FBI Director Christopher Wray made a stunning disclosure to the Senate Homeland Security Committee: The bureau is investigating 5,000 terrorism cases around the world.
“Right now, as I sit here, we’re currently investigating about 5,000 terrorism cases across America and around the world and about a thousand of those cases are homegrown violent extremists and they are in all 50 states,” Wray said in his prepared testimony on Wednesday.
He added that in the last year, the FBI has made “hundreds of arrests of terrorism subjects.”
When asked about the homegrown terrorism threat, he said that the FBI considers those threats “domestic terrorism.”
The bureau is investigating roughly 1,000 cases of domestic terrorism in the U.S., Wray said.
Wray was expected to field questions about the role the White House played in the FBI’s investigation into a sexual assault allegation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was confirmed by a mostly partisan vote on Sunday.
However, nearly 90 minutes into the hearing, Democrats had yet to ask him about the investigation.
Lawmakers had also not asked him about memos kept by former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe about his conversations with top officials, nor was he questioned about special counsel Robert Mueller and his probe into Russian election interference and possible connections to the Trump campaign.
