000 dedicated men and women of the FBI.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has presented unique and unprecedented challenges to the FBI workforce, I am proud of their dedication to our mission of protecting the American people and upholding the Constitution. Hostile foreign actors, violent extremists, and opportunistic criminal elements have seized upon this environment. As a result, we are facing aggressive and sophisticated threats on many fronts. Whether it is terrorism now moving at the speed of social media, or the increasingly blended threat of cyber intrusions and state-sponsored economic espionage, or malign foreign influence and interference or active shooters and other violent criminals threatening our communities, or the scourge of opioid trafficking and abuse, or hate crimes, human trafficking, crimes against children—the list of threats we are worried about is not getting any shorter, and none of the threats on that list are getting any easier.

Counterterrorism

Preventing terrorist attacks remains the FBI’s top priority. However, the threat posed by terrorism—both international terrorism (IT) and domestic violent extremism—has evolved significantly since 9/11.

The greatest threat we face in the homeland is that posed by lone actors radicalized online who look to attack soft targets with easily accessible weapons. We see this lone actor threat manifested both within domestic violent extremists (DVEs) and homegrown violent extremists (HVEs), two distinct sets of individuals that generally self-radicalize and mobilize to violence on their own. DVEs are individuals who commit violent criminal acts in furtherance of ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as racial bias and anti-government sentiment. HVEs are individuals who have been radicalized primarily in the United States, and who are inspired by, but not receiving individualized direction from, foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs).

Many of these violent extremists, both domestic and international, are motivated and inspired by a mix of ideological, sociopolitical, and personal grievances against their targets, which recently have more and more included large public gatherings, houses of worship, and retail locations. Lone actors, who by definition are not likely to conspire with others regarding their plans, are increasingly choosing these soft, familiar targets for their attacks, limiting law enforcement opportunities for detection and disruption ahead of their action.

DVEs pose a steady and evolving threat of violence and economic harm to the United States. Trends may shift, but the underlying drivers for domestic violent extremism—such as perceptions of government or law enforcement overreach, sociopolitical conditions, racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, and reactions to legislative actions—remain constant. As stated above, the FBI is most concerned about lone offender attacks, primarily shootings, as they have served as the dominant lethal mode for domestic violent extremist attacks. More deaths were caused by DVEs than international terrorists in recent years. In fact, 2019 was the deadliest year for domestic extremist violence since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

The top threat we face from domestic violent extremists stems from those we identify as racially/ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVE). RMVEs were the primary source of ideologically motivated lethal incidents and violence in 2018 and 2019 and have been considered the most lethal of all domestic extremists since 2001. Of note, the last three DVE attacks, however, were perpetrated by anti-government violent extremists.

The spate of attacks we saw in 2019 underscore the continued threat posed by DVEs and perpetrators of hate crimes. The FBI works proactively to prevent acts of domestic terrorism and hate crimes. For example, in November 2019, the Denver Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested Richard Holzer on federal charges of attempting to obstruct religious exercise by force using explosives. This disruption is just one example of the strength of our Domestic Terrorism-Hate Crimes (DT-HC) Fusion Cell. Our Counterterrorism Division (CTD) and Criminal Division (CID), working together, were able to prevent a potential terrorist attack before it occurred and, for the first time in recent history, make a proactive arrest on a hate crimes charge. Through the DT-HC Fusion Cell, subject-matter experts from both CTD and CID work in tandem to innovatively use investigative tools and bring multiple perspectives to bear in combating the intersecting threats of domestic terrorism and hate crimes, preventing attacks and providing justice to victims.

We recognize that the FBI must be aware not just of the domestic violent extremism threat, but also of threats emanating from those responding violently to First Amendment-protected activities. In the past, we have seen some violent extremists respond to peaceful movements through violence rather than non-violent actions and ideas. The FBI is involved only when responses cross from ideas and constitutionally protected protests to violence. Regardless of the specific ideology involved, the FBI requires that all domestic terrorism investigations be predicated based on activity intended to further a political or social goal, wholly or in part involving force, coercion, or violence, in violation of federal law.

HVEs and FTOs have posed a persistent threat to the nation and to U.S. interests abroad, while their tradecraft, tactics, and target sets have evolved. The international terrorism threat to the U.S. has expanded from sophisticated, externally directed FTO plots to include individual attacks carried out by HVEs who are inspired by designated terrorist organizations. As stated above, the FBI assesses HVEs are the greatest, most immediate international terrorism threat to the homeland. These individuals are FTO-inspired individuals who are in the U.S., have been radicalized primarily in the U.S., and are not receiving individualized direction from FTOs. We, along with our law enforcement partners, face significant challenges in identifying and disrupting HVEs. This is due, in part, to their lack of a direct connection with an FTO, an ability to rapidly mobilize without law enforcement detection, and their frequent use of encrypted communications.

