(WASHINGTON) — FBI Director Christopher Wray told a U.S. Senate panel Tuesday morning that the bureau has been forced to surge resources toward its domestic terrorism investigations in the past 18 months — increasing personnel by 260% to help handle a caseload that has more than doubled from roughly 1,000 ongoing investigations to 2,700.

“Terrorism moves at the speed of social media,” Wray told the Senate Homeland Security Committee. “You have the ability of lone actors, disgruntled in one part of the country to spin up similar like-minded individuals in other parts of the country and urge them into action.”

Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, who appeared alongside Wray, agreed with him that social media is a “terrain that can so easily propagate misinformation, false information and allow communications to occur among loosely affiliated individuals.”

Wray offered more detail during questioning with Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah.

“The first bucket, the homegrown violent extremists, has been humming along fairly consistently at about 1,000 investigations — sometimes a little more sometimes a little less — over the last few years,” Wray explained. “The domestic violent extremists bucket, had been going up quite significantly over the last few years, which is why we’re now at 2,700 domestic terrorism investigations when if you went back two and a half years ago we’re probably more about 1,000 So it’s been a really significant jump there.”

Wray added that officials are “concerned that with developments in Afghanistan, among other things… I think we anticipate, unfortunately, growth in both categories as we look ahead, over the next couple years.”

Those numbers appear to be impacted significantly by the FBI’s hundreds of ongoing investigations into the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“Overall, the FBI assesses that the January 6th siege of the Capitol Complex demonstrates a willingness by some to use violence against the government in furtherance of their political and social goals,” Wray said in written testimony provided to the Senate Homeland Security Committee. “This ideologically motivated violence — domestic terrorism — underscores the symbolic nature of the National Capital Region and the willingness of some Domestic Violent Extremists to travel to events in this area and violently engage law enforcement and their perceived adversaries.”

Wray said that even with the surge of resources to tackle domestic terrorism cases, the FBI has not been forced to divert attention away from investigations into threats posed by foreign terrorist organizations like al-Qaida and ISIS, and added the bureau is “certainly watching the evolving situation in Afghanistan.”

In the past several years, Wray said the FBI has thwarted potential terrorist attacks in at least seven cities, including Las Vegas, Tampa, New York, Cleveland, Kansas City, Miami and Pittsburgh.

Wray also flagged what he described as “a sharp and deeply disturbing uptick in violence against the law enforcement community.” He said thatin just the past eight months, 52 law enforcement officers have been killed feloniously in the line of duty, already lapsing the total number killed in all of 2020.

Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(NEW YORK) — A 16-year-old boy charged in connection with the 2019 stabbing death of Barnard College student Tessa Majors pleaded guilty to second-degree murder Tuesday in Manhattan Criminal Court.

Luchiano Lewis, who was charged as an adult, was 14 when he and two other teenagers were accused in the fatal stabbing of 18-year-old Majors during a mugging gone wrong on Dec. 11, 2019, in Manhattan’s Morningside Park, near Barnard College.

Majors, a freshman at the school, was stabbed several times before she staggered up a flight of stairs and uttered, “Help me, I’m being robbed,” authorities said.

Lewis also pleaded guilty to first-degree robbery Tuesday.

Lewis appeared in court in a dark suit and tie and raced through an allocution in which he said he saw feathers emerge from Majors’ winter coat but did not realize she had been stabbed, let alone killed, until the next morning when he recognized her on the news as the young woman he and the others tried to rob.

The family of Majors sat in the front row and listened to Lewis explain how the trio of middle school friends plotted to rob people in the park. He pinned the idea on 16-year-old Rashaun Weaver, who has pleaded not guilty. A 13-year-old juvenile has pleaded guilty and is serving his sentence.

“He wanted the three of us to do robberies in Morningside Park,” Lewis said of Weaver. “I assumed Rashaun had a knife on him, but using a knife was not part of our plan.”

Lewis will be sentenced Oct. 14, at which point Majors’ family plans to make a statement in court, prosecutors said.

“Are you pleading guilty because you are in fact guilty?” asked Judge Robert Mandelbaum.

“Yes,” Lewis replied.

Police and prosecutors have said Weaver wielded the knife and Lewis guessed he “threw it in the sewer” after the murder.

“This was not a premeditated murder as we heard inside,” Jeffrey Lichtman, the noted criminal defense attorney who is representing Weaver, said outside court. “These were 14- and a 13-year-old boys and we should remember that.”

Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other lawmakers paid tribute Tuesday to the more than 676,000 Americans who have died from COVID-19, visiting a memorial on the National Mall that displays hundreds of thousands of small, white flags, one for each life lost.

“As we look at this work of art and see it fluttering in the breeze,” Pelosi said, “it really is an interpretation of the lives of these people waving to us to remember.”

The installation, called “In America: Remember,” is the second iteration of the art project. In fall 2020, Pelosi visited the first exhibit, which at that time consisted of more than 200,000 lives lost to the pandemic.

Since then, the death toll has more than tripled, and so has the number of flags. The death toll from COVID-19 has surpassed the estimated number of Americans who died in the 1918 influenza pandemic, topping 675,000 deaths on Monday.

The lawmakers walked silently among the rows of flags, trails that stretch more than 3.8 miles.

At times, Pelosi bent down to read the messages families and friends had written on the white rectangles.

“We look at these flags and we think of the family someone missing from the table at dinner, missing from the conversation,” she said, recalling one flag that stuck her which was dedicated to a grandfather that said, “We miss you.”

Pelosi, who is Catholic, said that she hopes faith and prayer can help not only grief, but also to bring an end to the pandemic.

“I know that many of these people are people of faith and they believe that their message is being received and that by receiving that message — that not only our prayers but the prayers of the departed — will also bring solution to all of this,” she said.

She said the flags installation reminded her of the AIDS Quilt, which was displayed on the National Mall in 1987, and how such tributes can be so important.

Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.