← Stay Tuned with Preet
Stay Tuned with Preet
Today’s Terrorism Threats: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (with Rebecca Weiner)
00:58:39
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- [00:00]
Preet Bharara
From CAFE and the Vox Media podcast network. Welcome to Stay Tuned. I'm Preet Bharara.
- [00:09]
Rebecca Weiner
All this multiplicity of agencies out there need to be operating on the same sheet of music and the Iran war breaks out and we have our officers overseas briefing our police commissioner in real time on what's happening. There's plenty of Twitter videos out there, but having trusted information about what we might expect to see in the city based on what's happening overseas, incredibly important for us.
- [00:37]
Preet Bharara
Welcome to Stay Tuned. I'm Preet Bharara. My guest this week is Rebecca Weiner. She's Deputy Commissioner of Counterterrorism and Intelligence at the New York City Police Department, where she has served for over 20 years. She's a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. That's coming up. Stay tuned.
- [01:05]
Rebecca Weiner
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- [01:32]
Preet Bharara
Learn more@adobe.com do that with Acrobat this message comes from Betterment. Betterment's Dan Egan talks about tax loss harvesting.
- [01:40]
Rebecca Weiner
Tax loss harvesting is a tax management strategy.
- [01:44]
Preet Bharara
When you have a position that's gone
- [01:46]
Rebecca Weiner
down over time, we intentionally sell out of it to realize a loss, which we then say to the irs, hey, we lost money.
- [01:53]
Preet Bharara
You get to use that to offset
- [01:54]
Rebecca Weiner
your ordinary income every year, decreasing your tax burden.
- [01:57]
Preet Bharara
Investing involves risk performance, not guaranteed. Betterment does not offer tax advice. TLH may not be suitable for all customers. Learn more at betterment.com TLH-terms Heads up folks. Stay Tuned is going live. I'll be speaking with my friend and colleague Barb McQuaid at the 92nd Street Y in New York City on Sunday, May 31. About her new book, the Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob Style Government. To get in person or virtual tickets, head to cafe.com Barb that's cafe.com Barb. Hope to see you there. How does the NYPD measure risk to keep people safe? Deputy Commissioner Rebecca Weiner explains. Rebecca Weiner, welcome to the show. So good to have you.
- [02:52]
Rebecca Weiner
Thanks for having me.
- [02:54]
Preet Bharara
So I, I always feel bad taking people away for an hour from their day jobs. In this case More so than than usual, given the day job you have. I will tell you that when I was in law enforcement and I would run into or have a meeting with one of your predecessors or the head of the Joint Terrorism Task Force or people who are responsible for the kinds of things you are responsible for, I would say to them, not hello, how you doing? I would say, okay, are we going to die? How are we doing? It's my cheeky way of asking, what is the threat level? Are you concerned? What's keeping you up? And is it worse or the same as usual?
- [03:35]
Rebecca Weiner
It is very elevated, the threat level, and it waxes and wanes, as you well know. But we're in a period of pretty striking elevation and we have been really since October 7th, and we can talk a little bit about why. But then starting six weeks ago with the strikes in Iran, we have seen another ratcheting up of an already elevated threat level. And this is across the ideological spectrum. It's not just related to what's going on in the Middle east, although the Middle east is a very potent galvanizing impact on the threat environment generally. But yes, we call it the everything everywhere all at once threat environment.
- [04:17]
Preet Bharara
I didn't like that movie that much.
- [04:19]
Rebecca Weiner
Well, you know what, I don't really like the threat environment all that much, to be honest. But it's keeping us on our toes.
- [04:25]
Preet Bharara
So for people who are uninitiated into how New York deals with these things, is it like the military? Do you have a DEFCON one through DEFCON four? Do you have use a color system? Do you denote the threat level in some tangible way or not?
- [04:39]
Rebecca Weiner
Well, we do a lot of very specific analysis of threat and it's not categorized in a number system as it's been in places around the world at various points in time. But we are very aware, not just of threat to New York, which is obviously much of what we're looking at, but we look more broadly to threats around the world, to threats across the country. And the reason we call it Everything Everywhere all at Once is because, because the idiosyncratic nature of the threats, all of the familiar ones, the ISIS threat, the Al Qaeda threat, threats related to Iran, also domestic polarization. And all of the threats that that has unleashed, far right, far left, in between, has been aggregated by newer buckets of threat, nihilistic violent extremism for one, which focuses on kids and being groomed online grievance fueled acts of violence. And we saw that here in the city with Luigi Mangione allegedly assassinating Brian Thompson, with the incident, 345 Park Avenue. So you're seeing all of these new drivers of targeted violence, which looks a lot like terrorism, which isn't necessarily focused on a particular coherent ideology. All of this is what we focus on keeping the city safe from every day.
- [06:06]
Preet Bharara
So, you know, you mentioned a few things there that are super interesting, and I wonder if maybe we should do some definitions.
- [06:13]
Rebecca Weiner
Sure. Happily.
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Preet Bharara
And these have changed over time.
- [06:15]
Rebecca Weiner
Yes.
- [06:16]
Preet Bharara
How do you think about. And how do you define terrorism? In other words, what makes the shooting of somebody just an act of crime, as we've always understood it, versus an act of terror? And in particular, you mentioned Brian Thompson. Was that an act of terror or was that a homicide? Does it matter? Why do we call things different things?
