FBI Investigating CCP-Linked Land Buys in the US

uh director Ray with regard to PR the PRC and uh some recent public reports of uh significant egg land purchases um if these land purchases are accurate they may very well pose uh a threat to not only some military installations but most certainly involved in food production that that uh takes away from our ability to produce for our own country as well but just curious about whether or not you are aware could confirm land purchases by Chinese nationalists within the United States and are you following them at this time so uh this is an issue that we're focused on a lot lately um I think what I would say is we're investigating a number of instances proactively where we're seeing uh either commercial real estate or land being purchased by those with ties to the PRC uh near critical infrastructure and I want to be clear of course foreign purchase of land including Chinese purchase of land is not itself inherently illegal the the problem is the risk uh and as has been discussed much here already in a different context uh the hold that the Chinese government and the CCP have over its businesses in particular um and so we're particularly concerned about situations where a purchase of land near a military installation critical infrastructure something like that could be leveraged to enable anything from Espionage data collection or or Worse do you know if if the tools that we have in place today are are strong enough or capable of stopping these purchases from moving forward well I mean certainly a lot of types of of transaction you know go through the cfus process but I'm not clear on whether or not that fully extends to all the kind of land purchase situations that we're concerned about um we are working with uh through the cfus process when that applies we're working with the USDA to try to work towards maybe some kind of mandatory reporting regime uh you know that might uh apply so I think there is room for uh plugging gaps that may exist