Good afternoon, everyone. Im peter. I have the privilege of introducing our final speaker for today. The assistant attorney general of the United States who run it is National Security division and for the purpose of this conversation also importantly leads the China Initiative at the department of justice. He has kindly agreed to, were going to speak for probably about 25 minutes and then we will take some questions from the audience. So let me start sir with can you give us an overview of what the chinese have been doing and what youve been doing to counter it over the past since youve been in office . Great. Thanks very much. Thanks for the Homeland Security group for having me and for all of youse who are here watching on line or later on. Thanks for spending some time talking about these issues. On the china said let me say what a shift from the first time i was in the National Security division when we were doing all Counter Terrorism all the time to today where were really in the subject of this part i know is sort of great powers. And that is really our focus these days. In addition i know jay was just here talking about domestic terrorism. Its not like thats gone away. But on the great power side our focuses are as always sort of china, russia, iran, north korea, and with respect to the chinese were seeing a lot of is espionage both political sort of traditional military, espionage as well as economic espionage. And the China Initiative we put together about a yearandahalf ago with attorney general sessions continues today turned attorney general barr is focused on various aspects of chinese maligned behavior but the big emphasis has been economic. And it arose out of the intelligence that we were seeing on a daily basis come out of the finn, the n st. A, the c. I. A. , about the extent of chinese economic espionage here in the United States stealing everything from corn and Rice Technology to the bpa free lining of your water bottle to commercial jet airplane technology. Things you might actually expect them to be stealing. And can you give us a sense of the problem over time . You started the National Security division when it first started. You have Counter Terrorism is the obviously the main focus at the time. President obama did kind of go to the chinese and say knock it off at one point. Was that effective . What has proven effective and what has proven ineffective . Well, changing chinese behavior has proven to be a real challenge for people in every administration who have dealt with this. And i think there was a period and e when the chinese the u. S. Had an understanding ith respect to not doing cyber intrusion activity to steal intellectual property. That appeared for some time perhaps diminished the volume of theft by pure cyber means but these days and even before sort of just the present day what we saw was a real increase in the use of the chinese Intelligence Services. Those initial cases were Chinese Military services doing pure cyber activity. And with a we see these days although we still do see cyber economic espionage out of china we see that really complimented by the use of the Intelligence Services to steal intellectual property. And the end result of that is that we have a lot more Insider Threat cases because Intelligence Services yes they do cyber activity but they also do really well is get information out of people. And thats the trade craft that theyre trained on. And theyre almost information agnostic. They have their tools, skills, experience. And if they want to get a military secret out of you thats what they will use to try to do that. If they want to get an economic secret out of you they will use those same tools and trade crafted. And that is what our cases really reflect is kind of an Insider Threat when it comes to economic espionage. Give us a sense of the scale of the problem. I know the National Security strategy. Talked about hundreds of billions. Right. Do you have a number . I dont have a better number on the Economic Impact than they have. We did have a case go to trial not too long ago which involved the theft of Wind Turbine Technology in which because the case went to trial we did have to quantify the losses to the company. That was just the theft of this one particular piece of software that governed how the Wind Turbines interact with the electric grid. In just that one case the company lost about half of its market value about a billion dollars and about 700 to 800 people lost their job. So these are very real impacts on individual companies and obviously the individual workers and their families who lose their jobs. The mike rn case also seemed significant. That case at least thus far a good news story for us. It was a case where the company came forward and asked for the f. B. I. s help the governments help and cooperated with the government, been very public about that. And it is a case that we use to illustrate the benefits of coming forward and cooperating with the government early. What we were able to do there was charge the case, do the investigation, charge the case sort of comeback to there. But then when we charged the case the Commerce Department put the Chinese Company that had stolen the goods through the use of a joint venture by poaching certain employees, put them on the denied entity list which meant that they cant import the tooling that they need in the u. S. To make the parts that they stole the technology to make. So for us it is of great illustration in talking to the private sector which we do very often to convince them about the benefits of coming forward. Were not just trying to put the thief in jail, which may not help you as a company if in the meantime that other company has stolen your technology and theyre making a product to replace you on the market. But if we catch them early enough we can prevent no harm from occurring. Another example in that line was at the end of last year we arrested a fellow who had stolen what we call the newt rent optimizer which was basically software that helps farmers determine how much and when to water their fields and how to fertilize their fields depending on weather conditions, soil