■ FBI Director Chris Wray told Congress that the Jan. 6 riot was “domestic terrorism.”
Extremism growing in U.S., Wray warns
WASHINGTON — FBI Director Chris Wray labeled the January riot at the U.S. Capitol as “domestic terrorism” Tuesday and warned of a growing threat of homegrown violent extremism that law enforcement is scrambling to confront through thousands of investigations.
Wray also defended to lawmakers his own agency’s handling of an intelligence report that warned of the prospect for violence on Jan. 6. And he rejected allegations advanced by some Republicans that anti-trump groups had organized the deadly riot, which began when a violent mob stormed the building as Congress was gathering to certify results of the presidential election.
Wray’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, his first before Congress since the insurrection, was the latest in hearings centered on the law enforcement response to the Capitol insurrection. Lawmakers pressed him not only about possible intelligence and communication failures ahead of the riot but also about the threat of violence from white supremacists, militias and other extremists that the FBI says it is prioritizing with the same urgency as the menace of international terrorism organizations.
“Jan. 6 was not an isolated event. The problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a long time now and it’s not going away anytime soon,” Wray told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “At the FBI, we’ve been sounding the alarm on it for a number of years now.”
Wray said the number of domestic terrorism investigations has increased from around 1,000 when he became FBI director in 2017 to about 2,000 now. The number of white supremacist arrests has almost tripled, he said.
Many of the senators’ questions Tuesday centered on the FBI’S handling of a Jan. 5 report from its Norfolk, Virginia, field office that warned of online posts foreshadowing a “war” in Washington the following day. Capitol Police leaders have said they were unaware of that report and received no intelligence from the FBI that would have led them to expect the sort of violence that besieged them. Five people died, including a Capitol Police officer and a woman who was shot as she tried to climb through a smashed window into the House chamber with lawmakers still inside.
Wray said the report was disseminated though the FBI’S joint terrorism task force, discussed at a command post in Washington and posted on an internet portal available to other law enforcement agencies.
“We did communicate that information in a timely fashion to the Capitol Police and (Metropolitan Police Department) in not one, not two, but three different ways,” Wray said, though he added that because the violence that ensued was “not an acceptable result,” the FBI was looking into what it could have done differently.