Introduction: Las Vegas shooting and 9/11 Memorial & Museum  

Thank you to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum for the invitation to join you this evening. And thank you to all the staff here, for everything you do for our nation, and in particular, for the FBI.

This 9/11 Memorial & Museum means a great deal to me. I haven’t spoken very much about this publicly, but a visit here helped shape some things for me, very early in my time as FBI Director. I was sworn in in August of 2017, just before the 16th anniversary of 9/11. And one of the earliest trips I made was here, to meet with the 9/11 Memorial & Museum staff, where I had been asked to provide remarks.

Those remarks were scheduled for the fall of 2017. And as many of you know, that October, a 64-year-old man blockaded himself in a Las Vegas hotel room overlooking a music festival. And in just 10 minutes, he rained down more than 1,000 rounds into the crowd, striking more than 400 people and killing 60. And in total, more than 800 people were injured as they panicked and scattered for cover.

So in my second month as FBI Director, I found myself traveling here—to the site of the deadliest terrorist attack ever on U.S. soil—while the people of Las Vegas—residents, guests, and first responders—and all of us as a nation—were still reeling from the deadliest mass shooting in this country in recent history.

Just before the event here in New York, I took a tour of the museum with my wife and daughter, who was then 22. As we followed the ramps down, under the foundations of where the World Trade Center buildings had stood, I kept an eye on my daughter. Because while I had spent 9/11 in FBI Headquarters, she had been in elementary school in 2001, too young to really remember and understand the attacks.

As we took the tour, we looked at artifacts recovered from Ground Zero, saw images of the thousands of victims, and heard audio recordings from witnesses. We saw the structural beams where each plane impacted the buildings, the emergency vehicles crushed when the buildings collapsed, and the sea wall that barely held back the East River from flooding the subway system. 

And it seemed to me that every time we turned a corner, my daughter had another "aha" moment. I could literally see her experiencing the gravity of that day, perhaps for the first time. I watched it all become more real for her, and I realized that evening, that I needed to take my experience watching her experience that day back with me to the FBI somehow.

Because as I started thinking more about it, it occurred to me that many of our newest FBI employees were closer to her in age than to me, and from watching her, I knew I wanted our new agents and analysts to not only remember 9/11 as a historical moment. I wanted them to understand and feel the urgency of that moment, the senseless violence and what it cost our nation, to have their own version of those "aha" moments I saw in my daughter’s face, so they would have a deeper understanding of just how much is on the line, and what a tremendous responsibility we have in our mission.

Let me take you back, for a moment, to that scene in Las Vegas. 

I had gone out there to meet with the FBI’s special agents, evidence response team, and victim specialists and with the Las Vegas Metro Police Department and other first responder units that worked on scene. I visited the command post and went over to the venue that became the site of the horrific attack. 

As I walked around, I was struck by the emotion in the faces and the eyes of the people still processing the scene. They were working through the exhaustion—mental and physical—to respond to what had happened. And as I processed their reactions, and my own, as I spoke with partners and first responders, as I heard them describe the way the consequences of the violence were hitting them in the gut, and the way they were pushing through it to get the job done, I realized I was seeing the same phenomenon there, at that crime scene, and in that command post, that I had seen captured so well here in New York.

On the flight home a few hours later, I became convinced that the idea of an FBI 9/11 Memorial & Museum experience needed to become a reality. And when I got back to Washington, I told my team to find a way for all new FBI Academy classes to visit Lower Manhattan as part of their initial training. It took some time to put together, but starting with the first classes of 2019—and with the exception of a few classes during the pandemic who had to participate virtually—every new special agent and every new intelligence analyst has toured the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. But they don’t just visit and take the tour—they also take a class with the staff here to learn more about what happened that day.  