- [06:38]
Rebecca Weiner
Right. So we looked really carefully at over 25 instances last year in 2025, of terrorism and targeted violence, and analyzed them and found six major categories of. Of violence that happen, some very familiar. And it does matter. For us, it matters less than it does for some of our federal counterparts, whether a very cinematic assassination that's happening at seven in the morning in midtown Manhattan, which is a political, in the small p sense of the word, motivation behind it, which is. Luigi Mangione. Is terroristic. Does it instill fear? Under New York State law, you've got a specific definition. You have to commit a crime with the intent to intimidate or coerce a civilian population. And every time I go and talk to a group of law students or make commentary about it, I ask this question. Some of these new acts of violence that we've seen, especially in the last year and a half, that are terroristic in impact, that have very pronounced targeting, that are fueled by grievances. Are they conventional terrorism? No, but they have a similar impact on the public and on the target set of individuals involved. And we've seen this rise. And there's a contagion effect of some of these that is really notable. I look back to the first weekend of Hanukkah, when you had a mass shooting at Brown, followed by the assassination of a scientist at MIT that turns out to be carried out by an individual with a particular, again, highly idiosyncratic grievance, an individual who blew himself and his car up outside of a fertility clinic in California, the mass shooting at 345 Park Avenue. So we've seen these acts of violence that are terroristic in impact, similar in nature, but quite different from the conventional terrorism that we think about and that we've been fighting for 25 years.
- [08:51]
Preet Bharara
You've used that term a couple of times. Conventional terrorism, which is an odd concept because terrorism itself is unconventional. Seems to be as unconventional, right?
- [08:58]
Rebecca Weiner
Yes.
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Preet Bharara
Does conventional terrorism, defined by who is perpetrating it, that it's an international terror organization, does it mean the size? And so, for example, 9, 11, worst terrorist attack in the world, was that conventional terrorism?
- [09:16]
Rebecca Weiner
I mean, that's sort of paradigmatic. Terrorism, as we have thought about it, fought against it for the last 25 years. But for the residents of New Orleans who woke up January 1st last year to a vehicle ramming attack on Bourbon street, that is, again, more conventional in the sense that it was an individual who was inspired by isis, which is a foreign terrorist organization. But none of these definitions are clean anymore. And that makes our job much more complicated.
- [09:46]
Preet Bharara
Right. I mean, there have been terroristic rammings of cars, the crowds in New York as well. And let me just go there, since we're on it. How do you protect against that? When you're talking about a massive operation that takes a lot of time, resources, lots of personnel, human intelligence and signals intelligence and all those other means can cause nypd, FBI and others to disrupt them. But if it's just a guy who's aggrieved and is reading things that have radicalized him, he decides to swerve into a parade. Explain to folks how you think about that and how you protect against that. Because to me, that's one of the most frightening things about the new wave.
- [10:30]
Rebecca Weiner
It is, again, very individualized and there's a whole apparatus, and this is one agency, nypd, that works hand in glove with every other agency, federal, state, local, international, increasingly private sector partners to protect against just that and all of the other permutations of threat that we've been dealing with. But there's a number of things that go into it. There's deterrence, which is the leftist from boom, as we say, which is done here in our bureau through a combination of really concerted intelligence driven target hardening. So if you've walked around New York City, you've seen officers from our Critical Response Command, and they have long guns and they have special uniforms and special equipment, and they're deployed around the city every day. Based on the intelligence that our intelligence division collects in coordination with our partners, there's deterrence. And we do that with a combination of sensors, chem, bio rad, nuclear detection mitigation capabilities, counter drone canine programs, doing sweeps, our bomb squad, our network of tens of thousands of cameras as part of our Lower Manhattan Security Initiative that are linked up to our data lake to make sure that we're detecting anomalous activity. And those capabilities are married up with our intelligence, the parts of the apparatus that you don't see as much as. And then there's the investigative process. And that's what you spent so much of your career overseeing. And that's either police detectives or working with special agents and working with federal partners on developing longer term investigations that lead to disruption. And so those three pillars are all bread and butter to make sure that we're identifying threats before they materialize on our streets to the degree possible. But this threat environment is challenging just because it, it bends our assessments and understandings of where threats may come from and what they might look like and why they might be happening.
- [12:43]
Preet Bharara
Do you have an understanding of. I don't know if this is the right term, but for a solo actor and people used to call them lone wolves, I feel like wolf is not, maybe out of respect for wolves, we don't use that term as much anymore. But what the incubation period is between a decision after having become radicalized to do harm to a civilian population, like drive into a crowd or make a bomb or shoot at people, and when they accomplish it. And the reason I ask that question is presumably one of the reasons that conventional terrorism, in some ways, though its effects can be more devastating and more massive, that it's easier to deal with, is that there's lots of folks, some people double cross their folks. There are tripwires. People go out and buy fertilizer for a massive bomb or they take pilot training, although that tripwire wasn't fully exploited. Whereas a guy just living in his basement becomes radicalized, decides to do something. There's not a lot of advance notice. So the first question is, have you found that people wake up one morning and decide I'm going to do an act, or is there a period of time during which an interdiction is possible?