conditions, crops, stole that from mon santo and was bringing it over to china when the company noticed that he had downloaded all of this and we were actually able to stop them at the airport and take the computer that had the software on it. So if we can get involved early enough and that obviously requires the targets to be aware of the fact that theyve been stolen from early enough. But if we can do that then i think we could take great action that is will benefit the target in addition to obviously then pursuing the case against the wrong doer. How do you distinguish theres a lot of Chinese Students doing base basic Scientific Research as graduates. How do you distinguish somebody doing research for his or her own purposes from somebody with nefarious intent . It seems that could be fuzzy. You might end up imprisonning or detaining or arresting somebody here doing research. What we look at are behaviors. Were not looking at what are you here studying and what is your intent . Were not trying to divine your intent. What were looking at is your behaviors. What we see in some cases and this is what we both on the corporate side and academic side, is are people trying to get access to information or places that they really have no business getting access to given what theyre here to do. So if im here to study at lab a with this professor and ive gotten a visa to do that but in fact im over here in lab b or as weve seen im over here at this other school. You know, what are you doing over there . Right . And the same thing in terms of computer access. If i need to be in these data bases to do my jobs but im actually over here and downloading information or sending it to my home computer information thats over here, why am i over here . So thats what we try to focus on and what we tell universities and companies to focus on are those behavioral characteristics. Because then it really doesnt matter why theyre doing it. Right . Regardless of whether it is the person acting to just enrich themselves or the person acting on behalf of china or other nation states youre going to catch them. And thats the right way to do an investigation. If you start with the fact that the person is chinese, not only would that violate the law but secondly its going to be impractical because as you say the vast bulk of students here are just here doing what they should be doing and what they want them what we bant them here doing. Switching to 2020. What is the countries trying to interfere in the process . In the elections, we anticipate that we will be dealing with election influence and interference activities from russia, china, and iran for the most part. What will they look like . There absolutely are differences between them. The russians i think you have plenty of illustrations of what that looks like from 2016 and even continuing to some of the social media activity today. Obviously weve charged about four or five cases involving russian actors and election interference. A couple special Counsel Office me out of nsd proper all those cases are back right now. So i think we will see more of that. We may see well certainly see a lot of kind of social media activity. One of the things that i am concerned about is where the hacking and dumping activity occurred back in 2016. These are better kind of protections for that . Ultimately. And thats the hard part here. Theres been a tremendous amount of work hardning the election infrastructure and i think chris was here earlier today talking about that. When youre talking about somebodys email including sometimes peoples personal email that they use for work especially if theyre doing Campaign Work and their main job is at a law firm or Something Like that and theyre just using their personal email it really is very dependent on their cyber high jean practices. And not clicking on that wrong emp mail and all of that. What the russians did in 2016 in terms of their the means by which they gain access was just spear fishing. It wasnt super sophisticated cyber intrusion activity. It was ill send you an email and see if you click on it. Thats a greater vulnerability. And then email is always a vulnerability because everybody every organization i should say has emails that they would rather not be out there publicly. A lot of that is perfectly legitimate email its just could be you and i talking about the merits or demerits of a particular candidate. But its embarrassing if it gets out and were talking frankly by email. So thats why i say this is a means like its effectively also because tenchmails are real it means i think on the media side its a lot hard tore decide im not going to publish that because its stolen. Thats a very interesting point, which is is the media making a mistake eventually putting out stolen materials . Well, theres members of the media we could ask that question to rather than me. I think but i do think its something that everyone has to be thoughtful about and theres been a lot of discussion in the media about what the right lanes of the road are in terms of that. I think on the chinese side we havent seen that kind of activity. But we are worried about what i would call more foreign influence activities. So we do know that the chinese use their economic power and the availability of markets for instance to convince companies or people to make certain choices or take certain positions. We see that all the time from soccer players in europe to basketball general managers in the u. S. And on and on in terms of the examples. That could also be done in those are sort of the public examples and the public reactions to public comments. That can be done much more quietly. Give us an example. Folks who have business in china or in areas that are controlled by china are vulnerable to economic pressure and those are the same people who may be involved in a variety of ways in election campaigns here in the u. S. So we worry about that in terms of the chinese. On the iranian side not so much on that end. Possibly could look more like the russian piece of it that is using their cyber intrusion capabilities which they have. Well see how that plays out. What about the North