FBI director says domestic terrorism cases have soared in recent months

WASHINGTON — FBI Director Christopher Wray said Tuesday that his agents are pursuing roughly 2,000 domestic terrorism cases — a huge spike as the FBI tries to show it is taking the threat of such attacks seriously in the wake of January’s pro-Trump riot at the U.S. Capitol.

“We have significantly grown the number of investigations and arrests,” Wray told the Senate Judiciary Committee, noting that the number of such cases has more than doubled since he became the FBI director in 2017. He had testified in September that the number of such cases was about 1,000. By the end of 2020, there were about 1,400 such cases, and after Jan. 6 the figure ballooned again, the director said.

Wray also defended the bureau’s handling of intelligence in advance of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, asserting that agents rapidly shared what they were learning with other law enforcement agencies, rejecting criticism that the FBI did not do enough to warn Capitol Police of the looming threat.

Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., the committee chairman, pressed Wray on how the bureau shared a situation report, prepared by the FBI’s Norfolk field office a day before the riot, which warned of specific appeals for violence and a call for “war” at the Capitol. At a hearing last week, the Washington, D.C., police chief and the former Capitol Police chief conceded their agencies had received the warning, but suggested the FBI should have more aggressively sounded the alarm.

“I would certainly think that something as violent as an insurrection at the Capitol would warrant a phone call or something,” D.C. police chief Robert Contee III told lawmakers.

Wray said the report was shared in three ways — sent by email to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, which includes the D.C. and Capitol Police; posted on a law enforcement web portal; and mentioned in a briefing at a command center in D.C.

“It was unverified,” said Wray. “In a perfect world, we would have taken longer to be able to figure out whether it was reliable. But we made the judgment, our folks made the judgment, to get that information to the relevant people as quickly as possible.”

He did not specifically address why no one had called the D.C. police chief, and said he himself had not been briefed on the information before Jan. 6.

Wray said he believed the report was handled similarly to the FBI’s regular practice.