- [13:56]
Rebecca Weiner
Well, I think if you've seen one case of homegrown violent extremism or lone actor driven violence, you've seen one case of homegrown violent extremism or lone actor driven violence. And it varies tremendously. In some cases, the conventional tripwires that you're describing, the travel overseas, the communication with leadership of foreign terrorist organizations overseas, that direction, or in some cases electronic and enabling is there is present. In other cases it's really not. And people are mobilizing to violence somewhat in a vacuum. I mean, we look back just a few weeks to the incident on March 7 on the upper east side outside of Gracie Mansion, when you had two individuals travel into the city, spend less than 40 minutes in New York City and try to deploy two IEDs which thankfully didn't detonate. And thankfully they were apprehended, that mobilization process happened without tripping any wires. I will say that now the lone actor, it isn't a great term because it often reflects a mobilization process that has occurred in the online environment, not alone with others. And so those tripwires of online ecosystem have been the most helpful in our ability to interdict the ISIS inspired or the Al Qaeda inspired or the neo Nazi inspired attacks before they happen. And so what was travel overseas to a training camp is now the leakage that we can see online in association with somebody's radicalization process when it's happening.
- [15:42]
Preet Bharara
I want people to understand one thing about the nypd, which I love and worked with multiple police commissioners over my eight years in office. But I'm just going to read from the Vanity Fair article from a year ago that gives a lot of detail and talks about the resources that the NYPD has in the intel and counterterrorism area, refers to you as having a sprawling portfolio and that you rely on a mind boggling suite of assets that Americans might otherwise assume are controlled by the CIA, FBI, dhs, Secret Service or other agencies. You have access to a legion of intelligence analysts, counter assault and dignitary protection teams, flotilla of boats. That's nice. Radiation sniffing and surveillance aircraft, the nation's biggest bomb squad, a counter drone unit, a remote contingent of NYPD detectives stationed in 13 cities overseas. And a network of multilingual undercover operatives who subvert malicious actors across the US and around the world. This is a softball question, but one that I think a lot of people maybe don't know the answer to. Why does a local police force have the assets of a small nation?
- [16:57]
Rebecca Weiner
Well, nine, 11, after 93 and Ray Kelly, who was at time the police Commissioner, decided that he needed to grow internally to the NYPD a capability to counter terrorism. And this is back to the conventional terrorism that we were just discussing and that it would work hand in glove with federal counterparts. But the threats are so varied and again so unpredictable that we need to have our own capabilities to do this work as a force multiplier. And you know, 20 years ago when I joined the NYPD, we were at that point relatively newer to the table. Now, given all that's happening around the world, a people have become more used to us. But the recognition that this is necessary to protect the biggest Target in the world, one of the biggest, most vibrant cities has become much more understood.
- [17:57]
Preet Bharara
Do we have too many different agents? So, for example, I'll give you a non terrorism specific example. I try to explain to people who are not from New York City how crazy different it is with respect to our prosecutors. Right? If you're in Boston, there is one District Attorney in Boston. There's not only one U.S. attorney in Boston. In the Boston area, there's one U.S. attorney in the entire Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The District of Massachusetts, New York City, is divided between two federal districts, literally two federal districts. I think there's no other major city that has that, maybe no other city at all in the country that has two districts. So you have not one US Attorney and one da. You have two United States Attorneys, Eastern District and Southern district. You have five DAs, one for each borough. You have a special narcotics prosecutor. Then of course you have other folks, including the Attorney General of the State of New York. So from my world on the prosecution side, I thought it was a good thing because competition, even in the world of law enforcement makes everyone sharper and better. And I know that the NYPD sometimes could bring a case that was sprawling all over the city. They could bring it to the Eastern District or the Southern District. And I always wanted them to bring it to us. In the intel world, with so many intelligence agencies, now you're a local agency and you have so many on the federal side, what's the ideal number of agencies? What's the balance between having multiple agencies and being coordinated and consolidated?
- [19:27]
Rebecca Weiner
I mean, there's always going to be trade offs, right? With more agencies, you have more disparate ways of doing business. You have more opportunity to trip over each other. But we have so much work. There's plenty of work to go around. And I think the diversity of our threat requires the diversity of our responses to it. Each agency is going to have its own priorities. It's going to do things in a particular way. And so the key is to have all of those inputs that you can deconflict and coordinate around to make sure that we're not stepping on each other. But that makes us much more likely to all have a chance to pick up some of these very sprawling legs of an octopus that we are dealing with now. So it's difficult. We deal with partners all the time, and they're always surprised. 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the United States. How on earth do you collaborate? And there's ways NYPD has.
- [20:24]
Preet Bharara
How is it possible we still have
- [20:26]
Rebecca Weiner
crime with all these different crime fighting.
- [20:29]
Preet Bharara
Yes.
- [20:29]
Rebecca Weiner
But a centralized system has its perils as well. And I think for today's world, having all of these different partners doing their thing is the only way we could actually get stuff done.
- [20:43]
Preet Bharara
I happened to look at the paragraph before the one I just quoted from the Vanity Fair article, and I realized that I had circled a phrase that refers to you as an enigmatic figure. Can we talk about your job that is not enigmatic?
- [20:57]
Rebecca Weiner
Yes.
- [20:59]
Preet Bharara
So do you wake up in the morning and do you have the equivalent of a PDB that you brief to the commissioner or the mayor or somebody else? Because there are days when there's not an attack. There's no day on which there is no threat of attack. Correct.
- [21:15]
Rebecca Weiner
There are threats all the time. The architect of our intel program spent much of his career in federal government, Dave Cohen. And so modeled on many federal government elements is the police commissioner's daily brief, where I brief the commissioner on threats that she needs to know about. We have our own.