Koreans next year . North korean side ts possible. Theyre not in the top three. But. Questions on capacity . Theyre actually quite good in terms of cyber actors. But the question is what are you getting out of it if youre one of these countries. What is your ultimate purpose in undertaking a certain election or interference or influence activities . I think thats a difference too when you look at china and russia. China often has very specific policy objectives that theyre after. Stop talking about hong kong. Stop talking about the uighers. Stop interfering with our desire one day to control taiwan. That are very specific policy objectives. The russian side there may be some of that but a lot of it is just i will take you down. I will weaken you. I will weaken democracy as an alternate and competing vision of organizing society and thrsh i will increase my own sort of power in the world. And so depending on your objectives you are going to behave very differently in terms of your means. Are you sang win about 2020 . You know, i am we are very focused on it. And i think weve come a long way since 2016. I think we had kind of a dry run but in 2018. But certainly congressional off year elections are not as much going to be the focus as obviously a president ial election. So i think 2020 is where we could really be tested. But when i think about how far even just all of us as members of the public have come in terms of our awareness of foreign influence, how far the government has come in terms of its work, its work with social Media Companies and what the social Media Companies are doing on their own. The work obviously with the state and local Election Officials since thats really the way our elections are run here in the u. S. I mean, were just miles ahead of where we were. So that gives me a certain optimism but we need to stay laser focused on this through november. What are you communicating to the state and local authorities and how does that work . So that is mainly not a main justice issue. Its d. H. S. And f. B. I. So with the state and locals a lot its been about strengthening their election fralks by which i mean Voter Registration systems and the election system itself. Having resiliency in those systems. So if for instance youve got a ransom ware attack on a Voter Registration system on the day before an election do you have a backup system thats off line that you could then use on the day of the election . Paper ballot backups have been the subject of a lot of conversation. Thats a great example of heres what were seeing and sharing intelligence with them and heres how you can improve your networks and all of that. It is the fact obviously that we have a federalist system of state and local of elections run by the state and locals. We cant just dictate a lot of things. It is a process of Getting Better together at with a were doing. Switching gears a little bit. You mentioned some of these indictments that you speak through departments. The Department Speaks through indictments. I was fascinated by the fact that you indicted some Russian Military officers for hunting around in the chemical weapons and also in the antidoping area. Talk to us about those indictments and what they mean and what you hope to achieve. Theyre not going to be coming to disney land tomorrow. Right. So why do you do those things and what were these particular military officers doing . Starting with the more general questions. Why do we sometimes indict individuals who we have very little chance of ever catching. Of here are a variety reasons. Thinking about the russian 2016 example one of the purposes is to educate. So we do speak through indictments. We want to be able to show what we can do in terms of attrition. One of the things the chinese will say that theyve been involved. Well attributetion is impossible. Who knows if you even got this right. We say we know because we dont indict nation states and we dont indict the gru. We indict individuals. And we have their faces and their names up next to us when we announce the indictment. What were showing you is we can do attributes so well we can tie it back to an slidge behind the keyboard at this time on this day. The second point is education in terms of the general public. And that is i believe that indictments have a unique ability and our legal system and our political system and a unique credibility in terms of the government speaking because im not up here speaking like this when i speak to an indictment and i am not telling you look ive read all the intelligence and trust me heres what it says. Right . When i put something in an indictment im telling you i can stand up tomorrow in court in front of 12 people who dont know anything about this and convince them of this fact beyond a reasonable doubt using only unclassified admissible evidence. So i think thats a uniquely powerful way that we have of speaking as a government and of course as the justice department. So when we lay out for instance what we laid out in the indictment you cited which is about russian hacking of the World Antidoping Agency and also of the agency involved that was testing the poisons used to poison scripple in the u. K. , what were saying is this is very much what occurred. Now, whats interesting about the case that you mentioned it sometimes gets a little lost because of the focus on the election side of things with the russians is in you remember the russians have been banned from the olympics because they had a program to dope their athletes. This is very embarrassing to them as a country. So what they did basically was go after the World Antidoping Agency to pull the medical records of many athletes from around the world and post all of those publicly to show that there are other athletes around the world taking medications. But of course without any context for whatever their medical reason force taking medications would have been. But if you think about it, what case does this remind you of . It reminds you of going into e dccc and dnc emails and posting those on line. So that technique what i think is a good illustration is that this is something its not like the russians did this once