Capitol officers left out of loop, watchdog says

The Capitol Police and other federal entities fell short of consistently sharing threat information in the lead-up to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a federal watchdog said in a report released Tuesday.

The Government Accountability Office report said Capitol Police did identify potential violence, but the agency failed to internally share pertinent threat information throughout the agency, which led to “some officers, agents and intelligence staff not having complete information.”

“Capitol Police did not include all relevant threat information from other agencies in its threat products developed for January 6,” according to the report.

The federal watchdog made 10 recommendations to five different entities. That included a recommendation for the chief of the Capitol Police to set up policies for sharing “threat-related information agency-wide.” The agency, in a letter included in the report, responded in December that it is taking steps to implement the recommendation.

The recommendations follow more than two years of increased attention and funding for the Capitol Police after the attack.

A Senate committee report released months after the attack concluded that the agency’s intelligence components did not communicate the full range of the threat information.

The House committee that investigated the attack, in its final report released in December, called for additional oversight of the police department “as it improves its planning, training, equipping, and intelligence processes and practices.”

And the current Capitol Police chief, J. Thomas Manger, acknowledged at a Senate Rules Committee hearing in December that the department before the attack had “systemic deficiencies,” which he has tried to fix.