- [21:37]
Preet Bharara
What time is that? How early in the morning.
- [21:38]
Rebecca Weiner
Early in the morning. I mean, I start, well, the fact that we don't operate in a purely classified world, and this handy iPhone that I have, it never really ends and it never really begins because we are just receiving onslaughts.
- [21:55]
Preet Bharara
You don't have to be in a skiff all the time.
- [21:57]
Rebecca Weiner
No. And dealing with information overload. But I have, again, as the article pointed out, an incredibly talented team of people who are. Who are sifting through information, responding to events that are happening here, making sure they're understanding what's going on overseas, and that everybody on our team is aware of what might confront us over the course of the day. So a lot of it is moving information around, transacting in information, and making sure that partners are briefed, that partners are briefing us, that we are all operating, as you say, all this multiplicity of agencies out there need to be operating on somewhat of the same sheet of music. And, you know, the Iran war breaks out and we have our officers overseas who are in the region briefing our police commissioner in real time on what's happening, because there's plenty of Twitter videos out there. But having trusted information about what we might expect to see in the city based on what's happening overseas, incredibly important for us.
- [23:05]
Preet Bharara
I'll be right back with Rebecca Weiner after this. Support for the show comes from found. To the small business owners out there, when was the last time you felt like you truly had your finances under control? Every expense categorized, every receipt tracked, every invoice, sentence and tax season all wrapped up. If the answer is not often, to never, found can help. Found brings everything into one place. Banking, bookkeeping, invoices and taxes are all handled on one single easy to use platform. It even automates things like tracking expenses and setting money aside for taxes. Plus, you can even send invoices for free and pay contractors right from the app. So if you're stressing about taxes behind a in your books, chasing receipts, or just losing track of your cash flow, Found can help you regain control of your finances so you can get back to doing what you love. Take back control of your business. Today, open a Found account for free@found.com that's f o u n d.com found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by lead bank member fdic. Join the hundreds of thousands who've already streamlined their first finances with Found Recommendations can be amazing. I mean, maybe someone recommended that TV show you've been obsessed with lately, but when it comes to home projects, it's different. If you don't like a show, you might lose a few minutes. If you hire a friend of a friend of a friend to fix a leaky ceiling, you could end up with a flooded kitchen. Maybe I know a guy just isn't enough for your home. That's why Thumbtack works so well. They'll match you with a top rated local pro and you can see photos of past work credentials and reviews all right in the app. For your next home project, try Thumbtack. Hire the right pro today.
- [25:00]
Rebecca Weiner
Adobe Acrobat. Your team's home base. Collaborate within a shared PDF space. You've got your docs, your plans, your
- [25:07]
Preet Bharara
specs and then invite the crew to
- [25:09]
Rebecca Weiner
build of what's next. They talk off the team. They think that this design could be a contender. When somebody wonders what's the next step, AI helps you finish the rest. Bolts are tight now. Your plan's refined. Run a smoother business when you're all aligned. Do that with Acrobat.
- [25:28]
Preet Bharara
Learn more@adobe.com do that with Acrobat okay, so let's talk about Iran and the threat from that part of the world. So they've always been a threat as people are learning. If they've been under Iraq for the last 40 something years. Iran is one of the greatest, if not the greatest exporter of terrorism in the world. So that's not new. But when you have a conflict like this. Let me ask you more of a TikTok question. Presumably you don't get a heads up that there's going to be a war in Iran. But you folks are watching the news and you see speculation about going to war with Iran. And we had ships that went to the area without divulging anything that you're not supposed to divulge. When do you at NYPD and the intel section begin to change what you do or beef up what you do based on your expectations?
- [26:23]
Rebecca Weiner
So I'll take you back much farther, which is that we were in a very elevated posture as it relates to Iran much earlier in this year.
- [26:31]
Preet Bharara
October 7th.
- [26:32]
Rebecca Weiner
October 7th. It's actually before October 7th as we start seeing more Iran linked lethal plotting efforts in our city, which is only one of many vectors of threat that the Iranian government has exported. The lethal plotting threat and multiple waves of plotting against women's rights activists in the city, which has been discussed in court proceedings and the same Vanity Fair article. But really important element for us to understand how the Iranian government links to cutouts, sometimes through proxy groups to carry out its lethal plotting in the US and this is consistent with really several years and several waves of external operations work that the NYPD and FBI partners and others have been involved in preventing from manifesting here. So elevated. Elevated on October 7th. And we see the proxy activity that's happening in the region and always think about what might that threat look like here in the city and trace that through investigations. And then once we start seeing all this buildup of steel over there in the region can certainly put two and two together. So those plans are well underway. And again, we understand some of the contours of the threat and then some of them present anew. But even within that first 12 days, you had four attacks in the U.S. two that seem linked to the conflict, two that maybe not so much, but the timing is interesting. And those latter two are ISIS inspired. And then a pattern of expected and some less expected activity that we've seen ever since February 28th. And I think it's important that we talk about one thing. And it's just, it's an interesting thing that's happening new. This is more in the tactical realm, but with Iran threat. Right. So we're used to dealing with external operations, the lethal plotting, some of the target package generating. But there's another new element of threat and we started to see it in Europe with regard to sabotage as a service operation. So. And some of those can be linked back to the Russian government targeting entities that are doing business in support of Ukraine. And just this weekend, a couple of instances of arson and in some cases rudimentary IED attacks happening in North London, which are consistent with a pattern of instances of Europe based Jewish cultural religious institutions, US commercial institutions being targeted by individuals who are receiving money online. And all of this is being promoted by a relatively new self proclaimed militant collective that promotes its videos on Iran aligned Internet channels. So claimed attacks against a couple of synagogues in London, in the Netherlands, in Rotterdam, Amsterdam in Belgium. And a really important new way that threats can manifest. So we're familiar with the use of proxy groups like Hamas or Hezbollah or the Houthis, we're familiar with the use of organized criminal cutouts. But this notion of sabotage or terrorism as a service emerges directly out of the online world and can allow a threat actor to, at relatively low cost, hire sometimes witting, often unwitting people to carry out its dirty work in a way that doesn't give you a lot of quality control, but can give the sense of a campaign when it's really just a bunch of lower level individuals carrying out its business.