in 2016 and they didnt do it before and theyre never going to do it again because what a unique time seff was. No, this is consistent with a pat sh of behavior and they will continue to do this in these election contexts but in the other contexts too. Theyre either trying to get revenge or embarrass or muddy the narrative and say well you also do this. You didnt punish them which means yours is only political in nature. The same thing they were attempting to do with respect to that chemical testing laboratory. Oh you tested that poison, you said this was a poison that only the russians use in these kinds of means. Im going after your scientists and your records and embarrass you for doing that. And its not unlike what we saw the North Koreans do with sony. So this is a common technique of lets say totalitarian governments to try to delegitimize anyone who has said something that stands in opposition to what their goals or or just embarrass them in the antidoping situation. The other thing interesting is not just didnt just have the remote computer access the way we did in the u. S. Cases. You actually have these teams, these close access teams who were sent. If you cant break into your system remotely, well, maybe i can break in through your wifi. But to do that ive got to be outside this building. So when they were caught trunk open equipment in the trunk, which was meant to break into the wifi of that entity and they did of some hotels where various folks who were involved in the antidoping organizations were staying in order to then take the records off their computers. So other than making me er day paranoid about using my computer and my phone, these are good illustrations of the kinds of behaviors i think we have to watch out for in the future. Thank you very much. We have ten minutes left. I want to make sure we get uestions in. Thank you for your remarks. The pensacola case was the latest high profile example of the f. B. I. Being locked out of a shooters i phone and just this week attorney general barr turned up the pressure challenging the company to help the f. B. I. Gain access and the company argues that doing so would weaken security for all the phone users. So what, are you prepared to take the next step . Will you seek legislation to require companies to build in access for Law Enforcement when they have a wasnt . And if so what would that legislation look like . So i dont know that i would commint on sort of how far along we are. Whether or not to seek legislation. I will say and if you look at the december hearing on the senate side ive never seen the atmosphere here in d. C. To be so conducive to passing sosme kind of some kind of encryption legislation or lawful access legislation as it is today. The point that the attorney general is trying to make is the decision whether the government should have access to communications on a phone should be one that the people make through their representatives in congress and not one that the Company Makes on its own. And i think that was very much to the undertone of the comments and the questions at that Committee Hearing this past december. So again i think the ground is as fertile as its ever been for lawful access legislation but well see where this dialogue goes. We would still like to find some kind of solution with the companys cooperation. But weve been trying that for many, many years and so far that hasnt happened. So well see what the next step is. Just to follow up. One of the most Successful Companies in the world is apple. Why would it choose to sabotage its economic model by doing this . Its quite understandable. It seems this is a moveable contest. Well if it were the only company that had to do this that would be one thing. If this becomes the norm of the industry then it is not sacrificing itself in a way that other kches dont also have to change theirs. Respectfully, wouldnt the bad guys just migrate to German Companies or something that was outside american purview . You know, they might over time. But what we see in our cases is frankly regardless these days of theres still a great unevens in in terms of encryption. And what we see in some ways bad guys behavior is not that different from our own. They still use the most commonly available means of communicating. They still use now theres some very sophisticated actors who purposely do migrate to encrypted comes and all that. Theres no question about that. But a lot of people whether its through sort of just you fall back into your old habits and routines or whatever it is, they will use those most commonly used apps also because theyre not just communicating with each other theyre communicating with the wider world. So im not saying that that would never happen. But i think that would still vastly improve our ability to see whether its terrorist intentions or the intentions of child exploiters and the like. So look this is an issue obviously thats been there for some time. I can only speak to it from a Law Enforcement perspective which is to say i see the impact of this issue er day in our investigations. Both on the terrorism side, the intelligence side and those are the areas that im responsible for other people see them in Child Exploitation and other cases. So for me the problem is real. Obviously then that leaves open the question of solutions. The gentleman over here and the lady in front of him. As youre probably well aware the last few weeks theres been an Unidentified Group calling itself called intrusion Truth Publishing information alleged to be identifying chinese hacking. Oup known as abt 40 in china leaks of personnel reportedly to be associated with that group and other details. Im wondering what youve learned from those disclosures and how that might complicate first how you might use that information to build a future potential Law Enforcement action and how those kinds of unidentified leaks also complicated the process that you have. I should really not comment on that. Excellent question, but. Ok. Weve been doing Due Diligence and Risk Management in china since the early 1990s and have been working in china since the 1980s. I want to ask you a question about