Many FTOs use various digital communication platforms to reach individuals they believe may be susceptible and sympathetic to violent terrorist messages. However, no group has been as successful at drawing people into its perverse ideology as ISIS, which has proven dangerously competent at employing such tools. ISIS uses traditional media platforms as well as widespread social media campaigns to propagate its ideology. Terrorists in ungoverned spaces—both physical and virtual—readily disseminate propaganda and training materials to attract easily influenced individuals around the world to their cause. With the broad distribution of social media, terrorists can spot, assess, recruit, and radicalize vulnerable persons of all ages in the U.S. either to travel to foreign lands or to conduct an attack on the homeland. Through the internet, terrorists anywhere overseas now have direct access to our local communities to target and recruit our citizens and spread their message faster than was imagined just a few years ago.

We remain concerned that groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS) and al Qaeda intend to carry out large-scale attacks in the U.S. Despite their territorial defeat in Iraq and Syria, ISIS remains relentless and ruthless in its campaign of violence against the West and has aggressively promoted its hateful message, attracting like-minded violent extremists. The message is not tailored solely to those who overtly express signs of radicalization. It is seen by many who use messaging apps and participate in social networks. Ultimately, many of the individuals drawn to ISIS seek a sense of belonging.

Echoing other terrorist groups, ISIS has advocated lone offender attacks in Western countries. Recent ISIS videos and propaganda have specifically advocated attacks against soldiers, law enforcement, and intelligence community personnel.

As noted above, ISIS is not the only terrorist group of concern. Al Qaeda maintains its desire for large-scale, spectacular attacks. While continued counterterrorism pressure has degraded the group’s Afghanistan-Pakistan senior leadership, in the near term, al Qaeda is more likely to focus on building its international affiliates and supporting small-scale, readily achievable attacks in key regions such as East and West Africa. Simultaneously, over the last year, propaganda from al Qaeda leaders seeks to inspire individuals to conduct their own attacks in the U.S. and the West. For example, the December 2019 attack at Naval Air Station Pensacola demonstrates that groups such as al Qaeda continue to be interested in encouraging attacks on U.S. soil.

The FBI regularly reviews intelligence to ensure that we are appropriately mitigating threats from any place by any actor, and the possible violent responses and actions. We are sensitive to First Amendment-protected activities during investigative and intelligence efforts so as to ensure that our investigative actions remain aligned with our authorities and are conducted with the appropriate protections in place for privacy and civil liberties.

As the threat to the United States and U.S. interests evolves, we must adapt and confront these challenges, relying heavily on the strength of our federal, state, local, tribal, and international partnerships. The FBI uses all lawful investigative techniques and methods to combat these terrorist threats to the United States. Along with our domestic and foreign partners, we are collecting and analyzing intelligence concerning the ongoing threat posed by violent extremists motivated by any ideology and desire to harm Americans and U.S. interests. We continue to encourage information sharing, which is evidenced through our partnerships with many federal, state, local, and tribal agencies assigned to Joint Terrorism Task Forces around the country. Be assured, the FBI continues to strive to work and share information more efficiently, and to pursue a variety of lawful methods to help stay ahead of these threats.

Election Security

In less than two months, Americans will exercise one of their most important and cherished freedoms: the right to vote in a democratic election. Our nation is confronting multi-faceted foreign threats seeking to both influence our national policies and public opinion and cause harm to our national dialogue. The FBI and our interagency partners remain concerned about, and focused on, the covert and overt influence measures used by certain adversaries in their attempts to sway U.S. voters’ preferences and perspectives, shift U.S. policies, increase discord in the United States, and undermine the American people’s confidence in our democratic processes.

Foreign influence operations—which include covert, coercive, or corrupt actions by foreign governments to influence U.S. political sentiment or public discourse or interfere in our processes themselves—are not a new problem. But the interconnectedness of the modern world, combined with the anonymity of the internet, have changed the nature of the threat and how the FBI and its partners must address it. This year’s election cycle, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, provides ample opportunity for hostile foreign actors to conduct disinformation campaigns and foreign influence operations in an effort to mislead, sow discord, and, ultimately, undermine confidence in our democratic institutions and values and in our government’s response to our current health crisis.

