How FBI dropped the ball on Jan. 6
Documents suggest human error, bias blinded the agency
WASHINGTON — Days before the end of the 2020 presidential race, a team of FBI analysts tried to game out the worst potential outcomes of a disputed election. Of all the scenarios they envisioned, the one they never thought of came to pass: a violent mob mobilizing in support of former President Donald Trump.
The team’s work, which has never been reported, is the latest example of how the FBI was unable to predict — or prevent — the chaos that erupted Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol. Apparently blinded by a narrow focus on “lone wolf ” offenders and a misguided belief that the threat from the far left was as great as that from the far right, the analysis and other new documents suggest, bureau officials did not anticipate or adequately prepare for the attack.
The story of the FBI’s missteps in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6 was touched upon, but not fully explored, by the House select committee investigating Jan. 6 and may involve a mix of legal hurdles, institutional biases and simple human error.
The analysis conducted by the FBI, an exercise often known as a “red cell,” was included in the select committee’s investigation examining structural failures at the bureau and the Department of Homeland Security. The committee did not publish a report on those findings, but The New York Times reviewed a draft document containing preliminary conclusions.
There was no single failure. Agents ignored warning signs on social media and relied on confidential sources who either knew little or failed to sound the
alarm. Still, even recently, bureau officials have played down not preventing the assault on the Capitol.
“If everybody knew and all the public knew that they were going to storm Congress, I don’t know why one person didn’t tell us,” Jennifer Moore, the top intelligence official at the FBI’s Washington field office at the time, told congressional investigators.
Other agencies, like the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service and in particular the Capitol Police, also had major roles in analyzing intelligence and protecting the Capitol before Jan. 6 — and all failed to secure top officials. But the FBI had a unique part to play given its superior investigative reach and mandate to prevent acts of terror.
Now the FBI is conducting an internal review of what happened Jan. 6 to assess what it describes as lessons learned and to “make improvements in communication
and in the collection, analysis and sharing of information.” The Justice Department’s inspector general is also scrutinizing the bureau’s preparation and response.
Congressional investigators who examined the FBI’s response never received from the bureau many key documents they requested. The bureau provided about 2,000 documents, while the Secret Service by comparison offered over 1 million electronic communications.
Moreover, the FBI only did two transcribed interviews with top bureau officials: one with Moore and another with David Bowdich, the former FBI deputy director. The committee staff also received a dozen briefings, including from Steven Jensen, who ran the bureau’s domestic terrorism operations Jan. 6.
Committee investigators were, however, able to obtain emails that illustrated the bureau’s belief that there
were no credible threats to Washington before Jan. 6. Those emails were written even as agents tracked domestic terrorism suspects planning trips to the city for Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally, and opened dozens of new cases related to unrest surrounding the election.
The draft document cites two major problems that essentially blinded the FBI.
For years, the bureau has highlighted “lone wolves” — individuals acting on their own. In 2022, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before Congress that “the greatest terrorism threat to our homeland is posed by lone actors or small cells of individuals who typically radicalize to violence online.”
That focus obscured its ability to see a “broad-right wing movement come together” and created a cognitive bias that hampered critical thinking, according to the draft document.
The unclassified “red cell” analysis — dated Oct. 27, 2020 — discussed four potential situations that involved lone offenders, but “none suggested the rise of a mass movement that might support an aggrieved losing candidate,” the draft document said. And none specifically addressed actors such as militia groups or white supremacists, who took a leading role in the Capitol attack.
As early as 2019, Attorney General William Barr and then Trump wanted the bureau to focus on leftist groups like the antifa movement, claiming they were the real threat. This occurred even after a spate of mass shootings that year targeted places like synagogues and the FBI made combating racially motivated extremists a top threat.
In 2021, both the Justice Department and the FBI made investigating far-left extremists a top priority along with militias and other anti-government groups. But in more than two decades, there had been only one killing by someone the bureau had classified as an “anarchist violent extremist.”
The committee’s draft document said this decision by the FBI was an exercise in false equivalency, noting that the lethal threats posed by far-right violent extremists in recent years far outpaced the threats from the left. Officials at the FBI and Justice Department have repeatedly said white supremacist extremists were the top domestic terrorism threat and the most lethal one.
The FBI said in a statement that it sought to counter all types of threats, saying it would “continue to work to prevent acts of violence and mitigate threats, without fear or favor, regardless of the underlying motivation or socio-politico goal.”
It added that “while lone actors pose a serious and persistent threat, the FBI maintains a broad perspective, constantly gathering information and evaluating intelligence.”
The FBI has long kept tabs on extremist groups through confidential sources. And in the months leading to Jan. 6, the bureau was well positioned to know what was happening inside the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers militia, two far-right groups whose leaders were later charged with seditious conspiracy.
Federal agents had managed to recruit a star informant at the highest levels of the Oath Keepers: Greg McWhirter, the organization’s No. 2 man at the time and a confidant of its leader, Stewart Rhodes. The FBI had also developed relationships with at least eight members of the Proud Boys.
And yet before Jan. 6, none of these informants sounded an alarm about a pending attack, according to lawyers associated with the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.