FBI Director Kash Patel disclosed Friday that the bureau has reopened and escalated its counterintelligence operations targeting the Chinese Communist Party — operations he says the Biden administration deliberately sidelined — and accused his predecessor of misleading the American public about Beijing's ties to illegal biolabs discovered on U.S. soil.
The remarks landed days after the FBI and local police raided a biolab hidden inside a Las Vegas garage, collecting over 1,000 samples of material now en route to the FBI's forensic lab. One arrest — Ori Salomon, the property's manager — was made on the scene.
It is the second illicit biolab with suspected CCP connections found on American soil in three years. The first, in Reedley, California, was searched in 2023. Patel says the Biden-era FBI shut that investigation down and told the public Beijing had nothing to do with it. He intends to prove otherwise.
According to Just the News, the Saturday raid on the Las Vegas garage lab followed intelligence that the FBI had already developed. Patel described a coordinated effort with state law enforcement:
"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. And this is something that we're going to keep continuing to uncover."
Court filings, police officials, and members of Congress have tied both the California and Las Vegas labs to Jia Bei Zhu, a Chinese national arrested in 2023 and currently awaiting trial on charges of fraud, false statements, and adulteration of medical devices. Zhu's background, laid out in a 2023 report by the House Select Committee on the CCP, reads like a counterintelligence case study:
That is the profile of the man running a biolab in a California warehouse. And when a local code enforcement officer named Jesalyn Harper referred the matter to the FBI, the bureau investigated — then walked away.
The House Select Committee's report noted what happened next:
"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."
No weapons of mass destruction. Investigation closed. Case filed. A man with documented ties to PRC defense infrastructure, military-civil fusion, and over a million in unexplained CCP-linked payments was running an illegal biolab in the San Joaquin Valley — and the FBI decided there was nothing to see.
Patel did not mince words about his predecessor or the prior administration's handling of the Reedley case:
"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."
"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 also committed to taking the findings public and directly confronting Congress with what he characterized as flawed intelligence previously provided to lawmakers:
"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."
This is not a bureaucratic turf war. This is the sitting FBI Director telling Congress that his own agency fed them bad information under prior leadership — and promising receipts.
The broader context matters. The Biden administration shut down the China Initiative, the FBI's primary counterintelligence program designed to identify Chinese security threats embedded in American academia and research institutions. Patel framed that decision in blunt terms:
"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?"
"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."
The results since the reversal speak for themselves. Patel cited a 40% increase in Chinese espionage arrests during the first year of the second Trump administration. The Michigan cases alone illustrate the scale of what was going unaddressed.
Patel referenced arrests of researchers at the University of Michigan who smuggled biohazardous materials into the country:
"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 DOJ announcements paint a disturbing picture across multiple cases:
The DOJ described these as the latest charges in a long string of cases stemming from the University of Michigan's international research activities. One university. Multiple smuggling operations. Pathogens concealed in packages from China.
NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, who also spoke about the biolab discoveries, placed the threat in a longer institutional arc:
"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. 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."
American taxpayers funded the infrastructure that a hostile foreign power then exploited to compromise American research institutions and, apparently, to set up unlicensed biological laboratories in garages and warehouses across the country. Bhattacharya acknowledged this plainly:
"We need safeguards that make sure that the American investments don't result in threats and harms to America. 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."
The NIH has since acted. Last May, the agency announced a new award structure prohibiting foreign subawards nested under parent grants, citing a "lack of transparency" that is "particularly concerning in the case of foreign subawards, in which the United States government has a need to maintain national security." NIH will no longer issue awards to entities that include a subaward to a foreign entity, including China.
That policy exists because years of the opposite policy created the very problem now surfacing in FBI raids and federal courtrooms.
Bhattacharya expressed alarm at how easily these labs evaded detection:
"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."
"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."
The House Select Committee's 2023 report had already reached the same conclusion about the Reedley lab, warning that it exposed "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." The committee also found that the CDC's response was "inadequate and raises serious questions about its standard practices."
Meanwhile, findings from the American Accountability Foundation identified at least 20 Chinese scientists inside American academia and U.S. labs who appear to be CCP members, affiliated with Chinese projects aimed at stealing U.S. technology, or involved with universities and companies tied to the People's Liberation Army and Beijing's defense sector.
Patel framed the current posture as permanent, not episodic:
"This FBI, under this leadership, has prioritized the threat against it by the CCP against us, and we've taken swift action."
"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."
The lab results from Las Vegas are still pending. When they come back, Patel has promised full public disclosure. Congress will be briefed — and told, in Patel's words, that the intelligence they previously received was "dead wrong."
A biolab in a California warehouse is tied to a Chinese national with PRC defense connections. An investigation closed by the FBI two months after it began. A counterintelligence program dismantled by the very administration that should have been sounding the alarm. And now, three years later, another lab — in a Las Vegas garage — with the same suspected ties.
The CCP didn't stop because the FBI stopped looking. It just stopped getting caught.
