Chairman Grassley, Ranking Member Durbin, and members of the Judiciary Committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear today. I must start with a word of prayer for the tragic accident that befell our nation last night where we lost civilians and service members. I pray for their families, I pray for law enforcement and military personnel, and I pray for their souls and hopefully God will find them peace in the near future. I'd like to welcome my father Pramod and my mother Anjana, who are sitting here today. They traveled here to get here from India. My sister is also here, Nisha. She also traversed the oceans just to be with me here today. It means the world that you guys are here, Jesse Grosnow. I wouldn't be here today without their guidance, their unwavering support, and their relentless love. When President Trump informed me of his intention to nominate me as a director of the FBI, I was deeply honored. Sitting here today, I carry not only the dreams of my parents, but also the hopes of millions of Americans who stand for justice, fairness, and the rule of law. My commitment to these principles is deeply rooted in my family's history, which has profoundly shaped my worldview. My father fled. Idia means genocidal dictatorship in Uganda, where 300,000 men, women, and children were killed based on their ethnicity just because they happen to look like me. My mother is originally from Tanzania. She studied in India, as did my dad, and they were married there. They would later emigrate to New York, as the senator pointed out, where I was born, and we were raised in a household of my father's seven siblings, their spouses, and at least half a dozen children. That's the only way we knew how to do things at the time in the 70s and 80s, the Indian way. But we would soon learn the American way. These values have shaped and been the driving force of my career in 16 years of government service. Protecting the rights of the Constitution is of the utmost importance to me and has been every single time I've taken that oath of office. The recent terrorist attacks in New Orleans tragically claimed the lives of 14 Americans and serve as a stark reminder that our national security is at threat, both internally and externally. The FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Justice, where I served, play a pivotal role in securing our freedoms and our safeties for American citizens. If confirmed as the next FBI director, I will remain focused on the FBI's core mission. That is to investigate fully wherever there is a constitutional factual basis to do so, and to never make a prosecutorial decision that is solely the providence of the Department of Justice and the Attorney General. For the first eight years after law school, I served as a public defender, first for Miami-Dade County and later for the Southern District of Florida. During that time I represented some pretty awful human beings charged with some pretty heinous crimes. But what I learned there was the core value that has been enshrined in me since, that due process must be provided without bias to all Americans, and if we cannot provide due process to the worst, then there can be no due process for anyone, and our constitutional Republic fails. But I battled on that hill for that due process. I would later serve in the Obama Justice Department as a terrorism prosecutor in the National Security Division, where we successfully contributed the prosecutions of terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabaab, and others. I was honored to receive the 2017 Assistant Attorney General's Award from Loretta Lynch for my work in helping the Ugandans bring members of Al-Shabaab to justice for murdering 74 innocent people, including an American. I would also receive the Human Intelligence Award from the intelligence community for related work on that mission. My experiences at the National Security Division would later be followed by my experiences on the National Security Council as Senior Director for Counterterrorism, and later as a Deputy Director of National Intelligence responsible for the production, creation, and promulgation of the Presidential Daily Briefing, our nation's most sensitive classified information, and secrets to protect our country. My time in the White House was preceded by a time right here in Congress as a staffer on the House Intelligence Committee, where I spearheaded the investigation that exposed serious FISA, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuses by members of the Department of Justice in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That misconduct eroded the public trust in our FBI. The erosion of trust, as Chairman Grassi pointed out, is all too low today. 40% of Americans have trust in the FBI. In order to get it back, there's a two-fold track, Senator. One, violent crime is exploding in this country, and we cannot afford them to allow it to run away. We must tackle violent crime. Just in 2023 alone, there was 100,000 rapes, 100,000 drug overdoses, and 17,000 homicides. The priority of the FBI, if I'm confirmed, will be to ensure that our communities are protected and safeguarded and our children have parks to play in, and not needles to walk over. The way we do this, we let good cops be cops. We let law enforcement, and we provide them with the tools necessary and resources they need to get after violent crime. The second way we do this on equal track is aggressive constitutional oversight from Congress. The public trust can only be restored if there is full transparency, and I am committed to that full transparency. Members of Congress have unfortunately submitted hundreds of questions that have been unanswered by the FBI in recent times. That will not occur if I am confirmed. All appropriate requests for information will be responded to expeditiously and fully. I'm committed to working alongside the dedicated men and women of the FBI. They are warriors of justice, and I will always have their backs because they have the backs of the American people. I look forward to answering your questions, and I want to take a moment to thank my family, my friends, people who traveled here, and my entire team that has made this day possible. God bless America, and I look forward to your questions.
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