It’s starting to look a lot like the FBI wanted trouble to start on January 6, if they didn’t start it themselves. They’re taking serious heat now for ignoring “multiple tips” and were well aware of “calls for violence online.” They didn’t do a whole lot about it. A report from the Senate Homeland Security Committee released Tuesday says they “failed to fully and accurately assess the severity of the threat identified by that intelligence.”
FBI ignored the intelligence
The FBI didn’t seem to want to share “critical intelligence information that could have helped law enforcement better prepare for the events of January 6th, 2021.”
According to the Senate report released June 27, “despite the high volume of tips and online traffic about the potential for violence these agencies failed to sound the alarm.” Some say federal agents or their informants were behind all that chatter. Anyone can be lurking behind a Guy Fawkes mask.
The bureau did communicate some intelligence to “partner agencies” but they did it “informally.” Apparently the FBI didn’t want to leave paper trails or let the things they knew were about to happen get circulated around the general law enforcement community.
The 105-page report I just released as Chairman of @HSGAC found that the FBI and DHS fundamentally failed to fulfill their mission and notify other law enforcement agencies about the potential for violence on Jan 6th.
We can't let that happen again. https://t.co/k2HVNOLlL6
— Senator Gary Peters (@SenGaryPeters) June 27, 2023
Someone might have done something to prevent it ahead of time. They might start asking questions like who’s this Ray Epps guy?
As the report states, “while the FBI communicated its intelligence to partner agencies informally, it downplayed the severity of the threat and did not issue urgent warnings anticipating violence.”
The Senate committee wasn’t happy with that, suggesting the bureau “failed to seriously consider the possibility that threatened actions would actually be carried out.” Unless they wanted them to happen.
Not credible in isolation
The FBI was careful to dismiss each threat individually, one-by-one as “not credible in isolation.” They made that determination without fully considering the “totality of threats and violent rhetoric.”
Department of Homeland Security heard some of the rumors. The Office of Intelligence and Analysis believed the bureau when the “concerning posts” were “deemed noncredible threats, despite internal guidelines recommending otherwise.”
FBI agents lied when they “wrongly concluded” they could not process certain online tips. In fact, the rules “required all tips to be logged regardless of credibility.”
“Our intelligence agencies completely dropped the ball,” said Senator Gary Peters, Democrat of Michigan and the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee. https://t.co/S1zHK33nhR
— Linda Hill (@bulldoghill) June 27, 2023
They didn’t log the ones which mentioned their assets and informants. They especially didn’t want anyone to know they were hard at work planting all that chatter.
Summarizing, the report’s author Michigan Senator Gary Peters notes their report “shows there was a shocking failure of imagination from these intelligence agencies to take these threats seriously, and there is no question that their failures to effectively analyze and share the threat information contributed to the failures to prevent and respond to the horrific attack that unfolded at the Capitol.”
Apparently, the FBI could have stopped it but they much preferred to nudge it along.
