Historic Reforms Shift Resources to the Field

0:00 Speaker 1 Sunday morning, what’s going on in our country? Well, there’s nobody better to ask with us today is Christopher Rea. And he is the co deputy director of the entire FBI. And we got to know him well in New York when he was the assistant Director in charge of New York and he did such a great job he got promoted. Well,

0:22 Christopher Rea, how is Washington.

0:26 Speaker 2 Well, Washington is good. Obviously it’s not as good as New York City, but we’re enjoying it, making a lot of progress up there, and a lot of a lot of really good things happening inside the Beltway out there.

0:39 Speaker 1 Well, thank you for calling in on a Sunday morning, and and we’d love to hear you know, we’re going into June. There’s a lot of things happening in our country. You have the new soccer tournaments. Give us the priorities of the FBI for this month.

0:54 Speaker 2 Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely, John. You know what I think I’d like to start, which I think is is appropriate here, is really I want to kind of talk about just the historic and quite frequently generational reforms that our new director has put in over the last year. He sent an office wide email out with about seventy plus reforms

1:18 major reforms overhauled the agency, And of course I don’t have the time to go over all seventy but I would like to go over just a few of them, which I think will dovetail into what we’re going to be what we really want to talk about as the FIFA World pub coming up. But really just to give

1:33 you a flavor of these reforms, and any one of these reforms would have taken months, if not years to do, and to do seventy of them gives you an idea of just the breadth and depth of change, positive change that we’re going through. But just to name a couple, first thing he did very shortly on is he pushed

1:51 about twelve hundred resources out to the field from headquarters. Through the years, headquarters had got very top heavy, and at one point we had a third of the workforce inside the beltway there in the National Capital Region there. Well, as you know, John, a third of the work doesn’t happen inside the Beltway there or inside the National Capital Region.

2:11 So one of the first things he did was pushed twelve hundred resources out to the field to put them where the work actually happens. The other thing I think we talked about it last time on our show is he established helped to establish these new Homeland Security task forces which are really focusing on the drug cartels that

2:31 have been designated by President Trump as as foreign terrorist organizations, and really a whole brand new way of taking a hold of government approach as we come back those threats, that very serious and significant threat that I know New York seas on a daily basis. And then the last one I just want to touch on again. There were

2:50 seventy of them, so sixty seven more I could go through, which I won’t go through to the last one, which I think we’ll dovetail nicely into into what we’re going to be experiencing the summer. Is we have made a lot of space through the directors leadership, through the White House Task Force, white House Task Force on drones, we’ve

3:11 made a lot of We gain a lot of ground in the counter UAS or counter drone space, and I will tell you we are much more prepared going into significant events like sale to fifty America to fifty and fief of World Cup when it comes to combating drones because of the work that we’ve put in because of

3:30 the work we’ve put in the last year. We’ve we’ve we’ve done a lot of work to delegate those authorities down to the local level and to we also purchased a lot of equipment to not only detect these drones but to mitigate these drones. And we’ve trained officers all over the country so we could push this capability out

3:52 to the eleven different cities that we’re going to be that are going to be experiencing the FIFA World Cup later in fact, I think starting today as a matter of fact, UH or on Friday, UH as part of the as part of the game game game series that articular.

4:07 Speaker 1 So the FBI has a primary responsibility because they also talk to Andrew Giuliani, who’s the director of that FIFA, the the football UH well international football I call it UH and UH UH. They have a lot of games around the entire country. There is what level of twelve cities involved. So I guess Andrew Giuliani’s in charge of

4:32 UH the operations of it. You guys, the FBI is in charge of maintaining security UH in nor low cities and the entire spectrum.

4:43 Speaker 2 Yeah, I would say we work very closely with the Department of Homeland Security, our other partners in the Department of Justice, and of course with the state, local, uh and and territorial and tribal tribal groups in the various cities.

4:56 As you know better than anybody, there’s not a more capable police support department in the country than NYPD. So we will work very closely, specifically in New York with our NYPD partners to secure the venues the game, not only the venues where these where these teams are playing, but also the different base camp sites of different watch

5:16 parties that are going on. And so it’s really a whole of government approach. We are the main intel component. The FBI is the main intel component as it relates to national security. As it relates to national security, in fact, we stood up an intelligence Coordination Center out of our headquarters building there in Hoover to help keep everybody on

5:37 the same page and help make sure that we are pushing information out to other federal, state, and local partners when threats come in.

5:46 Speaker 1 Understood and so now you’re primarily responsible for the safety of AILO stadiums and ail those cities and et cetera. But the people coming in immigration wise, who’s responsible for them.

