The FBI and Department of Homeland Security repeatedly ignored intelligence warnings of violence on Jan. 6 and failed to share enough information with Capitol officials, a damning new Senate report finds.
The 106-page report entitled ‘Planned in Plain Sight,explored the role played by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) in the lead up to the uprising.
It details how the two agencies failed to recognize and warn of the potential for violence from some supporters of former President Donald Trump, and as a result the administration did not prepare a security response for the day.
The FBI and Department of Homeland Security repeatedly ignored intelligence warnings of violence on Jan. 6, a new Senate report finds
“The intelligence failures leading up to Jan. 6 were not failures to obtain intelligence suggesting a potential for violence,” the report states, noting that the two agencies “received multiple tips from numerous sources in the days and weeks leading up to the attacks. attack that should have sounded the alarm.’
“On the contrary, those agencies have not fully and accurately assessed the seriousness of the threat,” it notes. “At a fundamental level, the agencies failed.”
The Senate Homeland Security Committee report details tips the FBI received prior to the uprising, including a December 2020 tip that members of the far-right group Proud Boys scheduled to be in Washington, DC, and their “plan is to literally kill people.”
In January, the report found, the FBI was made aware of multiple messages calling for gun violence, such as one Parler user who stated, “[b]ring food and guns. If they do not listen to our words, they may feel our guidance. come armed’; plans to ‘set up armed encampment’ on the [National] Mall’; and a tip about “a TikTok video with someone holding a gun and saying” storm the Capitol on January 6.
But officials did not react with a sense of urgency to what they saw, saying they were “biased to discount the possibility of such an unprecedented event.”
In addition, officials did not sound the alarm “partly because they could not have suspected that the US Capitol Building would be overrun by rioters.”
Democratic Senator Gary Peters, the chair of the committee that commissioned the report, said the results were shocking.
“What was shocking is that this attack was essentially planned in plain sight on social media,” Peters shared NBC news. “And yet it seemed like our intelligence services completely dropped the ball.”
Democratic Sen. Gary Peters, the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said, “What was shocking is that this attack was essentially planned in plain sight on social media … And yet it seemed like our intelligence agencies completely dropped the ball”
The report does not exonerate Donald Trump, who addressed supporters on the National Mall on the morning of Jan. 6 (above)
The report adds to information from the now-defunct House Jan. 6 Committee, a bipartisan 2021 Senate report, and several separate internal reviews by the Capitol Police and other state agencies of what happened leading up to the attack on the Capitol. that resulted in five deaths.
While the main focus of the report is on the intelligence side, it does not absolve Donald Trump from being involved on that day. It cites Trump’s tweets denying the election results and his call for a January 6 protest that would be “wild” as “contributing directly to this attack.”
But the fact remains that the federal agencies charged with preventing domestic terrorism and disseminating intelligence — namely the FBI and I&A — failed to sound the alarm, and prevented much of the violence that followed January 6. could have been if they had.’ concludes the report.
Trump held a rally on the National Ellipse in front of the White House on the morning Congress prepared to certify Electoral College results.
In his remarks, he urged his supporters to “fight like hell” and called on them to march on Capitol Hill in protest of the election, which he falsely claimed was “rigged” and stolen from him .
The report found that as crowds gathered on the National Mall on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, intelligence analysts were more concerned that violence could break out between the mob of Trump supporters and counter-protesters than that a storming of the Capitol would occur. .
“The threats to the Capitol on January 6 were not made exclusively in private conversations that required secretive investigative tactics by law enforcement,” the report says. “Instead, these threats were made openly, often in publicly available social media posts, and the FBI and I&A were aware of them.”
Intelligence analysts were more concerned that violence could break out between the crowd of Trump supporters on the National Mall (above) and counter-demonstrators than a storming of the Capitol
In response to the report, the FBI said it had been cooperating with law enforcement agencies, including the Capitol Police, leading up to and on the day of Jan. 6. that after the attack it increased its focus on “rapid information exchange” with law enforcement partners, and that it also “made improvements to assist investigators and analysts in all of our field offices during the investigative process.”
And a DHS spokesman said the agency has conducted a “comprehensive organizational review” of its intelligence agency, which will “soon develop recommendations for how [the office] better able to deal with the threats to homeland security of today and tomorrow.’
Overall, the report finds a general lack of coordination, bureaucratic delays or general anxiety about what intelligence officials saw online that law enforcement officials were not adequately prepared for the day.
That resulted in the lack of a hard security perimeter around the Capitol that day, as there is during events such as the annual State of the Union address and presidential inaugurations.
The report found that, for example, the FBI was hindered in its attempt to find social media posts related to the Jan. 6 protests when the contract for their external social media monitoring tool expired.
It also found that I&A – the DHS intelligence arm – was hesitant to issue warnings related to Jan. 6, in part because of criticism it received for its handling of information about the protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by a police officer earlier summer.
The report contains a long list of recommendations to avoid a similar situation. It calls on both the FBI and DHS to conduct full post-action reviews. And it says that Congressional certification of future presidential elections should be declared special events for national security, which would bring special security enhancements.