- [30:39]
Preet Bharara
So I said before, I want to talk about some of the ways that you must, given the degree of harm that can come from a terrorist attack. And terrorism is distinct, as you point out, from ordinary street crime because of this X factor intimidation and instilling fear into a population. So we treat it more seriously in terms of sentencing and other things. Right. And that's all fair, right?
- [31:04]
Rebecca Weiner
Yes.
- [31:05]
Preet Bharara
Okay. You have talked about, you know, not only as a, as a law enforcement official, but as a trained lawyer. And not everyone who's had your position has been a trained lawyer. This age old question of security versus liberty. How do you think about surveillance? And what are the rules under which I think listeners would want to know under which you operate? When you have this legion of people who in good faith, and I think in the best interests of the public, want to make sure that they're finding out about plots. But where are they allowed to go? Where should they go? Do they have to get your permission? Do you sign a document? Explain how that works?
- [31:47]
Rebecca Weiner
Okay, yeah. I mean, I think the American public would be quite surprised, I suspect, to understand the constraints that exist on the way we investigate. And that's really important and I feel very grateful to have the degree of constraints that we do. And all of our investigations are governed by a consent decree that dates back to the 1980s. It's called Hanshu. And in 2026 it looks a lot like the US Attorney General guidelines. And in order for us to carry out a terrorism investigation, we have to reach certain factual predication levels. We have to articulate in writing a certain series of facts that supports our ability to investigate. And we have different ways that we can do those investigations, different techniques that we can use. We go from least intrusive to most intrusive. We have a board of people that has to sign off on them, which include not just me and my team, but also our department's lawyers and also, really importantly, since 2017, a civilian representative. So somebody who comes from outside of the world of law enforcement who is also taking a look at all of our investigations and asking questions and making sure that it's now a him. In his view, these investigations meet the requisite thresholds. And this is really important because we have, of course, are very forward leaning. We have a lot of resources and we're going to keep our city safe and everybody in it. But we have to do it in a way that is disciplined, thoughtful, that's legal and that respects civil liberties and civil rights. So I think the balance with our legal architecture has been well struck.
- [33:40]
Preet Bharara
Right. That was an evolution and it took some time. And again, not everyone would agree with every part of it on either side of the spectrum. But just so people understand, maybe to give a concrete example, if someone in your team decided, hey, you know, there's this particular ethnic community center where, you know, I heard a rumor on the street that there's a couple of guys there who are bad guys and who hate America. If you want to do something about that. Is that an example of what you were speaking of that you would. Someone would have to write it up and then that group of individuals would have to approve surveillance in that community center. Is that fair?
- [34:20]
Rebecca Weiner
Well, so, I mean, I'm going to give you an example which is more along the lines of the examples that we see every day, which is a threat, threatening content is uncovered and often in the online world that says something specific and it's not. There are levels of speech that allow you to actually arrest somebody for articulating a specific threat, but say it's a Hezbollah flag or, you know, we see this daily in our protests, some kind of expression of fealty for a foreign terrorist organization. If you are just in the realm of speech, we need a plus factor in order to open up an investigation. We can't just have unfounded rumors. We investigate every lead that's called into our hotlines. So we tell the public all the time, if you see something, say something. Tell an officer, call 911, call 1-888-NYC-SAFE. And we receive thousands of leads and we investigate all of them, and we do this in coherence with our Hanshu consent decree. But we can't just investigate based on unsubstantiated rumor without anything more.
- [35:33]
Preet Bharara
Somebody says online, I hate another ethnic group, I wish they would all die. Is that. That's not sufficient? So what's a plus factor?
- [35:40]
Rebecca Weiner
I mean, it can be anything and it often is. But I think you go back to your original question. How are you most likely to intercept a plan before it materializes into violence on our streets? If it doesn't include the conventional tripwires, the traveling, the communication, it's usually based on sussing out somebody's true intentions, which often requires another human being. And you can have all the AI tools and lead generators that you want. And those are never going to replace an individual's assessment, whether it's an officer who's debriefing somebody, who, based on an arrest, whether it's a trained analyst who's looking at a whole package of information that does require the human element in order to intercept threats.
- [36:41]
Preet Bharara
Do you feel that any constraints you have legally, either because of statute or other legal authority, is undue and you'd be, you'd be happy to be out from under some of them, or are there additional powers? Because I used to get this question all the time, often in the question of, on the issue of white collar crime, do you wish you had more powers? Do you wish you had flexibility in the law? Do you feel that way?
