There is a significantly noticeable omission in the initial summary of the January 6 committee’s final report on the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol: why weren’t law enforcement agencies better prepared for potential violence when the red flags had been waving for weeks so frantically?
The executive summary, which Daily Kos unwound on Monday, is unquestionably rich in resources and material—typically, an executive summary does not exceed a few pages and this one topped out at 154—but this lack of detail on one of the most shocking elements underlying the events of Jan. 6 seems particularly pointed.
All things being fair, the final report will be released on Wednesday and it may ultimately address issues missing from this introductory tome specific to intelligence failures and overall preparedness.
To be sure, the final report should tackle this subject head-on given the committee’s founding resolution:
“The purpose of the Select Committee [is] the following:
(1) To investigate and report upon the facts, circumstances, and causes relating to the January 6, 2021,domestic terrorist attack upon the United States CapitolComplex (hereafter referred to as the ‘‘domestic terroristattack on the Capitol’’) and relating to the interferencewith the peaceful transfer of power, including facts andcauses relating to the preparedness and response of theUnited States Capitol Police and other Federal, State,and local law enforcement agencies in the National Capital Region and other instrumentalities of government, as well as the influencing factors that fomented such an attack on American representative democracy while engaged in a constitutional process.”
Many members of the U.S. Capitol Police force and the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, as well as other law enforcement agencies, served valiantly on Jan. 6. This is precisely why these questions about what went wrong and why the Capitol was left so vulnerable deserve to be answered.
The committee’s initial summary notes that “intelligence and law enforcement agencies did successfully detect the planning for potential violence on January 6” and it further states that this included “planning specifically by the Proud Boys and Oath Keeper militia groups who ultimately led the attack on the Capitol.”
This is not false, really. There was some awareness of the activities of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys flagged by law enforcement before Jan. 6... but what came of it?
Here’s what is known unequivocally: Oath Keepers, led by Elmer Stewart Rhodes, who was recently convicted of seditious conspiracy, spent weeks publicly and privately broadcasting their plans to come to Washington, D.C. in protest of the 2020 election.
But it wasn’t the typical protest known to D.C.
Rhodes, in fact, just a few days after the election, told Alex Jones, the extremist group could “step in” in Washington, as needed.
“We have men stationed outside of D.C. as a nuclear option in case they attempt to remove the president illegally. We will step in and stop it,” Rhodes said in November 2020.
Rhodes also showed up in Washington in December, leading one rally where he called on Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and raise members of the extremist group to his aid. Rhodes told a large audience nearby the Capitol that Trump’s invocation of the Insurrection Act could stave off the “much more bloody war” Oath Keepers would be forced to wage if he failed to act.
At the Oath Keepers seditious conspiracy trial in October, FBI Special Agent Michael Palian testified that the FBI received a tip on Nov. 25, 2020, from an Oath Keeper based in West Virginia, Abdullah Rasheed. He was on a Nov. 9 GoTo meeting with Rhodes and other members that “scared” him, he said.
Rasheed told jurors after listening to the call, he feared Oath Keepers were preparing to “go to war” in earnest against the federal government.
But the FBI didn’t interview Rasheed until March 2021—three months after he made the tip.
The FBI only issued one bulletin ahead of Jan. 6. It came from the agency’s field office in Norfolk, Virginia. It noted online threads discussing “specific calls for violence” including comments that left little to the imagination.
“Get violent… stop calling this a march or a rally or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal,” a flagged message states.
Norfolk Jan 6 Bulletin by Daily Kos on Scribd
FBI director Christopher Wray was asked about this when he appeared before Congress last year and told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he didn’t see the Norfolk report until days after the attack on the Capitol. Wray noted the information that prompted the Norfolk office to issue its report was “unverified” or “uncorroborated” and he remarked, the threats seemed only “somewhat aspirational in nature.”
But the messaging was still worrisome enough, Wray said, that the raw or “unverified” information were ushered out of Norfolk anyway and shared with Capitol and Metropolitan police forces on Jan. 5. It was posted to an online law enforcement portal as well.
The FBI has claimed it was unaware of the pervasiveness of threats being made online. But this position has beggared belief for two years.
Two days after the attack, Washington, D.C.’s Attorney General Karl Racine said “everyone who was a law enforcement officer or a reporter knew exactly what these hate groups were planning.”
“There were no surprises there,” Racine told NBC at the time.
“They were planning to descend on Washington, D.C., ground center was the Capitol, and they were planning to charge and, as Rudy Giuliani indicated, to do combat justice at the Capitol,” he added.
Maps of the Capitol complex and its tunnel system were posted online and on seamy message boards like 8kun and TheDonald.win, the threats popped up constantly.
