FBI Director Kash Patel dropped a bombshell Friday: the Bureau has evidence that the Biden-era FBI buried critical intelligence connecting an illegal Chinese biolab discovered on American soil in 2023 to the Chinese Communist Party. And the revelation comes just days after the FBI and local police raided a second makeshift biolab — this one operating out of a garage in Las Vegas — tied to the same Chinese national behind the first.
Patel, appearing on the Just the News, No Noise television show, laid out a sweeping counterintelligence picture that should alarm every American: a 40% increase in Chinese espionage arrests in the first year of the second Trump administration, over 1,000 samples collected from the Las Vegas lab now awaiting FBI analysis, and a pattern of CCP-linked biological activity that the prior administration apparently had no interest in pursuing.
The Las Vegas raid over the weekend netted Ori Salomon, the property manager of the home where the lab was found. But the deeper story connects that garage lab to Jia Bei Zhu, the same Chinese national arrested in 2023 for allegedly running an illegal biolab in Reedley, California. According to court filings, police officials, and members of Congress, the two labs are closely connected, as Just The News reports.
Zhu isn't some rogue scientist. A 2023 House Select Committee report on the CCP detailed his background: Vice Chairman of a PRC state-controlled enterprise, Chairman of a Chinese company whose directors included an executive for a PRC defense firm, and the recipient of more than one million dollars in unexplained wire transfers from PRC banks. Before arriving in the United States, he allegedly stole American intellectual property while in Canada and transferred it to the PRC. Once stateside, he and his associates allegedly purchased counterfeit test kits from China and resold them as "Made in the USA."
This is not a story about a freelance chemist in a garage. This is a story about CCP-linked operatives establishing biological laboratories on American soil — and the U.S. government looking the other way.
When the Reedley biolab was discovered in 2023, local code enforcement officer Jesalyn Harper did what you'd expect a responsible public servant to do — she referred the matter to the FBI. The Bureau's response was considerably less responsible. According to the House Select Committee's report, approximately two months later, the FBI informed Harper that it had closed its investigation:
"The Bureau believed that there were no weapons of mass destruction on the property."
Case closed. Nothing to see here. A CCP-connected operative running an unlicensed biolab with unexplained foreign funding, and the FBI packed up because they didn't find a nuclear warhead in the back room.
Patel didn't mince words about what he found when he took over the Bureau:
"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."
He went further, naming his predecessor directly:
"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. We're just awaiting the lab results, and we're going to keep going."
The House committee was equally blunt about other federal agencies. The CDC's response to the Reedley discovery was, in the committee's words, "inadequate and raises serious questions about its standard practices." The committee's bottom-line assessment deserves to be read in full:
"At a minimum, the Reedley Biolab shows the profound threat that unlicensed and unknown biolabs pose to our country. At worst, this investigation revealed significant gaps in our nation's defenses and pathogen-related regulations that present a grave national security risk that could be exploited in the future."
It was exploited. A second lab turned up in Las Vegas.
Understanding how America ended up with CCP-linked biolabs in its garages requires understanding what the Biden administration dismantled. The China Initiative — the FBI's primary counterintelligence effort against Chinese security threats in academia and beyond — was shut down. Patel framed the consequences in stark terms:
"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?"
The answer, of course, is an administration more worried about appearing xenophobic than about protecting the homeland. The academic establishment howled about the China Initiative, claiming it unfairly targeted Chinese researchers. The Biden team obliged. And while America's counterintelligence posture softened, the CCP's operations did not.
President Trump reversed course immediately. Patel described the directive as straightforward:
"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 speak for themselves — a 40% increase in Chinese espionage arrests in a single year.
The biolabs are only one front. The infiltration runs through America's most prestigious research institutions. Patel pointed to the University of Michigan, where the FBI arrested researchers who smuggled biological pathogens into the country:
"Just last year in Michigan, we arrested three individual researchers at the University of Michigan who were trying — not trying, did — import illegally biohazardous materials and pathogens into the United States of America to not only destroy our ability to successfully have scientific labs that are pro-America, but also attack our agricultural and bioseed industry."
The details of those cases paint a chilling picture:
A long string. Not an isolated incident. A pattern.
The American Accountability Foundation found that at least 20 Chinese scientists embedded in American academia and cutting-edge U.S. labs appear to be CCP members, affiliated with Chinese projects aimed at stealing U.S. technology, or involved with universities or companies tied to the People's Liberation Army and Beijing's defense sector.
NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya offered the broader context — and the broader indictment of Washington's decades-long approach to Chinese scientific engagement:
"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. You know, there are stories of foreign influence in universities going back now a couple of decades."
America funded the rise of a rival power's biomedical enterprise and then acted surprised when that rival exploited the access. Bhattacharya described the threat from unauthorized labs in equally plain terms:
"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."
The NIH has begun to act. Last May, the agency announced a new award structure prohibiting foreign subawards from being nested under parent grants — including awards involving Chinese entities. The agency acknowledged what should have been obvious years ago: the "lack of transparency" in NIH-backed research is particularly concerning in the case of foreign subawards, in which the United States government has a need to maintain national security."
The FBI is waiting on lab results from over 1,000 samples collected in Las Vegas. Patel promised full public disclosure once those results return — and a conversation with Congress that won't be diplomatic:
"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."
Jia Bei Zhu awaits trial on charges of fraud, false statements, and adulteration of medical devices. The full scope of his operation — stretching from PRC state enterprises to Canadian IP theft to counterfeit medical devices to at least two illegal biolabs on U.S. soil — still isn't fully mapped.
For four years, the federal government's posture toward CCP infiltration was to look away, shut down the investigative apparatus designed to catch it, and reassure the public that there was nothing to worry about. A local code enforcement officer in Reedley, California, saw what the FBI chose not to. She flagged it. The Bureau closed the case in two months.
Now there's a second lab, a thousand samples in an FBI forensics queue, and a growing roster of Chinese nationals charged with smuggling biological weapons-grade pathogens into the country through America's own universities. The Biden-era FBI didn't miss this. They walked away from it.