those pesky Chinese Foreign students that are here that many of them are legitimate as you said but our Research Shows that at least at a minimum 40 of the Chinese Students who come to the United States are either members of the communist party or are at least a minimum have taken membership in the communist youth league. That means that they have taken the oath and the oath is a very serious one to defend their homeland and protect their homeland and so we have to wonder if theres an agenda for coming to the United States. And im wondering you rightly said we cannot target people based on their nationality. Understood. But can we target them if we believe they are foreign agents . The way that works is the i think weve got it above the government and therefore the government answers to the party. Thank you very much. I mean, yes. We can target individuals who we have reason to believe are foreign agents. Their membership in the commine knees communist party may not be Chinese Communist party y itself may not be enough to. But what the things we worry about and membership in the Chinese Communist party can be an indicator obviously of intent but the fact is any Chinese Student whose here regardless of whether theyre a member of the party is also susceptible to pressure from the Chinese Government when theyre here. Some of it can be unspoken or whispered economic pressures like youre in the u. S. Im sure you would love to have a good job when you come back. Others can be stronger youre in the u. S. But you know who is still in china . Your mom, your dad, not too many siblings. Your aunts, uncles. So the point is i think we worry about that kind of behavioral pressure a great deal and we see it in some cases. So as i said, membership in a party may be an indicator but there are other ways the chinese have been more forceful in getting folks who are here some who came here not planning on doing anything but ended up doing things. A question on this side. Go back to the case you mentioned earlier about the wind turbine software. What was the motivation for that . What extent are people just its intellectual espionage for financial gain versus its intellectual espionage to strengthen the chinese how much of this is directed prurelly and how much is directed by the got . I dont know that i would accept that in china theres as much of a distinction as maybe the question assumes. What we see in china so there it was and ive described this aspect of their Economic Strategy as rob replicate and replace. That is an aspect. There are individual chinese individuals and companies who will prosper as a result of that strategy but that is an aspect of the made in china 2025 plan, which is a Chinese Communist party plan and obviously its a very authoritarian top down government so things get planned at the top and then those plans have to get implemented all the way through. The goal in the made in china 2025 plan is for china to be a dominant player in the industry in these ten technological areas, everything from agriculture to commercial jet engines to Artificial Intelligence and so on. Of course every one of those is not one technology, its thousands of technologies. Achieving ns for that goal sometimes are legitimate research and development and investment on the part of the chinese state. That is fine. But other times are theft. Some of it we see directed by the chinese Intelligence Services. So a number of our cases actually allege that a Chinese Intelligence Service was involved. For instance over the past year or so three of our commercial airplane engine cases involve involvement of the chinese Intelligence Services and others are we dont allege state involvement but the state has still set up an eco system which is ultimately responsible for the kind of theft that we see. We want to thank the assistant attorney general very much for keeping the nation safe, more of those responsible jobs in the federal government. Nd please join me in demrating him. [applause] we look forward to continuing conversations and elevate them. Thank you for engaging with us. We look forward to further conversations. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2019] this body this chamber exists precisely so we can look past the daily dramas and understand how our actions will reverberate for generations. So that we can put aside animal reflexes and animosities and cooly consider how to best serve our country in the long run. So that we can break factional fevers before they jeopardize the core institutions of our government. Has hamilton put it only the senate with confidence enough in its own situation can preserve unahed and uninfluenced the necessary impartiality between an individual accused and the representatives of the people his accusers. So the houses hour is over. The senates time is at hand. It is time for this proud body to honor our founding purpose. Here is what Alexander Hamilton warned of in federalist 65. He said the greatest danger is that a decision in an impeachment trial will be regulated more by the comparative strength of the parties than by the real demonstration of innocence of guilt. Alexander hamilton even before the day Political Parties were as strong as they are today wanted us to come together. The leader wants to do things on his own without any democratic input. But, fortunately, we have the right to demand votes and to work hard as we can for a fair trial. A fill trial. A trial with witnesses. A trial with documents. The founders anticipated that impeachment trials would always be buffeted by the wind of politics but they gave the power to the Senate Anyway because they believed the chamber was the only place where impartial justice of the president could truly be sought. In the coming days these eventful and important coming days each of us, each of us will face a choice about whether to begin this trial in a search of the truth or in the service of the president s desire to cover up and rush things through. For the third time in history a president is on trial in the u. S. Senate. Watch live tuesday when the trial resumes at 1 00 eastern on cspan 2. House majority leader joins an event marking the