Speaking at one of America’s leading public universities, FBI Director Christopher Wray offered a full-throated defense Friday of the Justice Department’s efforts to investigate and prosecute academic fraud linked to China, saying that there is no “more serious, more persistent threat to our innovation, our ideas and our economic security than the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government.”
Wray’s stark description of what he views as a top national security threat from China was not new, but the context was notable. Speaking to students and professors at the University of Michigan, he was answering pointed questions by a Chinese American political scientist, who asked him about a series of cases under the Justice Department’s now-abandoned “China Initiative” that had collapsed in court.
