It has been evident since January 6, 2021 that intelligence agencies and law enforcement have overwhelmingly failed to prevent and respond to the attack on the US Capitol. A new report from Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security Committee details how federal agencies let the threat from Trump supporters go unaddressed, leading to the disastrous lack of preparedness we’ve all seen in action (or inaction). That day.
“Our intelligence agencies have completely dropped the ball,” Sen. Gary Peters, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, told The New York Times. He added: “Despite a slew of advice and other warnings of intelligence violence on January 6, the report showed that these agencies repeatedly downplayed the threat level and did not share the intelligence they had. with their law enforcement partners.”
You wouldn’t say that was an easy quote for intelligence agencies, but when Peters says they “lowered the threat level,” he’s understating it. The report finds that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis have collected a large number of tips and social media posts showing threats of violence and alluding to specific plans. They had reports of increased traffic on a website showing maps of the Capitol Tunnels. The FBI has received advice and referrals on threats of violence from a former acting assistant attorney general for national security, the US Postal Inspection Service, the US Marshals Service, and even the social media platform of extreme right Talking.
On January 2, Parler sent the FBI a message saying, “(c) this is not a rally and this is no longer a protest. This is a final stand where we draw the red line on Capitol Hill. …don’t be surprised if we take the #capital building. Another said: “Peaceful protests are long gone… Everyone comes with guns. They may be hidden at first, but if Congress does the wrong thing, expect real chaos because Trump needs us to cause chaos to enact the #insurrectionact.
The report concludes that “part of the reason the FBI did not take more action to warn its federal partners and the public was because it did not seriously consider the possibility that threatened actions were actually carried out, and he dismissed each individual threat as not being credible”. in isolation, but did not fully consider all of the threats and violent rhetoric associated with such a controversial event. Additionally, the FBI assumed that “potential clashes between protesters (e.g. Proud Boys) and counter-protesters (e.g. Antifa)” were the main threat, rather than “giving more attention and point out the growing threat to elected officials.” officials and the Capitol itself.
The FBI would not seriously consider the possibility that this particular group of protesters were really as violent as they claimed, and it’s not hard to see why when you consider who these protesters were. Ultimately, “many of the threatened actions that the FBI had found to be uncredible actually took place on January 6th. For example, among the threats directed at the events of January 6 that the FBI deemed not credible were threats to engage in violence, use makeshift weapons, use mobs to overwhelm police and storm the Capitol.
It wasn’t just the FBI. The I&A also saw huge amounts of evidence that violence was happening and dismissed it, according to the report. This dismissal came in part in direct reference to the heavy-handed response to other recent but instructive protests:
Additionally, I&A’s mistakes during the 2020 racial justice protests – during which the agency was criticized for collecting too much intelligence on US citizens – led to a “swing of the pendulum” after which analysts then hesitated to report the open source information they saw in the until January 6.
Isn’t it interesting how it turned out that the excessive intelligence gathering on American citizens happened primarily to blacks protesting racial injustice and the reluctance to report threats then primarily benefited whites attacking the Congress ? Regarding the racial justice protests, DHS “deployed helicopters, planes and drones to 15 cities where protesters gathered to protest the death of George Floyd, logging at least 270 hours of surveillance” , but when it came to explicit threats to storm the United States Capitol in an effort to nullify an election, DHS concluded that it could not even share these publicly posted threats on the social networks. It’s one hell of a “pendulum swing”.
Similarly, regarding the George Floyd protests, “the DHS report found that I&A collectors were pressured to find evidence to support management’s conclusion on the Portland protests, for example by linking the protests to Antifa despite the fact that “overwhelming intelligence regarding the motivations or affiliations of the violent protesters did not exist. “”In regards to Jan. 6, the FBI focused on the possibility of clashes between Trump-supporting protesters and purely hypothetical antifa counter-protesters, even though there was substantial evidence for an attack by supporters. from Trump and basically nothing to suggest there would be a significant number of counter-protesters.
Because the agencies refused to connect the dots on the evidence and believe what they were seeing, they failed to document the threats and pass them on to other law enforcement agencies. The FBI issued only two written products warning of threats, both coming out of field offices on the evening of January 5, without the authority that would have accompanied a warning from headquarters. A DHS “National Civil Unrest Summary” released the morning of Jan. 6 “gave no indication of the potential for violence.”
Moreover, I&A couldn’t believe what she saw even as the crowd entered the Capitol:
At 2:58 p.m. (January 6, when the crowd was already inside the Capitol), an email from I&A stated, “(i) Over the past 48 hours there have been discussions important on the thedonald (.) Win forum which was at the time considered hyperbole and as such protected from speech. … Other discussions over the past 48 hours have called for more violent actions, but at this time no credible information to convey has been established.
Which threats are considered hyperbole rather than credible, actionable information? Not heavily armed white people supporting Trump, that’s for sure! At 4:27 p.m., another internal email echoed this, saying, “So far, we haven’t had anything that has met our threshold for reporting these incidents.” The report notes:
An internal I&A timeline of these events shows that this exchange occurred after the MPD declared a riot, the USCP declared a capitol lockdown, the “capitol building (had) been breached and people (were) outside the Senate Chamber”, the USCP had sent an “immediate request” for information, the House of Representatives and the Vice President had been evacuated, weapons had been fired inside the Chamber of the House, gunshots had been reported and “(Members) barricaded the entrance” to the Congress House of the house. Even after these events occurred, I&A still struggled to assess the credibility of the threats against the Capitol and to report on its intelligence.
They watched it happen, unable to decide if they should believe the reports they had gathered saying exactly this thing was going to happen.
There’s a lot more to the 106-page report. The failure to report threats was based in part on multiple specific violations of policy and procedure. A few days before January 6, an FBI contract for a social media monitoring service expired, creating a gap in their tracking. Officials disagreed on which agency should lead the response, with the Defense Department saying the Justice Department and the Justice Department disagreed. It was a clown show with deadly results, and it’s still hard to believe — impossible to believe, even — that the response would have been so weak if the people threatening the Capitol had been black or from the political left.