We’ve now had nearly 6,0002 trainees experience this memorial, and I’m proud that thousands more will have the opportunity in the years to come. Because anyone who visits this place comes away understanding a little better: Why we’re so focused on integrating intelligence into everything we do, why we emphasize partnerships, why it’s so crucial that we approach every task with rigor and urgency, why we’ve always got to be willing to adapt and innovate to meet new threats, and why we have to work together with our intelligence and law enforcement partners at all levels, leveraging our collective strengths and resources and authorities to stay ahead of the threat—every threat—all the time.

Elevated threats 

When I took this job in 2017, it seemed to me that some of the changes the Bureau had made after 9/11 were, by then, 16 years later, in some ways being taken for granted. In fact, some commentators were criticizing the FBI for maintaining counterterrorism as our top priority, claiming the threat from foreign terrorist organizations was over.

How does that sound today, a year after the Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7, when one of our closest allies was attacked by terrorists who killed something like 1,300 people that day?

And that’s in a country with a total population of less than 10 million—put another way, in the United States, that would proportionally be like killing nearly 40,000 people in a single day. 

Even before that attack, I’d been very public in saying the terrorism threat was already elevated. In fact, in the summer of 2023, I told Congress that the terrorism threat was elevated across the board—international, domestic, and the state-sponsored threat. 

When it comes to state-sponsored terrorism, Iran has been aggressive in plotting attacks against former U.S. officials in retaliation for the death of Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani. In 2022, a Quds Force officer was charged for his attempt to arrange the murder of former National Security Advisor John Bolton. Fortunately, the individual he attempted to pay to carry out the attack was one of our confidential human sources.

Then, last year, three people hired by the government of Iran were charged for plotting the murder of a journalist right here in New York who had spoken out against the regime’s human rights abuses. And just recently, we added charges against a senior Iranian official and other members of his network for their role in the plot. That was their second attempt to silence her. Both times, we were there to stop them.

Those were both direct attempts at violence, but we’ve also stopped Iranian cyberattacks that could have had very tangible and horrific real-world results—like one that threatened to take a New England children’s hospital offline.

They also remain the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, through support to their proxies and other foreign terrorist organizations throughout the world, like Lebanese Hizbollah.

And that was all before October 7, 2023.

Since that attack on Israel, the ongoing war in the Middle East has raised the threat of an attack against Americans to a whole 'nother level. Over the past year, we’ve seen a rogue’s gallery of foreign terrorist organizations call for attacks against Americans and our allies. Hizballah expressed its support and praise for Hamas—and despite Israel’s actions in recent weeks—still poses a threat to U.S. interests in the region. Al Qaeda issued its most specific call to attack the United States in the last five years. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula—or AQAP—called on jihadists to attack Americans and Jewish people everywhere. And ISIS urged its followers to target Jewish communities both in Europe and the United States. 

And violent extremists around the world are responding to those calls. 

In September, a Pakistani citizen living in Canada was arrested after he attempted to travel from Canada to New York City, where he intended to carry out a mass shooting at a Jewish center in Brooklyn. 

He was aiming to execute his plan on or around the October 7 anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel. And his stated goal was to, quote, "slaughter as many Jewish people as possible," all in the name of ISIS. During one communication, he noted his ambition for this attack, and here’s another quote: "If we succeed with our plan, this would be the largest attack on U.S. soil since 9/11."

Just a few weeks ago, we arrested a man from Afghanistan in Oklahoma City who had plotted to conduct an attack on Election Day. He had made plans to take care of his family and to sell all of his possessions, including his home, to raise money to purchase weapons and ammunition that he intended to use in an attack targeting large gatherings of people.

He and his co-conspirator were engaged in this plotting with an individual overseas he knew to be affiliated with ISIS. And he intended his attack, and his own death, to be an act of martyrdom on ISIS’s behalf.  

Thanks to the great work of the FBI team, including an FBI undercover employee and confidential human sources, we were able to disrupt the plot before he could get access to the weapons he was looking for.    

But I need to be clear that we—even with our sources, and working with our partners here at home and around the world—are not omniscient, and the threats are only getting more complex.

As many of you know, Hizballah, al Qaeda, AQAP, and ISIS haven’t always seen eye to eye—and that’s putting it mildly. But they’re now aligned in their calls for attacks on us and our allies.  

