The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) downplayed or ignored “a tremendous amount of intelligence” ahead of the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, according to the chairman of a Senate panel that on Tuesday it will publish a new report on the alleged irregularities.
The report details how the agencies failed to acknowledge or warn of the potential for violence as some of then-President Donald Trump’s supporters openly planned the siege in messages and online forums.
Among the crowd of intelligence that went unnoticed was a December 2020 tip to the FBI that members of the far-right group Proud Boys planned to be in Washington, D.C., for the certification of Joe Biden’s victory and his “plan to literally killing people,” according to the report.
The Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee noted that the agencies were also aware of many social media posts that portended violence, some calling on Trump supporters to “come armed” and storm the Capitol, kill lawmakers or “burn the place to the ground.”
Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, the Democratic chairman of the DHS panel, said the failure was “largely a lack of imagination to see threats that the Capitol could be breached as credible,” echoing the findings of the 9/11 commission on the intelligence failures of the 2001 terrorist attacks.
The committee’s majority staff report noted that the intelligence community has not been completely recalibrated to focus on threats from domestic, rather than international, terrorism. And government intelligence leaders did not sound the alarm “in part because they could not conceive of the US Capitol building being overrun by rioters.”
Still, according to Peters, the reasons for discarding what he called a “massive” amount of intelligence “defies easy explanation.”
While other reports have examined intelligence failures around January 6, including a bipartisan report from the Senate from 2021, the House committee from January 6 of last year, and several separate internal assessments by the Capitol Police and other agencies. government agencies, the latest investigation is the first congressional report to rely solely on the actions of the FBI and DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis.
In the aftermath of the attack, Peters said the committee interviewed officials from both agencies and found that they “pointed fingers at each other pretty constantly.”
“Everyone should be held accountable because everyone failed,” Peters opined.
IN DETAIL
The report contains dozens of leads about the violence on January 6 that agencies received and discarded either due to a lack of coordination, bureaucratic delays or concern on the part of those who picked them up.
The FBI, for example, was unexpectedly hampered in its attempt to find social media posts planning the January 6 protests when the contract for its third-party social media monitoring tool expired.
As for the DHS, analysts were hesitant to report open source intelligence after criticism in 2020 for collecting intelligence on US citizens during racial justice rallies.
One confession received by the FBI before the January 6 attack was from a former Justice Department official who sent screenshots of online posts by members of the extremist group Oath Keepers: “There is only one way in. They are not signs. They are not rallies. Those are f—— bullets!”
ANNOUNCE CHANGES
In a statement, Homeland Security spokesman Ángelo Fernández reported that the department has made many of those changes two and a half years later. He added that the agency “has strengthened intelligence analysis, information sharing and operational preparedness to help prevent acts of violence and keep our communities safe.”
For its part, the FBI said in a separate response that, since the attack, it has focused more on the “rapid exchange of information” and centralized the flow of information to ensure more timely notification to other entities.
“The FBI is determined to aggressively combat the danger posed by all domestic violent extremists, regardless of their motivations,” the statement read.
FBI Director Christopher Wray defended the agency’s handling of intelligence in the run-up to Jan. 6, including a Jan. 5 report from his Norfolk field office that cited online postings that foreshadowed the possibility of a “war” in Washington the next day. The Senate report noted that the memo “failed to take note of the multitude of other warnings” the agency had received.