Foreign influence operations have taken many forms and used many tactics over the years. Most widely reported these days are attempts by adversaries—hoping to reach a wide swath of Americans covertly from outside the United States—to use false personas and fabricated stories on social media platforms to discredit U.S. individuals and institutions.

The FBI is the lead federal agency responsible for investigating foreign influence operations. In the fall of 2017, the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) was established to identify and counteract malign foreign influence operations targeting the United States. The FITF is led by the Counterintelligence Division and is composed of agents, analysts, and professional staff from the Counterintelligence, Cyber, Counterterrorism, and Criminal Investigative Divisions. It is specifically charged with identifying and combating foreign influence operations targeting democratic institutions and values inside the United States. In all instances, the FITF strives to protect democratic institutions and public confidence, develop a common operating picture, raise adversaries’ costs, and reduce their overall asymmetric advantage.

The task force brings the FBI’s national security and traditional criminal investigative expertise under one umbrella to prevent foreign influence in our elections. This better enables us to frame the threat, to identify connections across programs, to aggressively investigate as appropriate, and—importantly—to be more agile. Coordinating closely with our partners and leveraging relationships we have developed in the technology sector, we had a number of instances where we were able to quickly relay threat indicators that those companies used to take swift action, blocking budding abuse of their platforms.

Following the 2018 midterm elections, we reviewed the threat and the effectiveness of our coordination and outreach. As a result of this review, we further expanded the scope of the FITF. Previously, our efforts to combat malign foreign influence focused solely on the threat posed by Russia. Utilizing lessons learned over the last year and half, the FITF is widening its aperture to confront malign foreign operations of China, Iran, and other global adversaries. To address this expanding focus and wider set of adversaries and influence efforts, we have also added resources to maintain permanent “surge” capability on election and foreign influence threats.

We have also further refined our approach. All efforts are based on a three-pronged approach, which includes investigations and operations, information and intelligence sharing, and a strong partnership with the private sector. Through the efforts of the FITF  and lessons learned from both the 2016 and 2018 elections, the FBI is actively engaged in identifying, detecting, and disrupting threats to our elections and ensuring both the integrity of our democracy is preserved and the will of the American people is fulfilled.

Protecting policymakers is an important part of our efforts to combat malign foreign influence and protect our elections. As you are aware, the FBI and our interagency partners have been providing ongoing election security threat briefings to Congress. We will continue to do so throughout the fall and into the future, where there is actionable intelligence.

Lawful Access

I want to turn now to an issue continuing to limit law enforcement’s ability to disrupt these increasingly insular actors. We are all familiar with the inability of law enforcement agencies to access data, even with a lawful warrant or court order, due to “end-to-end” encryption. Increasingly, device manufacturers and communications service providers have employed encryption in such a manner that only the users or parties to the communications can access the content of the communications or devices. This is known as end-to-end encryption.

This development has meant that, in recent years, the FBI has observed a decline in its ability to gain access to the content of both domestic and international terrorist communications due to the widespread adoption of encryption for internet traffic and the prevalence of mobile messaging apps using end-to-end encryption as default.

The FBI certainly recognizes how encryption increases the overall safety and security of the internet for users. But in fulfilling the FBI’s duty to the American people to prevent acts of terrorism, this kind of end-to-end encryption creates serious challenges. Accessing content of communications by, or data held by, known or suspected terrorists pursuant to judicially authorized, warranted legal process is getting more and more difficult.

The online, encrypted nature of radicalization, along with the insular nature of most of today’s attack plotters, leaves investigators with fewer dots to connect. As was evident in the December 9, 2019, shooting at Naval Air Station Pensacola that killed three U.S. sailors and severely wounded eight other Americans, deceased terrorist Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani was able to communicate using warrant-proof, end-to-end encrypted apps deliberately to evade detection by law enforcement. It took the FBI several months to access information in his phones, during which time we did not know whether he was a lone wolf actor or whether his associates may have been plotting additional terrorist attacks.

If law enforcement loses the ability to detect criminal activity because communication between subjects—data in motion—or data held by subjects— data at rest—is encrypted in such a way making content inaccessible, even with a lawful order, our ability to protect the American people will be degraded. Providers and law enforcement must continue to collaborate to explore possible technical solutions that would provide security and privacy to those using the internet while also contributing to the FBI’s ability to complete its mission.

Despite the successes that result from the hard work of the men and women of the FBI, our Joint Terrorism Task Forces, and our partners across the government, terrorism continues to pose a persistent threat to the homeland and our interests overseas.

China Threat

The greatest long-term threat to our nation’s information and intellectual property and to our economic vitality is the counterintelligence and economic espionage threat from China. It is a threat to our economic security and by extension, to our national security.

