The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | January 4th, 2025: Terrorism Hits Home & Beijing’s Strategy for 2025
Sat, 04 Jan 2025
In this episode of The PDB Situation Report: We begin with a deadly New Year's Day, where two separate incidents over 1,700 miles apart have raised alarm about potential terrorism on U.S. soil. Retired FBI senior agent Kurt Pipel shares his expert analysis on these attacks and the investigations that are underway. Later, we delve into Xi Jinping's New Year's message, where he addressed China's economic hurdles and reinforced his aggressive stance on Taiwan. Author and China expert Gordon Chang joins us to unpack what this could mean for Beijing's strategy in 2025. To listen to the show ad-free, become a premium member of The President’s Daily Brief by visiting PDBPremium.com. Please remember to subscribe if you enjoyed this episode of The President's Daily Brief. YouTube: youtube.com/@presidentsdailybrief Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What incidents raised concerns about terrorism on U.S. soil?
Welcome to the PDB Situation Report and welcome to a brand new year. It's 2025. I'm Mike Baker. Your eyes and ears on the world stage. All right, let's get briefed. We'll start today's show with a deadly New Year's Day, where two incidents over 1700 miles apart have shot the nation and sparked new concerns about terrorism on U.S. soil.
Retired FBI Senior Agent Kurt Peipel joins us to provide insight into these attacks and the ongoing investigations. Later in the show, we'll examine Xi Jinping's New Year's message. Did you catch that? Where he laid out China's economic challenges and renewed his hardline stance on Taiwan.
Author and China expert and friend of the show, Gordon Chang, will join us to break down what this means for Beijing's agenda in 2025. But first, our Situation Report Spotlight. Two major incidents shocked the nation on New Year's Day.
First, in New Orleans, where 42-year-old Shamsa Din-Jabbar drove a rented pickup truck into a crowd of revelers on Bourbon Street, killing at least 15 people and injuring over 30. Now, Jabbar, an Army veteran, was fatally shot by police at the scene. The FBI has revealed that the suspect had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and is investigating the attack as an act of terrorism.
Just hours later, in Las Vegas, a Tesla Cybertruck exploded outside the Trump International Hotel, killing the driver, 37-year-old Matthew Livelsberger, and injuring seven bystanders. The vehicle was packed with fireworks and gas canisters, turning what initially appeared to be an accident into a deliberate act.
Investigators have since discovered that both vehicles were rented through the same peer-to-peer app, raising questions about whether these attacks were coordinated. What do these incidents tell us about the threats that we face in 2025 and how might authorities respond to those threats?
Well, here to share his insight is Kurt Peipel, a recently retired FBI senior agent with 20 years of experience and, full disclosure, now working for Portman Square Group, our company that's an intelligence and security and risk mitigation firm. Kurt, thanks very much for joining us here on The Situation Report.
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Chapter 2: What insights can Kurt Peipel provide on the New Orleans attack?
Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me.
Yeah, of course, man. Of course. And look, honestly, you didn't need to get dressed up for the Situation Report. But thank you. Thank you for making the effort. I appreciate it. So let's kind of start at the 30,000-foot level with New Orleans. We'll start with New Orleans first. Can you walk us through how does an investigation like this unfold?
The attack occurs and then maybe, I mean, I don't mean for you to get too far into the weeds, but just kind of lead our audience through how this investigation unfolds.
I'm going to assume that after the attack, the scene secured, you know, police are on scene, they've made that safe. What's going to really happen, you know, the Bureau is going to probably bring in some experts, bomb techs, along with the police bomb techs, and then the evidence response teams and maybe other special agents, depending on the needs of, you know, the division at the time.
But, uh, they're going to immediately start trying to identify it. I think you saw it really in both incidents, but, um, and for certainly into Orleans, they identified the attacker pretty, pretty fast.