- [37:07]
Rebecca Weiner
No.
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Preet Bharara
About anything? No.
- [37:08]
Rebecca Weiner
I mean, I've grown up with this system. I think the system works quite well. It works quite well at threading a needle, which is difficult to thread. So the answer is no. I think that the real issue we have is just, again, the multiplicity of threats that we're facing and how difficult it is to predict them and the speed. And you'd asked me a few minutes ago how quickly some people tend to mobilize to violence. And it varies quite widely. But one thing that we have seen is younger and younger threat actors who are mobilizing faster and faster. So that's an area where it gives us very little lead time to identify a threat before it turns into violence.
- [37:50]
Preet Bharara
One of the threats you mentioned, which is a little bit maybe unfamiliar to a lot of folks, nihilistic violent extremism. What is that? Where did that come from? And what can we do about it?
- [38:02]
Rebecca Weiner
Yeah, so that's a great segue because we're talking about young kids and we're talking about the online ecosystem, and this is a Relatively newer term that is officially described by the FBI as terrorism only for a couple of years and describes a pretty wide range of behavior, but two main prongs of it. One is individuals who are identifying often not only, but often minors online. And they're identifying them in gaming platforms, in online self help forums and they're grooming them and they are encouraging them first to create and disseminate child sexual abuse material, to engage in self mutilation, what's called fan signing. Carving their names or other numbers into their bodies and doing it through live streaming, sometimes attacking siblings or mutilating pets, even live streaming their own suicide. It is influencer culture at its most insidious. It is shocking. And that's the point. The worse, the better. And then there's an overlap with the school shooter community. And this is the week that is the annual anniversary of Columbine. We've seen an increase in school shootings, which is something that this country and really around the world have been dealing with forever, but an increase in school shootings that are networked individuals who are all part of the same online forums. One in particular is called the true crime community where school shootings are encouraged, school shooters are venerated. And it's something like a social network around this particular activity. And so it is an ideology. It's an ideology that's rooted in nihilism. Again, the worse the better. And it's spreading. It's in the us, it's also overseas. There were two back to back school shootings in Turkey last week which killed over a dozen kids, wounded tons of others. And they are all sharing similar characteristics and traits. And tricky problem because how are you going to prosecute young people who are grooming other young people? So difficult for the law enforcement community to grapple with. And we've done a lot of work. NYPD working with FBI, FBI has been very out front on this. Same with partners in Europe trying to educate parents, educate schools about some of these signs. When you see the bomb threats called in or bricking people, throwing bricks in the windows of people's houses, when you're seeing the fan signing, you might chalk that off to kids being kids, but there might be something much more pernicious under.
- [40:56]
Preet Bharara
Are there any other threats that are more recent than that, that have a name or are we up to speed once we understand this one?
- [41:04]
Rebecca Weiner
No, this one is new and it's important and it's growing. And there's been a number of important disruptions of leaders of these groups. And again, some of this Work necessarily is going to involve what you would call a sting. Right. It's a human being that's trying to really discern the behavior in some of these networks. The other, and we talked about this a bit at the beginning, is the grievance fueled acts of terror that we've seen so much of. So January 1st, 2005, the world woke up on New Year's Day to two different terrorist attacks. One was Bourbon street, which we talked about. The other was an individual US army, who blew himself and his car up outside of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas. And at that moment, hard to determine which of those two incidents would be the more common over the year to come. But that grievance fueled violence that again has this contagion element is something that we've seen a lot of an attack against CDC headquarters in August. I mentioned 340 Pye Park Avenue. We talked about about Mangione, we talked about the individual in front of the fertility clinic in California, Brown, mit. And so that again is a bit paradigm bending. And then at the same time, you've had this backdrop of a rise in ISIS related activity, and that's been here. We had the year begin in 2025 with an ISIS inspired attack, and it ended New Year's Eve with a disruption of an ISIS inspired attack that was to take place allegedly on New Year's Eve in North Carolina. And so that threat we've seen quite a bit of over the last couple of years, whether it's a Canadian who was looking to travel to Brooklyn to attack a synagogue here in the city, who was disrupted. A network of individuals around the Detroit, Michigan area who are looking to carry out a mass casualty attack in Detroit. A renewed interest in traveling overseas to join ISIS. The attack that happened on March 12th at Old Dominion. So ISIS, which had all of us working 247 between 2014 and 2016, has seen a renewal of affinity and of adherence since October 7th. Not a new threat, but one that has had an energizing impact over the last two and a half years.
- [43:43]
Preet Bharara
This is not a political question because I want you to get to the substance. What is the view of you, your team and the community of law enforcement and intel? What is the collective view of the relationship between the terror threat in the United States and immigration? Open border?
- [44:03]
Rebecca Weiner
I mean, I think it's necessarily very nuanced. On the one hand, you have the ability of individuals to cross the border into the country unknown to us. And we've seen cases of that happening who pose a national security threat. To our country. You've also seen tensions play out domestically across this country. You had over the summer, multiple instances of people trying to attack either Customs and Border Protection facilities or in one case, kill two migrants at a facility in. In Texas because of their opposition to US Domestic policies around immigration. And for us, we're looking. It's simpler, really. We look at manifested threat, and we try to make sure it doesn't manifest here. So there's threats to open borders, there's threats associated with opposition to policy, and our job is to identify all of them.
