By David Cruz
Correspondent
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson calls it an evolving threat — extremists bent on spreading terror through the region and around the world, including the New York metro area.
“Homeland Security increasingly depends upon cooperation between federal state and local law enforcement, first responders, homeland security officials,” said Johnson.
Govs. Chris Christie and Andrew Cuomo met in mid-town Manhattan with city, state and federal law enforcement officials. Afterward, Johnson, the governors and Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that they have instructed their Homeland Security teams to take the next 10 days to as Christie put it: “To do a complete review of how we’re conducting ourselves in terms of the protection of our assists in the state and our people.”
The officials said they wouldn’t take any questions off topic and beyond the 10-day review there wasn’t much more in terms of details.
“We suffered and learned from the 93 World Trade Center attacks. We suffered and learned from 9/11 obviously and we would be in a state of denial if we did not say with what’s going on internationally that the risk of a threat to us has increased,” said Cuomo.
Clearly the New York/New Jersey region is always a target, but officials here refused to say whether the threat was any more imminent today than it’s been in recent years.
You could ask why it took two governors, a mayor and a Homeland Security secretary to do the job that a press release could have accomplished, but that question would have been off topic. The whole enterprise had the look of a photo-op intended to showcase the bipartisanship between two governors looking forward to upcoming elections.