And that’s particularly concerning as Iran grows frustrated with its inability to make their attempted strikes into Israel effective. And we remain concerned, from the way they’re talking publicly, that some of these adversaries could overlook their ideological differences to find common cause in attacking us. 

What makes the threat of a coordinated attack seem even more real is a number of violent extremists we’ve seen recently cross our borders— from the north and the south—in an attempt to advance plots against Americans.  

In June, for instance, the Bureau and our Joint Terrorism Task Forces worked with ICE in multiple cities across the country to arrest several people with suspected international terrorist ties. Leading up to those arrests, hundreds of FBI employees dedicated countless hours to understand the threat and identify additional individuals of concern. 

Now, the physical security of the border is, of course, not in the FBI’s lane, but as the threat has escalated, we’re working closely with our partners in law enforcement and the intelligence community to find and stop violent extremists who would cross our borders to harm Americans and our interests. And as concerning as the known or suspected terrorists encountered at the border and arrested by ICE are, perhaps even more concerning are those we don’t know about, because they provided fake documents or we didn’t have information connecting them to terrorism when they first arrived in the United States. 

So, we’ve got suspected terrorists who have crossed into the United States, an Iran that gets more brazen by the day, and foreign terrorist organizations who otherwise hate each other moving toward being able to work together. And that’s on top of increased tensions from a war in the Middle East, the instability in Syria and the foreign fighters in prisons there we don’t have a good enough handle on, and a deteriorating CT environment in Afghanistan and Africa following U.S. and allied withdrawals in those regions.  

But, as I said in Nigeria when I was visiting partners there this summer, we cannot be thinking of these threats as oceans away. They have a direct impact on our national security.  

And like that message in the side-view mirrors of our cars—"objects in the mirror are closer than they appear"—we have to remain vigilant to the danger these threats pose to us here, at home.  

And that’s why terrorism remains the FBI’s number one priority. 

Domestic terrorism and fuzzy lines 

But the international terrorism threat is far from the only terrorism threat we’re contending with.  

Over the past several years, we’ve elevated two of the categories within the domestic terrorism landscape as national threat priorities, meaning we assess these threats pose a similar level of risk as ISIS, for instance. Those are racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists—particularly those advocating for the superiority of the white race. And anti-government – anti-authority violent extremists, which include militia violent extremists, anarchist violent extremists, and sovereign citizen violent extremists. 

We categorize violent extremists this way because it helps us understand connections and motivations, but we recognize these distinctions are not important to the violent extremists themselves. They don’t care how we categorize them, and it’s getting harder to do so cleanly. 

For instance, in February of 2023, a man in Texas was sentenced to five years in prison for his attempt to destroy a natural gas pipeline as part of his ideological fight against capitalism and climate change. His ultimate intent was to weaken Texas’ energy independence and cause significant economic damage in the process.  

Another example: in May, we got a guilty plea from Sarah Beth Clendaniel, the first of two defendants involved in the plot to destroy the Baltimore regional power grid in late 2022 and early 2023. In September, she was sentenced to 18 years in prison. Her co-conspirator is awaiting trial. They acted in furtherance of "accelerationism," a belief that violent action will precipitate a societal collapse that will somehow lead to a world more closely aligning with their ideology.  

Clendaniel and her co-conspirator specifically wanted to help create a white-nationalist society. So, they were primarily motivated by racial prejudice, but that led them to an anarchist, anti-government point of view. 

From late 2022 through February 2023, they made plans to destroy five electrical substations surrounding the city of Baltimore. They believed this would shut down the Baltimore regional power grid. Fortunately, one of the people they tried to conspire with was an FBI confidential human source. They showed our source infrastructure maps of Baltimore and three suburban towns, they talked about how they believed they could completely destroy the substations with well-placed firearm shots, and they told our source about their plans to hit the five substations all in the same day, which they believed would cause, quote, "a cascading effect."  