6:04 Speaker 2 Yes, so we work closely with DHS. DHS has overall responsibility for those folks. But what we do is we help DHS help identify any type of bad actors or potential bad actors that we may be tracking. And so EHS has the overall picket when it comes to vetting these folks and ensuring these folks come in with visas,

6:29 but they run every single one of those folks through our system just to make sure that we’re not we’re not tracking them for some sort of a nefarious purpose. And that could be anywhere from being a member of a drug cartel to a terrorist organization to even a fraud s turn right. And so if we have anybody

6:46 that we’re tracking that we’re concerned about, we’ll push that information over to DHS, and then DHS ultimately makes that all makes the ultimate call as to whether or not to let them in to the country.

6:57 Speaker 1 I understand now. The other thing that I was going to ask you about is, in the last fourteen months since the new administration, tell us all the reforms that the FBI has has done to make sure our country is safer.

7:14 Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, really really historic, generational, generational type reforms. Obviously, I don’t have enough time to go over all seventy of them, or nearly seventy of them that the Director along with along with his executive staff myself included, the co deputy directors, have pushed out, but I will tell you they run the gamut from pushing resources out to

7:42 the field. Again.

7:44 Speaker 2 Now, we had a third of our resources, of our toll FBI resources inside the National Capital Region, inside the DC area, and of course a third of the work doesn’t happen there, and so we push those resources out the counter uas capabilities that I was just talking talking about, you know, the establishment of the Homeland Security Task Force

8:06 and also the establishment and other task force that we started. We started the establishment of what we’re calling the Joint Mission Center, which was really dedicated or birth from a directive out of the President’s National Security Presidential Memorandum seven, which really has us looking at these these anarchists, kind of extreme left folks that are doing violent apps to

8:32 our law enforcement and other federal, state and local partners that are essentially just trying to just trying to uphold the law, law and order. And so we’ve pushed a lot of calories. We pushed a lot of resources into that along with Homeland Security investigations, DHS and our other partners who really combat that. Whether it’s a protest that

8:54 has gone violent, whether it’s a protest that has prevented some of our DHS partners named the e Er from affecting the law. We’re working closely with those folks who identify those bad actors side of the First Amendment protections that we’re all afforded here through the Constitution of the United States. But when those First Amendment actions become violent,

9:17 that’s when we have to get involved in uncovering those networks and really trying to keep our folks safe in executing that mission.

9:25 Speaker 1 The last thing we want to talk about we’ve got a couple of minutes left, is I understand the FBI has a new fraud program, uh that they want to protect the public body.

9:37 Speaker 2 Yeah. No, that’s a great, great, great question. John. We are really, we are really going to focus this year on fraud, and we’ve got two really main lines of effort when it comes to fraud. We’re going to make it a priority this year, and obviously New York being the financial capital of the work, financial capital work the

9:56 world a lot of fraud. In fact, several now million billions dollars of fraud you know, funnels through New York at some point. But we are going to really start to focus on that. And you’ve probably seen, you may have heard, we’ve actually started a a fraudster most Wanted list.

10:18 So we’ve always had we’ve always had like most wanted terrorists, we’ve always had most wanted violent criminals. Of course, we’ve always had our top ten lists, but we’ve actually started a fraudster most Wanted List, which which we’re running concurrent with the Vice President’s Task Force on Fraud, which which which feeds in which which feeds into all this and so.

10:38 Speaker 1 So this is all the fraud that’s going on and whether it’s it’s California where I’ve seen uh, doctor Oze talk about it and Lee Zelden talk about it, I mean the fraud going on in Minnesota, the freud going on in Uh doctor Oz talked about what is it Medicaid et cetera, et cetera. So you guys are deeply

10:58 involved with that.

11:00 Speaker 2 Yeah, all the healthcare fraud that you’ve been seeing that you’ve been seeing doctor Oz talk about Lee Delden talk about that is right up our alley along with our partners at HHS as well as HSI. In fact, you probably read recently we had a massive takedown in Minneapolis just last year, I mean, I’m sorry, just last month

11:19 where we took down about fifteen of these fraudsters involved in a very myriad of different healthcare frauds, fraud schemes that were basically defrauding our most vulnerable population demographic off out of millions of dollars and taking these state runs, sometimes federally funded programs and using using the proceeds from that as their own atm machines instead of using that

11:52 money for people who actually need it. And the thing I’ll touch on that which was interesting is those cases, those types of complex case normally take months, if not years to complete, and based on the amount of energy and the amount of resources we’re pushing in that we were able to complete that massive takedown in Minneapolis in

12:12 about four months, which is record time for that type of case.

12:16 Speaker 1 Understood well, Christopher Reya, thank you for everything you do to save our country, help our country, and the FBI is the best law enforcement agency in the world, and thank you for what you do.

12:34 Speaker 2 All right, I appreciate it, John, thanks for having me and always enjoy coming on your show. Thank you.