FBI chief: Pre-riot report was widely shared with police
FBI Director Christopher Wray on Tuesday described an ominous warning the night before the Capitol riots about the prospect of extreme violence as “raw, unverified, uncorroborated information” – but he said the bureau’s report was shared extensively with Capitol Police and other authorities.
Wray said the report, which concluded that extremists were “preparing for war,” was provided to authorities at the command level, distributed to its local Joint Terrorism Task Force network and posted on a national electronic portal for review by law enforcement authorities across the country.
The FBI director’s testimony before a Senate panel comes nearly a week after former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund told a separate Senate committee that the intelligence never made it to him and others before the attack that left five dead, including Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick.
Sund acknowledged that the bulletin landed at the Capitol police agency’s intelligence unit but said it was never forwarded.
Though Wray told lawmakers Tuesday that he did not become aware of the report’s existence until “some number of days” after Jan. 6, he said the contents of the advisory were important enough for the FBI to distribute it across law enforcement the way they did at the time. “Because of the level of detail that was in it, the judgment was, given the press of time, given the specificity ... was to push it to the people who needed it,” he said.
Pressed by lawmakers on why the information had not been seen by either the former Capitol chief, who resigned shortly after the attack, or the acting District of Columbia police chief, Wray said: “I don’t have a good answer.”
“It was more than just an email,” the director said, adding that at least five Capitol police officers who also serve as members of a Capitol-area terrorism task force would have received it.
In addition to the report’s placement on an electronic portal, Wray said, the information was included in a “verbal” briefing for law enforcement officials at a local command center.
But Sen. Richard Blumenthal, DConn., citing the volume of threat-related information circulating across social media in the days before Jan. 6, suggested the FBI should have called more urgent attention to the risk.
“Why didn’t you sound the alarm in a more visible and ringing way?” Blumenthal asked.
Wray said he had warned repeatedly of the mounting domestic threat in recent years and again defended the bureau’s handling of the threat report distributed before the attack.
Wray’s testimony comes six months after he offered a now-prescient warning of the threat posed by domestic extremists. “Trends may shift, but the underlying drivers for domestic violent extremism – such as perceptions of government or law enforcement overreach, sociopolitical conditions, racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, misogyny and reactions to legislative actions – remain constant,” he said then.
The director on Tuesday described how the Capitol assault involved some of the very classes of extremists he warned about in September.
Wray said the Capitol extremists represent just part of a burgeoning domestic threat landscape in which agents are working about 2,000 investigations, double the number the FBI reported four years ago.
In opening Tuesday’s hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., declared that the “federal government has failed to address the growing terrorist menace in our own backyard.”
He took sharp aim at the Trump administration, saying officials “spent four years downplaying the threat posed by white supremacists.”