Attorney General Merrick Garland said Tuesday that he has been “worried” about the prospect of a terrorist attack on American soil since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.
“I am worried about the possibility of a terrorist attack in the country after October 7,” Garland told the House Judiciary Committee in a hearing geared toward oversight of the Department of Justice. “The threat level has gone up enormously. Every morning, we worry about this question. We try to track anyone who might be trying to hurt the country.”
Garland added that preventing such an attack is “a major priority for the Justice Department.”
The Attorney General had previously addressed threats of violence in the wake of October 7.
“The entire Justice Department remains vigilant in our efforts to identify and respond to hate crimes, threats of violence, or related incidents, with particular attention to threats to faith communities,” he said at an October press conference.
Garland is not the only member of the U.S. intelligence community to make such a pronouncement about the threat of terrorism on American soil.
In December, Federal Bureau of Investigation director Christopher Wray told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs that terror threats had been reaching record levels.
Wray said during that hearing that he had “never seen a time where all the threats or so many of the threats are elevated, all at exactly the same time.” When Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) asked whether he saw “blinking red lights” of the sort that popped up before 9/11, Wray replied, “I see blinking lights everywhere I turn.”
“Given the steady drumbeat of calls for attacks by foreign terrorist organizations since October 7, we’re working around the clock to identify and disrupt potential attacks by those inspired by Hamas’s horrific terrorist attacks in Israel,” Wray told the committee.
In an April interview, Wray told NBC News’s Lester Holt reiterated that the FBI has paid close attention to potential terrorist threats against the U.S.
“We are increasingly concerned [about] the potential for some kind of coordinated attack here in the homeland,” Wray said.