Lack of clarity delayed response to DC riot
Muddled intelligence missed warning signs for far-right threat
Muddled intelligence division missed warning signs for far-right threat.
WASHINGTON — On Jan. 4, the intelligence division of the U.S. Capitol Police issued a report listing all the groups known to be descending on the city and planning to rally for former President Donald Trump two days later, such as the Prime Time Patriots, the MAGA Marchers and Stop the Steal.
The dispatch, a kind of threat matrix, gave low odds that any of the groups might break laws or incite violence, labeling the chances as “improbable,” “highly improbable” or “remote.” But the document, which was not previously disclosed, never addressed the odds of something else happening: that the groups might join together in a combustible mix, leading to an explosion of violence.
But just a day earlier the same office had presented a slightly more ominous picture. The Capitol Police’s intelligence division, which draws on information from the FBI and the Department
of Homeland Security, warned of desperation about “the last opportunity to overturn the results of the presidential election” and the potential for significant danger to law enforcement and the public.
The documents show how police and federal law enforcement agencies produced inconsistent and sometimes conflicting assessments of the threat from American citizens marching on the Capitol as Trump sought to hold onto power. That lack of clarity in turn helps explain why the government did not bring more urgency to security preparations for a worst-case outcome.
But the decision in the face of muddled intelligence to take only limited measures to bolster security and prepare backup highlights another issue: whether agencies that have spent two decades and billions of dollars reacting aggressively to intelligence about the potential for Islamic terrorism are similarly focused on threats from the homegrown far-right.
“Since 9/11, law enforcement has followed a ‘no stone left unturned’ policy when there is even a scintilla of evidence that a Muslim supports terrorism and has routinely targeted social movements as terrorists,” said Faiza Patel, a director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. “But it has refused to take seriously the threat of far-right violent actors.”
Steven Sund, who resigned as the Capitol Police chief after Jan. 6, said in a previously undisclosed letter sent Monday to congressional leaders that the “entire intelligence community seems to have missed” the warning signs.
In the case of the Capitol riot, Sund did make a request several days beforehand for National Guard troops, though it was denied at that time by his bosses, the sergeants-at-arms of the House and the Senate.
The Capitol Police request at the time was driven primarily by the need to expand the security perimeter around the building because of the size of the anticipated demonstration and its possible duration — and not any intelligence warning that there could be an armed assault on the Capitol, according to a person familiar with the Capitol Police’s decision-making.
In the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, numerous agencies predicted that white supremacists and armed militia members might gather in Washington. But in a meeting Jan. 5 about the inauguration, no federal or local law enforcement agencies raised any specific threats of violence for the next day.
One factor in the muddled nature of the intelligence assessments was the difficulty of knowing how seriously to take the extensive social media chatter about efforts to block ratification of Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election.
“Perfect hindsight does not change the fact that nothing in our collective experience or our intelligence — including intelligence provided by FBI, Secret Service, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and D.C. Metropolitan Police (MPD) — indicated that a well-coordinated, armed assault on the Capitol might occur on Jan. 6,” Sund said in his letter.
Yet the failures came even after thousands of social media posts in the days before the assault, which documented how the rioters saw the Capitol — and the lawmakers certifying the election results — as a specific target. “Every corrupt member of Congress locked in one room and surrounded by real Americans is an opportunity that will never present itself again,” declared one post Jan. 5.
Yogananda Pittman, acting chief of the Capitol Police, told Congress last week that her force knew that militias and white supremacists would attend the rallies Jan. 6 and that some participants would be armed. She confirmed that Sund had asked for support from the National Guard but was denied by members of the Capitol Police Board.
“We knew that there was a strong potential for violence and that Congress was the target,” Pittman said. The department beefed up its defenses, she said, “but we did not do enough.”