- [45:03]
Preet Bharara
Let me ask you another different question, but in the same vein. I'm not asking you to comment necessarily on some of the things that federal agents, like ICE agents, have been observed to be doing in Minneapolis in the last year. But when things like that happen, when you have a negative public reaction to law enforcement activity in a place like Minneapolis, do you feel that? Do you and your colleagues feel any change of attitude in New York towards law enforcement or not?
- [45:37]
Rebecca Weiner
No matter where a controversial incident takes place, it reverberates here. And the threats reverberate here if they emerge overseas. The controversial interactions reverberate here if they emerge overseas. And that's just a reality. And that's the social media universe that we live in. That's the world we live in. So it always is going to reverberate here. And it's our responsibility to make sure that we do our work the way we will always do our work. But, yes, we are all connected, for better or for worse.
- [46:13]
Preet Bharara
What's the question you get most when you get pushback about how we go about keeping the city and the country safe? What is the thing that you find people are worried about?
- [46:24]
Rebecca Weiner
Well, I think one of the things important to keep in mind is there are periods when things are calmer, when the threat environment is more placid, then people tend to press me more on is this really necessary and why are we doing it, and how are we doing it, and are we overreaching? And I say no, this is our process, and we take this into consideration and do this this way. But for the last few years, because it's been so active and because there's been event after event after event happening, I think that there is a lot of fear. And during those moments, people want to make sure that we, as a department are doing everything we can to keep the city safe. And so the opinion goes up and down, the threat environment goes up and down. Our tools, our tactics, our commitment to doing the work thoroughly. But in a nuanced way that's consistent with civil rights, with civil liberties, all of that remains the same.
- [47:23]
Preet Bharara
Okay, thank you so much. Thanks for being with us.
- [47:25]
Rebecca Weiner
Thank you. Take care.
- [47:30]
Preet Bharara
Our conversation continues for members of the Insider community. In the exclusive bonus content, Weiner explains how her family history destined her to work in national security.
- [47:39]
Rebecca Weiner
911 was our clarion cry for my generation. If you wanted to be involved in national security work using your brain, if that was the skill set you had, not your tactical training or your brawn, then you would go into the counterterrorism fight.
- [47:56]
Preet Bharara
To try out the membership, head to cafe.cominsider again, that's cafe.cominsider. after the break, I'll answer your questions about the process for replacing Representatives Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzalez and what Congress can do, if anything, to curb abuses of the presidential pardon power. Adobe Acrobat, your new foundation. Use PDF spaces to generate a presentation. Grab your docs, your permits, your moves. AI levels up. Your pitch gets it in a groove. Choose a template with your timeless cool. Come on now, let's flex those toes. Draft, design, deliver, make it sing. AI builds the deck so you can build that thing. Do that, do that, do that with Acrobat. Learn more@adobe.com do that with Acrobat Starting
- [48:56]
Rebecca Weiner
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- [50:14]
Preet Bharara
Now let's get to your questions. This question comes as a post from Lauren in the Stay Tuned substack chat. What are the state laws in California and in Texas for replacing Swalwell and Gonzalez. How soon can both be replaced? Thanks with hopes of a better vetting system and hopes that Preet has a good Mango Lussi recipe. He'll post well. Thanks Lauren. Let me talk about your question first. Special elections are actually a really interesting procedural issue. Both Representative Swalwell of California and Representative Gonzalez of Texas, as you know, recently resigned their seats following allegations of serious sexual misconduct. So that leaves each state with an empty House seat and the question of how to fill it. So first, as always, let's begin with the Constitution. Unlike a Senate seat, a House seat cannot be filled by a governor's temporary appointment. That's in the Constitution itself, which says when a vacancy occurs in the House of Representatives, the state's executive authority must issue what's called a writ of election, essentially a formal written order directing that a special election be held. So both California and Texas are supposed to fill these vacancies through special elections. So that's the same, but the timing and structure of those elections differ by state. California law requires the governor to call a special election within a specific time frame, generally on a Tuesday between 126 and 140 days after issuing the proclamation that calls the election first, there is a special primary election where all candidates, regardless of party, appear on one single ballot, and if one candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, that's the person. If no candidate wins a majority, on the other hand, in California, the top two vote getters advance to a special general election. For California's part, Governor Newsom has already scheduled a special primary for June and the special general for August. Now, the system in Texas is similar, but with a few notable differences. Texas gives the governor broad discretion over timing. Under that state's law, the governor must order a special election by proclamation and do so as soon as practicable after the vacancy occurs. But because the statute does not set a firm deadline, the governor has considerable latitude in determining what qualifies as practicable, so mischief is possible. Texas election format is also similar to California's, though the terminology differs. Texas holds a single all candidate special election like California, and a candidate has to receive a majority of the vote to win outright. If no one earns a majority, the top two vote getters advance to a runoff election, so pretty much the same as California. As of this recording, Governor Abbott of Texas has yet to schedule the special election. Legally speaking, a governor can't simply refuse to hold a special election. But in practice, if a governor delays long enough the calendar can effectively run out, and the seat may remain vacant until the next regular general election, and any legal challenges are unlikely to be resolved quickly enough to alter that timeline. That may be the route Governor Abbott chooses to take, and I don't know enough about Texas politics to speculate about why that might be. In any event, we'll be watching both states closely. As for your question about a Mangalussi recipe, do you need a recipe? Just do what I do. Find a nice spot in your town or city that serves