FBI chief says pre-riot report widely shared
Warns of rising threat of domestic extremism
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 ... 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 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.
Wray said the Capitol extremists represent just part of a burgeoning domesFBI
tic 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.”
“We need to be abundantly clear that white supremacists and other farright extremists are the most significant domestic terrorism threat facing the United States today,” Durbin said. “I hope that everyone in this room can look at the facts and acknowledge this, and that we can come together on a bipartisan basis to defeat this threat.”