While other reports have examined intelligence failures surrounding the January 6 assault, such as a 2021 bipartisan Senate report, the House panel on the January 6 assault, and several separate internal evaluations of the California Police. Capitol and other government agencies, the latest investigation is the first at the congressional level to focus solely on the actions of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis.
In the aftermath of the insurrection, Peters said the panel interviewed officials from both agencies and found that they were “pointing fingers quite often” at each other. “Everyone should be held accountable, because everyone failed,” Peters warned.
Based on emails and interviews collected by the Senate committee and other bodies, including the House panel on the January 6 assault, the report details sensitive information received by agencies in the weeks leading up to the stroke.
There was no failure to obtain evidence, the report adds, rather the agencies “did not fully and accurately assess the severity of the threat identified by that intelligence, nor did they formally disseminate the guidance to their law enforcement colleagues.” ”.
As Trump, a Republican, falsely claimed that he had won the 2020 election and tried to overturn his electoral defeat, calling on his supporters to “fight like hell” in a speech outside the White House that day, thousands of them marched on the Capitol. More than 2,000 rioters outpaced law enforcement, assaulted police and caused more than $2.7 billion in damage to the Capitol, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. published earlier this year.
After breaking doors and windows, rioters made lawmakers run for their lives and temporarily halted the certification of the election victory of Biden, a Democrat.
Even as the attack was taking place, the new report found, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security downplayed the threats. As Capitol Police struggled to clear the building of intruders, Homeland Security officials “were still trying to assess the credibility of the threats against the Capitol and report their intelligence findings.”
Even as protesters gathered to listen to Trump’s speech and were near the Capitol “wearing bulletproof helmets, body armor, radio equipment and military-grade backpacks,” the FBI reported during a 10 a.m. briefing. that “there were no credible threats at this time.”
The lack of sufficient warning meant that law enforcement was not properly prepared and did not establish a hardened perimeter around the Capitol, as occurs during events such as the annual State of the Union address.
The report reveals 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 were picking them up. The FBI, for example, was unexpectedly hampered in its attempt to detect social media posts about the planning of the January 6 protests because the contract for its monitoring tool, developed by a third party, expired. In Homeland Security, analysts were hesitant to report publicly available intelligence after being criticized in 2020 for collecting intelligence on US citizens during racial justice demonstrations.
One tip received by the FBI before the January 6 attack was from a former Justice Department official, who sent screenshots of online postings by members of the extremist group Oath Keepers: A message on one of those screenshots warned: “Only there is a way in. It is not with signs or rallies. It’s bullets!”
The social media platform Parler itself, a favorite among Trump supporters, sent several posts it found alarming directly to the FBI, before adding that there was “more where this came from” and that they were concerned about what would happen on January 6.
“This is not a rally and it is no longer a protest,” read one of Parler’s posts sent to the FBI, according to the report. “This is a final position where we are drawing the red line at the Capitol… No one will be surprised if we take the #capital building,” he added.
But even despite receiving the warnings, the Senate panel found, the agency said time and again that there were no credible threats.
“Our nation has yet to recover from the fallout of January 6, but what is clear is the need for a reassessment of the federal government’s internal intelligence collection, analysis, and dissemination processes,” the new report added. .
In a statement, Homeland Security spokesman Angelo Fernandez assured that the Department has made many of these changes, after two and a half years. He maintained that the Department “has strengthened intelligence analysis, information sharing, and operational preparedness to help prevent acts of violence and keep our communities safe.”
In a separate response, the FBI said in a statement that, since the attack, it has focused more on the “rapid exchange of information” and that it has centralized its flow to ensure more timely notifications to other entities. “The FBI is determined to vigorously combat the danger posed by all violent extremists within the country, regardless of their motivations,” the text said.
FBI Director Christopher Wray defended the FBI’s handling of intelligence in the lead up to January 6, including a report from his office in Norfolk on January 5 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.
The faultfinding between the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security echoes the fierce criticism leveled at the Capitol Police in a bipartisan report issued two years ago by two Senate committees. That report found that the police intelligence unit was also aware of the social media posts calling for violence, but did not report them to higher-ups.
Peters says he asked the two intelligence agencies to investigate after other reports, such as the House panel investigation last year, focused on other aspects of the attack. The January 6 panel focused more on Trump’s actions, concluding in its report that the former president criminally engaged in a “multi-party conspiracy” to try to overturn the official results of the 2020 presidential election and failed to act. to prevent his supporters from attacking the Capitol.
“It’s important that we become aware of these failures to make sure they don’t happen again,” Peters stressed.
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Associated Press writers Eric Tucker and Rebecca Santana contributed to this report.
FUENTE: Associated Press