up a delicious cold mango lassi. This question comes as a post from Jessica, also in the Stay tuned Substack chat. I'm curious, what are the avenues that are available to Congress for reforming the presidential pardon process? Jessica, this is a great question. It comes up a lot, but in particular it comes up when Donald Trump is the president. As you know, the Constitution places very few limits on the president's pardon authority. It may be the president's broadest, most unfettered power altogether in the Constitution or otherwise. As a reminder, Article 2 of the Constitution says the president shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment. That's it. That's the whole thing. There's no procedural roadmap, no transparency requirement, and no limitations beyond the impeachment exception and the fact that the power applies only to federal offenses. So a lot of discretion which people can argue has been used well or misused and abused, depending on your views of a particular case. The most direct way to reform the pardon power, or at least to change it, would be through a constitutional amendment that would allow Congress and the states to impose clear structural limits. But a constitutional amendment is really, really, really difficult. So don't hold your breath. But instead of an amendment, Congress still has some tools. One important theory, articulated by frequent podcast guests here, Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith in a Lawfare article, is that while the pardon power may be absolute for the person receiving the pardon, it is not necessarily immune from criminal scrutiny when it comes to the person granting it. In other words, in certain circumstances, the act of granting a pardon could itself constitute a criminal offense. That's the view of those gentlemen. And it's my view also. For example, if a president issued a pardon in exchange for a campaign contribution, or exchange for an agreement not to testify, or something else, that conduct might implicate existing federal bribery or obstruction statutes. It's a quid pro quo. And in fact, I'm old enough to remember about a quarter century ago, my boss at the time, Mary Jo White, then the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, did investigate sitting president and people around him for the questionable and dubious pardon Clinton gave to Mark Rich. In any event, some scholars argue, those laws already apply. Others say Congress should clarify the matter. Congress could pass a statute explicitly stating that granting a pardon as part of a corrupt quid pro quo constitutes bribery. According to Bauer and Goldsmith, there is a substantial argument that such a law would survive constitutional scrutiny because it would regulate the quid pro quo, not eliminate the pardon itself. But it would certainly be tested in court. Another proposal appeared some years ago in the Abuse of the Pardon Prevention act, introduced by our friend Representative Adam Schiff. That bill would have required disclosure to Congress when a pardon involved certain sensitive circumstances, such as cases connected to the President or people connected to the president, or congressional investigations. The idea was to impose transparency by requiring the Justice Department and the White House to provide relevant materials to Congress and explain the reason for the pardon. Now, aside from legislation, Congress also has oversight authority. It can hold hearings, issue subpoenas, and investigate how the pardon process is being used within the executive branch. And finally, as the Framers envisioned, impeachment remains the ultimate constitutional check on pardon abuses. This question comes as a post from Tom in the Stay Tuned substack chat. Does reforming the Supreme Court by increasing the number of Justices require a constitutional amendment? That's a great follow on question. Unlike the pardon power, it does not. The Constitution itself does not specify how many Justices sit on the Supreme Court. And by the way, you may be asking this question because there's a lot of speculation swirling about whether Justice Alito will retire this summer or not. As always, let's go to the Constitution. Article 3, Section 1 states, the Judicial power of the United States shall be vested in one Supreme Court, but it does not specify the size of that court. Article two, Section two gives the President the power to appoint judges of the Supreme Court with the advice and consent of the Senate, but once again doesn't say how many. Historically, the number of Justices has been determined by statute. In fact, the Judiciary act of 1789, one of the earliest laws passed after the Constitution was ratified, set the Court at six justices, an even number. It allowed President George Washington to appoint a Chief justice and five Associate Justices. Since then, Congress has legislatively changed the size of the Court several times. The number has ranged from six to 10 justices. At different points in the 19th century, Congress both increased and decreased the court size. But in 1869, Congress set the number at nine justices. Where it has remained ever since. People may remember from history that Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to increase the size of the court. In 1937, he proposed the famous Court packing plan, which would have allowed him to appoint up to six additional Justices without a constitutional amendment. Congress, of course, as you also know from history, rejected that proposal, and ever since, the Court has remained at nine members. So the bottom line is this, every time Congress has changed the size of the Court, it has done so through ordinary legislation. And it could do so again today in the same way. But once again, don't hold your breath. Well, that's it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest Rebecca Weiner. If you like what we do, rate and review, view the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics and justice. You can reach me on Twitter or blueskyeetbarara with the hashtag AskPreet. You can also call and leave me a message at 833-997-7338, that's 83399, Preet. Or you can send an email to letterscafe.com stay tuned is now on substack. Head to staytuned.substack.com to watch live streams, get updates about new podcast episodes and more. That's staytuned.substack.com Stay Tuned is presented by Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The Executive Producer is Tamara Sepper. The Deputy Editor is Celine Rohr. The Supervising Producer is Jay Kaplan. The lead Editorial Producer is Jennifer Indig. The Associate Producer is Claudia Hernandez. The Audio and Video producer is Nat Weiner. The Senior Audio Producer is Matthew Billy and the Marketing Manager is Leanna Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. Special thanks to Tory Paquette and Adam Harris. I'm your host Preet Bharar. As always, Stay tuned.
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Rebecca Weiner
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Preet Bharara
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