“You can go to Washington on Jan. 6 and help storm the Capital. As many Patriots as can be. We will storm the government buildings, kill cops, kill security guards, kill federal employees and agents, and demand a recount,” one user on 8kun wrote.
In addition to the FBI, questions linger around the national security gaps the Department of Homeland Security left open for police in the region for Jan. 6.
This March, the DHS Office of the Inspector General published a report laying out how the agency’s Intelligence and Analysis branch spotted threats as early as December 2020.
RELATED: Jan. 6 warnings held back by officials at DHS, watchdog finds
As Daily Kos reported at the time:
According to the inspector general, a field agent shared a tip on Dec. 21 with fellow DHS analysts in the open source division from a person who “threatened to shoot and kill protesters at the upcoming rallies related to the presidential election.”
The message noted how “he planned to kill at least 50 individuals.”
The open-source analyst agreed to review it, but had trouble locating related information. The analyst asked the field agent for help. Ten days passed before the field agent recalled the request was ever even sent.
She said it “slipped away from her.”
No report was drawn up and no one else inside the national intelligence apparatus was warned.
On Jan. 5, a field agent warned internally that a user on social media was calling for masses of people to come to D.C. to counterprotest. But because no “derogatory information” was found in a search of the person’s social media account, nothing was done.
On Jan. 6, the day of the attack, at 11:29 AM as Trump was reportedly telling Vice President Mike Pence by phone that he could go down in history “as a patriot or … as a pussy,” a field agent shared a tip internally from a social media user claiming the neofascist Proud Boys planned to shut down D.C.’s water infrastructure.
A Senate Homeland Security Committee report noted last June that the FBI and DHS “stressed the difficulty in discerning the constitutionally protected free speech versus actionable, credible threats of violence.”
This has long been a point of political contention for a nation awash in its own history of domestic terrorism and white supremacy. Last month, the Senate Committee on Homeland and Governmental Affairs published a report, “The Rising Threat of Domestic Terrorism,” and assessed the federal response to the spread of extremist content online.
Both the FBI and DHS “failed to systematically track and report data on domestic terrorism,” the report noted. Yet it unironically notes too that the “most persistent and lethal terrorist threat” in America today is white supremacist violence.
When Bennie Thompson, the Jan. 6 committee’s chairman opened the select committee hearings this June, the 74-year-old Black man from Mississippi remarked that he was “from a part of the country where people justify the actions of slavery, Ku Klux Klan, and lynching.”
“I’m reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try and justify the actions of the insurrectionists of January 6, 2021,” he said.
The Department of Justice has put in thousands of hours across all 50 states and spent millions in pursuit of accountability for Jan. 6. The department has racked up 974 arrests and counting and investigations into the insurrection continue apace. These results have a direct throughline to the hundreds of law enforcement officers who held the line at the Capitol despite lacking, as the Senate found last year, the lack of a department-wide operational plan for the joint session, sufficient staff, and up-to-date protective gear and equipment.
Yet tucked deep into the footnotes of the select committee’s executive summary, the panel writes: “Given the timing of receipt of much of this intelligence immediately in advance of January 6, it is unclear that any comprehensive intelligence community analytical product could have been reasonably expected. But it is clear that the information itself was communicated.”
When the select committee conducted its probe, it split investigators off into multiple, color-coded teams. Each team was tasked to investigate a different element of the attack. The “Blue Team” was responsible for reviewing intelligence failures, for example.
As the panel ticked down the days to its final meeting, reports emerged this November from NBC and The Washington Post citing sources familiar with committee dynamics. The sources claimed that staff on the select panel had become frustrated by committee vicechair Liz Cheney’s laser-like focus on Trump’s role in the insurrection. The Republican lawmaker was too focused on him alone and according to The Washington Post, relegated other details to a lesser priority.
The committee members played down reports of internal divisions. Daily Kos was unable to independently verify whether the claims of infighting were as intense as reported.
At the core of the committee’s executive summary, the panel gives the nation’s intelligence apparatus a bit of a cushion by pointing to the former president.
“No intelligence community advance analysis predicted exactly how President Trump would behave, no such analysis recognized the full scale and extent of the threat to the Capitol on January 6,” the summary states.
In many ways, that is the story of Trump. His erraticism is what makes him both predictable and unpredictable.
On Monday, he posted a tirade on his social media platform, Truth Social, and railed against the committee’s decision to criminally refer him to the Justice Department for four crimes including insurrection.
It made him “stronger,” Trump wrote, and would prompt “people who love freedom [to] rally around me.”
Though he isn’t president anymore, he’s running for the office again in 2024. Perhaps this time, closer attention will be paid to the violent threats made so often by those who rally around him.