FBI Director Kash Patel dropped a serious charge Friday: the Biden-era Bureau deliberately shut down its investigation into a Chinese Communist Party-linked illegal biolab on American soil — and told the public it had no connection to Beijing.
Patel, appearing on the Just the News, No Noise television show alongside NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, said his agency has not only reopened the book on CCP-tied biological threats but dramatically escalated the fight. The numbers back him up — Chinese espionage arrests surged 40% in the first year of the second Trump administration.
And the evidence keeps arriving. Last Saturday, FBI agents and Las Vegas Metropolitan Police raided a home in Las Vegas, Nevada, seizing over 1,000 samples of unknown biological material now headed to the FBI crime lab.
The home's property manager, Ori Salomon, was arrested on the spot. The property is owned by Jia Bei Zhu — the same Chinese national arrested in 2023 for operating an illegal biolab in Reedley, California, where authorities discovered approximately 1,000 transgenic mice used in disease research.
Police and lawmakers say the two labs are closely connected. The picture forming is not one of isolated incidents. It's a pattern.
The Reedley biolab should have been a five-alarm national security event. When local code enforcement officer Jesalyn Harper discovered it in 2023, she referred the matter to Fresno County and the FBI. The Bureau's response was to open an investigation — and then quietly close it roughly two months later, informing Harper that it believed there were no weapons of mass destruction on the property.
Case closed. Move along.
Except the House Select Committee on the CCP wasn't satisfied. Its 2023 report painted a starkly different picture of Zhu. He had served as Vice Chairman of a PRC state-controlled enterprise tied to a company involved in military-civil fusion for the PRC.
He had chaired another Chinese company whose directors included an executive for a PRC defense firm. He was accused of stealing American intellectual property and transferring it to the PRC while in Canada, purchasing counterfeit test kits from the PRC and reselling them in the U.S. as "Made in the USA," and receiving more than one million dollars in unexplained wire transfers from PRC banks.
The committee also found that an associate identified only as "Accountant 1" had incorporated and performed work for organizations linked to CCP leadership and the United Front Work Department — Beijing's primary overseas influence apparatus.
The committee's conclusion was blunt: the CDC's response was inadequate, and the Reedley biolab at minimum exposed profound gaps in America's defenses against unlicensed biolabs — gaps that "present a grave national security risk that could be exploited in the future."
None of this stopped the Biden FBI from walking away.
Patel wasn't diplomatic about it:
"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."
Zhu currently awaits trial on charges of fraud, false statements, and adulteration of medical devices. His legal exposure may be about to get a lot wider.
The Saturday raid in Las Vegas marks the next chapter. Patel made clear the FBI had intelligence ahead of the operation and coordinated with state authorities to execute the search warrants:
"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 1,000 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."
Lab results are still pending. Patel pledged to go public with the findings and take them directly to Congress — along with a pointed message that the intelligence summaries lawmakers received under the prior administration were, in his words, "dead wrong."
"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."
That's not the language of a man expecting the lab results to be benign.
Understanding how two illegal biolabs tied to a CCP-connected operative could exist on American soil requires understanding what the Biden administration dismantled. The China Initiative — the FBI's primary counterintelligence effort to detect Chinese security threats inside American academia — was shut down under Biden. Patel said the decision led to an explosion of CCP activities on U.S. soil.
His assessment of that choice was unsparing:
"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 of going "all in" extend well beyond biolabs. At the University of Michigan, the DOJ charged Chinese nationals Yunqing Jian and Zunyong Liu in June with conspiracy, smuggling, false statements, and visa fraud. The bureau had arrested Jian in connection with smuggling a fungus called Fusarium graminearum into the United States — a pathogen that scientific literature classifies as a potential agroterrorism weapon. Jian pleaded guilty in November to smuggling a biological pathogen and lying to FBI agents.
In September, another Chinese national, Chengxuan Han, pleaded guilty to three smuggling charges and making false statements to Customs and Border Protection. According to the DOJ, Han had sent multiple packages from the PRC to the United States containing concealed biological material addressed to individuals associated with a University of Michigan laboratory. Three additional Chinese scholars were charged in November with conspiracy to smuggle biological materials and making false statements to CBP.
That's not a coincidence. That's an operation.
The threat doesn't end at clandestine labs and smuggled pathogens. The conservative American Accountability Foundation has identified at least 20 Chinese scientists of concern — CCP members, individuals affiliated with Chinese intellectual property theft projects, or those tied to the PLA and defense sector — still embedded inside American academia and U.S. labs.
NIH Director Bhattacharya acknowledged the scope of the problem with unusual candor:
"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."
Let that sink in. American taxpayer dollars built the very biomedical infrastructure that Beijing now leverages against us.
Bhattacharya noted the Trump administration has taken concrete steps, pointing to the NIH's May 2025 announcement of a new award structure that prohibits foreign subawards from being nested under parent grants. The NIH will no longer issue awards to entities that include subawards to foreign entities, including those in China.
On the biolabs themselves, Bhattacharya was alarmed by how easily they escaped 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."
Patel's posture is clear: this FBI treats the CCP as the primary threat and intends to act accordingly — in academia, in American labs, and in the quiet residential neighborhoods where illegal biolabs apparently flourish unnoticed.
"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 will tell part of the story. Congressional hearings will likely tell more. But the most damning chapter may already be written: a local code enforcement officer in a small California town found what the FBI could not — or would not — and the most powerful law enforcement agency in the world simply closed the file.