And so they're going to identify that subject as fast as they can, because they're going to want to go, um, interview co-conspiracy or determine if there's any other threats, you know, out there like co-conspirators or anything like that. Um, They're going to do interview all the witnesses. They're going to ask for video, you know, either locally or by cell phone.
That's going to be a lot of work just to go through all that. But they have identified the Royalene subject. And, you know, initially, the Bureau, the FBI and the police had said that there was other pro conspirators. Now they've come out and said he acted alone. Which is interesting.
I felt like the FBI has said that they're trying to be more transparent and therefore they're releasing information as it comes, which in an investigation that can change quickly. So now they're saying, originally they said there was co-conspirators, now they're saying they're not.
Let me ask you this, because I mean, again, part of the problem, I think in today's world, it's a problem, but there's also an upside to it, obviously. But a lot of this plays out in the open, right, in real time now because of social media. And everybody, in a sense, you know, the media is playing beat the clock against everybody who's got a smartphone. So information is flowing.
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Chapter 3: What happened during the Tesla Cybertruck explosion in Las Vegas?
And I think it's always a little bit dangerous to speculate about a perpetrator's mindset or mental health. This individual, again, like with New Orleans, there's some similarities, right? This individual and the attacker in New Orleans, both with military experience. And in fact, the Las Vegas incident, he was an active member of the military with the special forces.
They both actually served at Fort Bragg, although there's no indication that they served at the same time, knew each other, etc. They both were in Afghanistan in 2009, I believe. Again, no indication that they knew each other at that point. But talk to me about what you know of the incident in Las Vegas. Certainly.
So what they're reporting, yeah, he was a green beret, I mean, decorated green beret, which are, you know, a counterterrorism unit along with a lot of other things that they do. This person drove from Colorado Springs, rented the Tesla Cybertruck and brought it down. It just came out, I think, that he actually shot himself in the head before the bomb exploded.
So there was a, which is it, you know, again, more of a suicide, but I don't know if a statement, if there wasn't, you know, obviously Elon Musk, Cybertruck, Trump Tower, if there was a statement to be made, they were pretty lucky in that Cybertruck directed the blast, at least is what I'm understanding, blasted up.
So even the glass didn't break, which is pretty fortunate for the people probably around there or inside the hotel. But right now, they have no speculation on the individual. You know, right now, no motive why we don't like New Orleans, we have a pretty good picture right now compared to, you know, this one where all we know is he was active duty military and now has shown up here.
Does it seem... I mean, I suppose it has to be taken into account. It's a factor in trying to determine motivation. But as an individual who was a Green Beret, a significant period of time in the military, and yet the...
the setup right the way that he had orchestrated this seemed very unsophisticated nuts i mean it was just you know some fireworks not even commercial grade it's just available out you know to anybody uh some fuel canisters nothing nothing nothing particularly sophisticated about what he was doing almost as if there wasn't really either a lot of thought or intent to do a lot of collateral damage.
I assume that this is just one of those elements that goes into, again, the investigation and trying to determine motivation.
Yeah. And I think access to a knowledge, you know, if you talk to like bomb techs in the FBI, they're like, you know, people that don't know what they're doing usually kill them. Like they get blown up or they'll blow out the limb or something. So there's a lot of technical stuff there. You know, the easy thing is throw some gas, throw some fireworks, light it.
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Chapter 4: How do investigations unfold after terrorist attacks?
It's one thing if you're talking about a government facility, right? Where if you, you know, you've got more control, you've got more ability to do that. If you're talking about the Vegas strip, good luck with that.
How do you stop a car from parking in front of a hotel? That's really the threat, right? Like, how do you stop a car from parking in front of the hotel?
if you don't stop the car out then there is no there's nothing you know i don't think there's a technological solution right now or or a human guard that's going to be able to figure that out really quickly a car stops and no one gets out for 15 seconds like how is that weird you know
Well, but I think there's good questions, important questions to be asked here, particularly with, I mean, you've got two distinct incidents, right? The Vegas situation, I think, is going to prove to be significantly different than what happened in New Orleans. Certainly. The New Orleans incident has precedent, and extremely recent precedent.
