Attorney General Merrick Garland made the astonishing admission while testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday during a hearing dedicated to investigating the department's politicization.
'I am worried about the possibility of a terrorist attack in the country after October 7,' Attorney General Garland said. 'The threat level for us has gone up enormously.'
'Every morning, we worry about this question. We try to track anyone who might be trying to hurt the country,' he continued. 'Of course, this is a major priority for the Justice Department.'
FBI Director Christopher Wray, speaking to a different committee on the other side of Capitol Hill in the Senate, agreed, saying 'we have seen the threat from foreign terrorists rise to a whole other level' after the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack.
We have seen a rouges' gallery of foreign terrorist organizations call for attacks against Americans and our allies,' Wray said.
'Just in the time I have been FBI director we have disrupted multiple terror attacks around U.S. cities.'
'I would be hard pressed to think of a time when so many different threats to our public safety and national security were so elevated all at the same time.'
Wray said threats against Jewish Americans has been particularly acute.
'We've seen an elevated threat to the Jewish community in the United States.'
Though he said Jewish communities were targeted before the October 7 attack, since then the threats 'went up dramatically.'
'Religiously motivated hate crimes, close to 60 percent of them, are targeted at the Jewish community,' Wray testified, noting how the community only makes up two percent of the U.S. population.
'Increasingly concerning is the potential for a coordinated attack here in the homeland, not unlike an attack we saw in the Russia theater.'
One vector for threats to enter the country is through the U.S.-Mexico border, according to the FBI chief.
'Individuals who when they come in are armed with fake documents or snuck in some way or individuals of whom there's not enough derogatory information in the intelligence community to watchlist them,' have been of particular concern, Wray testified.
'As we have less collection overseas against foreign terrorism, there's less sources of information' to denote which individuals entering the U.S. are threats, the FBI director said.
Though there have been numerous reports of known terrorists entering the country illegally through the southern border, non-watchlisted suspects, on which there is scant intelligence, also pose a great concern, Wray told the senators.
These individuals pose a threat because once in the interior they are difficult to track - and then it may take take an FBI terrorist task force response to regain surveillance on such people.
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Additionally, he said the threat from fentanyl smuggling has increased, adding that there have been individual seizures of the drug that could 'wipe out an entire state.'
One of those FBI raids in New Mexico found enough fentanyl to kill every person in the state 'along with hand grenades, ballistic vests, you know, the whole nine yards.'
And the fentanyl problem is tied to the other side of the border, Wray said, referencing Mexico.
