Thank you, Attorney General Sessions for your kind introduction. It is an honor to join you today and to be a part of this veteran’s appreciation ceremony.
Our top-notch intelligence collection tells me this is the 7th year running that you have held this event at the Department of Justice – which I think is a wonderful way to honor the more than 28,000 veterans (25% of DOJ workforce) that work across the DOJ.
Good morning. Thank you, Dr. Brothers for that introduction. And thank you to everyone in the audience today for the work you do to keep our country safe.
We all recognize that our government’s most basic responsibility is to protect its citizens. But we don’t do it alone. We do it in partnership with the private sector, with academia, and with foreign governments. So I’m glad to see you all assembled for this week’s conference.
Thank you Attorney General Sessions for your leadership and for inviting me to join you here today and working together on the Task Force. We have served together in the U.S. Senate, and now we serve together in the Trump Administration. We stand together today to address an issue which we both strongly believe needs to be addressed using the authorities of our respective agencies.
Tom Billington, thank you very much for your introduction, and for organizing this meeting. Looking out at the crowd, it is clear that there are a lot of good people here engaged on this subject. And I appreciate the invitation to come and kick off what I think is going to be, and hopefully is going to be, a very productive and informative session for you here.
As the National Intelligence Manager for East Asia, I work for the Director of National Intelligence and am responsible for integrating the Intelligence Community’s collection, analysis, counter-intelligence and budgetary approach for East Asian issues. National Intelligence Managers also serve as the bridge between policymakers and the Intelligence Community to orient and guide collection and analytic needs. One of my key responsibilities is to identify gaps between what our policy makers need and what the Intelligence Community can provide to close these gaps. With that as my job description, I can certainly tell you that this is an interesting time to work East Asia – especially since my responsibilities include North Korea. There are few issues that garner the same level of attention at the highest levels of government – and few issues have been such a high priority throughout our recent Presidential transition. North Korea is one of the Trump Administration’s top national security priorities – just as it was for the Obama Administration.