We had a similar situation at a Christmas market a couple hours west of Berlin. It's the same thing. We've had the same thing during a Christmas parade here in the US just a handful of years ago. We know that this is a tactic that can be used, whether it's from an organized terror group or whether it's from a lone wolf who's just radicalized.
I think the concern, I think for some of the general public is are we learning lessons and are we doing what's necessary to prevent these types of scenarios?
I think those things need to be taken into account more. I think people get, I don't want to say complacent, they get hey, it hasn't happened here. We're a low threat. Now I would argue Bourbon Street clearly is packed all the time and a car going down that strip, you know, like that's an easy one to figure out. And clearly they knew it.
And again, I haven't seen the situation where how tight that, you know, that curb was or the sidewalk that he jumped over. Was it, you know, did someone look at that and they're like, there's no way, you know, we can stop them before they get here. Maybe it's because they didn't hear them or... Again, three in the morning, you know, people are clearing out.
There's a lot of questions that they ask. And I think when you look at crowds, I think cities and city policing is going to have to change a little bit to say, we have got to look at, like, and we say low tech, but hey, if it works, why would you go any higher? You know, if you can get a car and run people over, it's just as effective as almost anything.
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Chapter 5: What are the challenges in preventing similar attacks?
Yeah, well, he called it reunification, which is incorrect because the People's Republic has never ruled Taiwan. And in fact, throughout all of history, No Chinese regime has ever held indisputable sovereignty to Taiwan. I can go and wonk out on you on that if you want, and I'd love to do that, but let me just put that to the side for a moment.
The problem for Xi Jinping is not only does he get his terms wrong, but he's wrong when he says that the reunification of Taiwan and the mainland is a trend of history and no one can stop it. Because as time, in fact, goes on, Taiwan and China are diverging. And you can see this most clearly in self-identification surveys. In the last big survey, which was done by the Pew Research Group,
This was from the middle of 2023. The results were 67% of the people in Taiwan viewed themselves as primarily Taiwanese. Only 3% viewed themselves as primarily Chinese. And the really bad news in all of this, because it gets worse for him, is that in the younger age cohort, those 18 to 34, the numbers are 83% Taiwanese, 1% Chinese.
So, if Xi Jinping wants to annex Taiwan, he's not going to be able to do it voluntarily. He's going to be able to do it by force, because the people in Taiwan, although of course they want good relations with China, they don't believe that they are Chinese. So, when Xi Jinping in his 2025 New Year's message says, oh, we are all one family, which is the term he used, well, I don't think so.
There are a lot of people who don't think they're part of that family.
Is there a sense within the Chinese population on the mainland that this is an important issue? I mean, just the person walking the streets of Shanghai or Beijing, do they think about Taiwan and say, you know, it'll be good to unify with Taiwan? I mean, is it something that matters in a sense to the general population or is this just something that sits with Xi Jinping and his view of his legacy?
On a controversial topic like this, we really don't have precise views of the way the Chinese people think, because you can't actually say what you think, and no one's going to ask. But let me put it this way. I don't think the people in China think about this issue all the time. If you were to ask them, you would probably get an answer something like this.
95% would say, yes, Taiwan should be part of the People's Republic. But if you were to ask them, would I give my only son or daughter to go across the Taiwan Strait to kill Taiwanese to annex it? You're down in the single digits. And the reason is, there's a couple of reasons. First of all, Although we just went through this, people in Taiwan don't think they're Chinese.
The people in China, because of relentless indoctrination, think they're Chinese. And the Chinese people in the mainland will tell you this. Officials or common folk will say, Chinese do not kill Chinese. So, you know, if Xi Jinping is thinking of launching an invasion of the main island of Taiwan, it's just not going to get a lot of people. This would be really, really unpopular.
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