A new report released by the Senate Homeland Security Committee claims that federal law enforcement agencies failed to properly analyze a wide range of intelligence that warned of potential violence on Jan. 6, 2021.
The report was released by Democrats on the committee on Tuesday and was written by the committee chair, Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), and staff. In it are several examples of threats of violence and plans for an attack on the U.S. Capitol building, all of which were collected by agencies in the days leading up to Jan. 6.
“At a fundamental level, the agencies failed to fulfill their mission and connect the public and nonpublic information they received,” the report says.
The agencies that collected the data included the Federal Bureau of Investigations and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis.
The report concluded that the agencies consistently downplayed the potential for violence resulting in the government not being prepared for them when they occurred on Jan. 6.
Internal emails and documents were inside the report, which says they “demonstrate the breadth and gravity of the threats these agencies received related to January 6th.”
One example outlined in the report was a post on the social media platform Parler. The company shared the post from Jan. 2, 2021, with the FBI as it read, “This is not a rally and it’s no longer a protest. This is a final stand where we are drawing the red line at Capitol Hill. … don’t be surprised if we take the #capital building.”
Other posts that had similar themes of violence were collected by the FBI and I&A, but both agencies continued to downplay the online rhetoric, according to the report.
Instead, the agencies advised the U.S. Capitol Police and the Washington Metropolitan Police to prepare for a typical political rally, the report says.
What Peters says was the most shocking about the situation was that the insurrection was “essentially planned in plain sight in social media.”
“And yet it seemed as if our intelligence agencies completely dropped the ball,” Peters shared in an interview with NBC News.
The FBI’s Washington Field Office sent an internal email that the report highlights. In the email, several online threats were shared, but it concluded that the posts, videos, and message boards were isolated and could not be considered evidence of an actual threat.
“The threats to the Capitol on January 6th were not made solely in private conversations that required secretive law enforcement investigative tactics to detect,” the report states. “On the contrary, these threats were made openly, often in publicly available social media posts, and FBI and I&A were aware of them.”
The report continues, saying the FBI “has an obligation to take into account the larger threat picture, including social media and online calls for violence when there is a significant increase in threats that may indicate a growing danger of violence.”
Despite the collected threats online, the FBI and Washington Field Office did not issue reports about a potential attack in the days leading up to the Capitol riot, resulting in law enforcement being unprepared when the rioting started.
“I think the failure was largely a failure of imagination, to see threats that the Capitol could be breached as credible, despite the fact that the threats were shared publicly and in such high volume in a variety of ways,” Peters said. “And I think the failure in a lot of ways echoes the findings of the 9/11 Commission, which identified similar failures to take warnings seriously.”
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