As you have seen from the recent closure of the Chinese Consulate in Houston, this issue is not just an intelligence issue, or a government problem, or a nuisance largely just for big corporations who can take care of themselves. Our adversaries’ targets are our nation’s core economic assets—our information and ideas, our innovation, our research and development, our technology. No country poses a broader, more severe threat to those assets than China. It is the people of the United States who are the victims of what amounts to Chinese theft on a scale so massive that it represents one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history. If you are an American adult, it is more likely than not that China has stolen your personal data.

In 2017, the Chinese military conspired to hack Equifax and made off with the sensitive personal information of 150 million Americans—we are talking nearly half of the American population and most American adults. Our data is not the only thing at stake here—so is our health, livelihood, and security.

The FBI is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case approximately every 10 hours. Of the nearly 5,000 active FBI counterintelligence cases currently underway across the country, almost half are related to China. And at this very moment, China is working to compromise American health care organizations, pharmaceutical companies, and academic institutions conducting essential COVID-19 research. They are going after cost and pricing information, internal strategy documents, personally identifiable information—anything that can give them a competitive advantage.

It is important to be clear: This is not about the Chinese people as a whole, and certainly not about Chinese Americans as a group, but it is about the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party. Every year, the United States welcomes more than 100,000 Chinese students and researchers into this country. For generations, people have journeyed from China to the United States to secure the blessings of liberty for themselves and their families—and our society is better for their contributions. So, when the FBI’s refers to the threat from China, we mean the government of China and the Chinese Communist Party.

Confronting this threat effectively does not mean that we should not do business with the Chinese. It does not mean that we should not host Chinese visitors. It does not mean that we should not welcome Chinese students or coexist with China on the world stage. But it does mean that when China violates our criminal laws and international norms, we are not going to tolerate it, much less enable it. The FBI and our partners throughout the U.S. government will hold China accountable and protect our nation’s innovation, ideas, and way of life—with the help and vigilance of the American people.

Cyber

With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, the nature of the cyber threat has become increasingly concerning. As more individuals telework and increasingly use the cloud, we encounter less secure networks. As a result, the scope of our cyber threats has changed, the impact has deepened, and many of the players have become more dangerous as we have become increasingly vulnerable. We are still seeing hack after hack and breach after breach. We hear about it daily in the news. The more we shift to the internet as the conduit and the repository for everything we use and share and manage, the more danger we are in.

Today we are worried about a wider-than-ever range of threat actors, from multinational cyber syndicates to nation-state adversaries. And we are concerned about a wider-than-ever gamut of methods continually employed in new ways, like the targeting of managed service providers—MSPs—as a way to access scores of victims by hacking just one provider.

China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) pioneered that technique and, as you saw in July, we indicted two Chinese hackers who worked with the Guangdong State Security Department of the MSS. These individuals conducted a hacking campaign lasting more than 10 years, targeting countries with high technology industries, to include the United States. The industries targeted included, among others, solar energy, pharmaceuticals, and defense.

Cyber crimes like these, directed by the Chinese government’s intelligence services, threaten not only the United States but also every other country that supports fair play, international norms, and the rule of law, and they also seriously undermine China’s desire to become a respected leader in world affairs.

Theft of intellectual property is not the only cyber threat presented by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) government. They are also working to obtain controlled defense technology and developing the ability to use cyber means to complement any future real-world conflict. All of them, and others, are working to simultaneously strengthen themselves and weaken the United States. And we are taking all these nation-state threats very seriously.

But as dangerous as nation-states are, we do not have the luxury of focusing on them alone. We also are battling the increasing sophistication of criminal groups that place many hackers on a level we used to see only among hackers working for governments. The proliferation of malware as a service, where darkweb vendors sell sophistication in exchange for cryptocurrency, increases the difficulty of stopping what would once have been less-dangerous offenders. It can give a ring of unsophisticated criminals the tools to paralyze entire hospitals, police departments, and businesses with ransomware. Often the hackers themselves have not become much more sophisticated—but they are renting sophisticated capabilities, requiring us to up our game as we work to defeat them, too.

Hackers have not relented under the COVID-19 pandemic. On the contrary, they have attempted to compromise the computer systems of hospitals and medical centers to obtain patient financial data, medical records, and other information. In addition, such attacks on medical centers may lead to the interruption of computer networks and systems putting patients’ lives at an increased risk when America faces its most dire health crisis in generations.

Conclusion

Chairman Johnson, Ranking Member Peters and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today. I am now happy to answer any questions you might have.

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