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A damning new Senate report portrays federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies as either unwilling or unable to recognize the serious threats posed by right-wing extremists in the lead-up to the deadly Jan. 6 attack.
The report — “Planned in Plain Sight: A Review of the Intelligence Failures in Advance of January 6th, 2021” — was released by Democrats on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. It details how federal officials downplayed the legitimacy of extremists’ online threats and attempts to organize in preparation for the Capitol riot.
Investigators determined that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, known as I&A, “failed to issue sufficient warnings based on the available intelligence indicating January 6th might turn violent,” the report said.
The report added:
This investigation found that part of the reason FBI failed to take more action to warn its federal partners and the public was because it failed to seriously consider the possibility that threatened actions would actually be carried out, and it dismissed each individual threat as not credible in isolation but failed to fully consider the totality of threats and violent rhetoric associated with such a contentious event.
Another line I found particularly interesting claims that criticism of federal surveillance tactics during the racial justice protests in 2020 caused the intelligence community to hesitate in gathering info ahead of Jan. 6. Here’s that section:
I&A’s mistakes during racial justice demonstrations in 2020 — during which the agency was criticized for over-collecting intelligence on American citizens — resulted in a “pendulum swing” after which analysts were then hesitant to report open-source intelligence they were seeing in the lead-up to January 6th.”
In other words, the investigation found that federal intelligence officials subjected civil rights demonstrators to more scrutiny than they applied to right-wing extremists threatening to overthrow our government.
The report even quotes a Homeland Security senior watch officer who wrote, just before 9 a.m. on Jan. 6, that there was “no indication of civil disobedience.” Investigators also found that a lack of coordination among federal agencies led to confusion that day:
Officials disagreed as to which agency was taking the lead role, with Department of Defense (DOD) officials pointing to DOJ as the lead, but DOJ and FBI officials stated that no agency had been designated the lead. Officials from other agencies also reported confusion about who was in charge. DHS also did not designate January 6th as a National Special Security Event, which it routinely does for significant events and which would have bolstered security and coordination. Furthermore, when asked about what went wrong on January 6th, officials across agencies passed blame, largely pointing to failures at other agencies for what happened.
The report lists a few fixes to avoid similar failures in the future, among them that the FBI and DHS should “conduct full internal reviews of their actions in the lead-up to January 6th” and “improve their processes for assessing and sharing intelligence (including open-source intelligence on social media).” The report also recommends designating a joint session of Congress to certify a presidential election (like the one on Jan. 6, 2021) as a National Special Security Event, which would require more thorough security plans.
The report also says the Senate committee “faced challenges in obtaining full compliance with its requests,” which the report says Congress can remedy by reasserting its authority “in legitimate oversight of the Executive Branch.”
The document doesn’t offer any reasons for this noncompliance. What’s clear, though, is that members of the intelligence community were flippant toward threats of violence and largely froze at a time when Americans most needed them to spring to action.
And that doesn’t inspire confidence they’ll be prepared — or willing — to prevent attacks like this in the future.