The woman who pled guilty in May told our source that if they were successful, and this is another quote: "It would probably, permanently, completely lay this city to waste."  

They never got close to carrying out their plan.

But what makes this more concerning is we know they were communicating with like-minded individuals in other cities. These are not people in an organized or coherent or structured group. They all just had a common interest—to help bring down our current society so a white nationalist society could spring up in its place. 

Even more concerning—more and more we’re seeing a crossover in goals and tactics between this set of conspirators, who are motivated primarily by racial hate, and the anti-government – anti-authority violent extremists who just want to see the government burn. 

In fact, we’re increasingly seeing that people who are attracted to extremist violence are ideologically fluid—they can switch between motivations or even hold contradictory motivations at the same time.  

We’ve seen subjects posting white nationalist propaganda while voicing support for ISIS, using both to justify their violence. We’ve seen suspects justifying violence against women, simultaneously through religious zealotry and by aligning with the self-proclaimed "involuntarily celibate" or "incel" movement. And just like ISIS finding common cause with al Qaeda, if they can find people with common violent extremist goals — targeted violence against specific people or structures of authority, they don’t need their co-conspirators to agree on precisely why they intend to commit the violence. 

Partnerships and conclusion 

So with all of that to contend with, I often get asked: How do we pivot as the threat changes? 

I tend to agree with a former senior intelligence official I recently sat down with, who told me she hates the term "pivot"—the idea that we can simply move on from one threat to the next. 

In our line of work, we almost never pivot away from a threat. We just cover down on more and more threats as things evolve. 

So, what is the solution? How do we deal with an ever-changing, ever-expanding set of terrorism threats to Americans and our allies? I think we have the answer, though it’s a lot easier to conceptualize than to put into practice. 

We have to keep applying the lessons we learned here, at Ground Zero, to our changing world. We have to leverage intelligence in everything we do, working to pull facts from a world where encryption is ubiquitous and exploited by terrorists and criminals alike. We have to keep emphasizing partnerships, not just with the intelligence and law enforcement agencies we’re so integrated with now, but also with foreign governments, private industry, and the public—the people and communities who notice when their friends and neighbors are at risk of escalating from radicalization to violence. 

We have to approach every task with rigor and urgency, doing the right thing the right way every time. And we need to adapt and innovate, staying ahead of the threat. 

So, while I’ve talked a lot tonight about how complex the terrorism landscape has become, I hope you’ll also walk away from this evening with the knowledge that the nearly 6,000 new FBI special agents and intelligence analysts who have experienced this 9/11 Memorial & Museum since 2019. Plus the rest of the FBI workforce who interact with those who have gone through the training here have all taken those lessons on board. And they, too, feel the sense of urgency this mission demands. 

I also want you to know that while the threat continues to show up in unexpected places, we’ll continue to be there, working with our partners to disrupt it, just like we did in New York, when we arrested the man who came across the border from Canada intending to conduct a mass shooting for ISIS. And in Oklahoma City, when we arrested the violent extremist from Afghanistan plotting to conduct an attack on Election Day. And in Baltimore, when we arrested the accelerationists who wanted to shut down the city and bring down society as we know it.

But none of this is easy. 

We’ve got to continue doing the hard work of staying focused on an evolving array of threats to keep Americans safe. And we cannot do that alone. We need you. 

There’s a phrase written here at the memorial addressed to the victims of the attacks in 2001: "No day shall erase you from the memory of time."

Everyone at the memorial and museum is committed to that promise. And you’re holding true to that commitment, every time you share this experience with others 

Whether it’s with my family, with all the FBI agents and analysts who come as part of their training, or with the millions of people who visit every year to experience their own "aha" moments. 

So, I’m here tonight—first and foremost—to say thank you to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum for your partnership with the FBI. 

And to thank you, too, for your own service to our nation. Your work makes a difference in how we in law enforcement and the intelligence community operate. And our work together is never finished. 

But I want you to know—whenever we find success in holding back the tide of terrorism, you have had a hand in that.  

Thank you.