INTEL FAILURES IN CAPITOL RIOT
FBI sent warning, Senate panels told
Former chief of U.S. Capitol police testifies that warning from FBI didn’t reach the right people.
WASHINGTON — Around 7 p.m. on Jan. 5, less than 24 hours before an angry mob overran the Capitol, an FBI bulletin warning that extremists were calling for violent attacks on Congress landed in an email inbox used by the District of Columbia police. That same evening, a member of the U.S. Capitol Police received the same memo.
But the alert was not flagged for top officials at either agency, according to congressional testimony Tuesday — deepening questions about the breakdowns that contributed to massive security failures on Jan. 6.
Both acting District police chief Robert Contee III and former U.S. Capitol Police chief Steven Sund said the intelligence community failed to detect key information about the intentions of the attackers and adequately communicate what was known in the run-up to the Capitol riot.
“I would certainly think that something as violent as an insurrection at the Capitol would warrant a phone call or something,” Contee told lawmakers.
Sund cast the Capitol Police as a “consumer” of intelligence from 18 federal agencies.
“If they were finding efforts that this was a coordinated attack, that had been coordinated among numerous states for some time in advance of this, that’s the information that would have been extremely helpful to us,” Sund said.
Tuesday’s joint hearing by two Senate committees also spotlighted the stark warnings that were issued before Congress met in a joint session to formalize Joe Biden’s victory.
One came in the form of the Capitol Police’s own intelligence report three days before the attack. In a 12-page memo, the agency’s intelligence unit warned that “Congress itself” could be targeted by angry Trump supporters who saw the Electoral College vote certification as “the last opportunity to overturn the results of the presidential election.”
Two days later, the FBI alert issued by its field office in Norfolk, Virgina, described how “an online thread discussed specific calls for violence.
Separately, dozens of people on a terrorist watch list were in the District on the day of the riot, including many suspected white supremacists.
The FBI said in a statement Tuesday that the Norfolk, Virginia, report was shared with the Washington Field Office’s joint terrorism task force within 40 minutes and discussed inside a command post there.
“The language was aspirational in nature with no specific and credible details,” the bureau said.