Seven hundred and fifteen. That's the number of planned terror attacks the FBI foiled on American soil last year, according to FBI Director Kash Patel. In December alone, agents shut down four separate plots in thirty days — attacks targeting Southern California, Texas, Florida, and New York.
Nobody in legacy media led with that number.
Patel sat down with Epoch Times senior editor Jan Jekielek for an interview set to air August 8, and the details he shared had never been publicly reported. The 715 figure represents disrupted plots tied to ISIS and other terrorist-affiliated organizations — not vague "intelligence leads" or "persons of interest," but operational plans to kill Americans on American soil.
"Before these individuals, who wanted to disrupt America's holidays last year, literally, and kill dozens, if not hundreds, of people, and cause a mass casualty event, we went in and took them all down," Patel said.
The December plots alone paint a picture. Four attacks across four states in thirty days, all targeting places of worship, schools, and businesses. On January 2, the bureau announced the arrest of an 18-year-old in North Carolina who'd been planning an ISIS-inspired attack on a grocery store and a fast-food restaurant on New Year's Eve. The kid told an undercover agent he wanted to "do jihad soon."
Then there was the Halloween plot. Suspects arrested in New Jersey, Washington state, and Michigan had been planning attacks on an amusement park near Dearborn, Michigan and LGBT-friendly venues in Detroit. And the White House UFC event on June 16 — multiple suspects arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit murder. The ringleader turned out to be a Mexican illegal immigrant enrolled in the DACA program.
Patel credited the results to having actual backing from the administration. "It's because we were resourced and backed by the White House and the administration to get these sort of achievements," he said. He described the operational philosophy as patience — "We want to go out at the right time to dismantle the entire criminal enterprise, not just a couple of them. So it's a balance."
The suspects from the December plots are, in Patel's words, "on their way to federal prison for a very long time."
Worth remembering what the FBI was doing three years ago. Categorizing parents at school board meetings as domestic threats. Sending SWAT teams to arrest pro-life activists at dawn. Running a Baltimore field office that spent more resources tracking social media grandmothers than the guy in North Carolina who wanted to shoot up a grocery store for ISIS.
Senators Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Tom Cotton of Arkansas, along with Representative Carol Miller of West Virginia, have publicly backed Patel's refocused bureau. The support tracks — when you stop treating half the country as the enemy, it frees up remarkable bandwidth to find the people who actually want to "jump-start" a revolution in the United States.