Released Jan. 6 report cites FBI missteps before the attack on Capitol
The FBI properly shared the intelligence it gathered before the Jan. 6, 2021, riots with relevant law enforcement agencies, but made some missteps that may have hampered preparations for the violent and chaotic attack on the U.S. Capitol that day, according to a report released Thursday from the Justice Department’s inspector general.
The long-awaited report examined whether the FBI appropriately handled and assessed its confidential human sources and intelligence ahead of the certification ahead of presidential election at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
The FBI and Department of Homeland Security have been sharply criticized for what a Senate committee report described as a failure to believe the intelligence tips they received in the run up to the attack.
DHS did not declare Jan. 6 a national special security event, which meant that the FBI only played a supporting role in preparing for the day. The narrowly focused inspector general report examines the FBI’s actions in that role.
The report found that the FBI failed to properly canvas its 55 field offices for information that their confidential human sources may have provided. According to the report, 26 confidential sources were in Washington for events related to Jan. 6, though only three were tasked by the FBI to be there.
None of the confidential human sources, according to the inspector general, have been prosecuted for their actions on Jan. 6, including the ones who entered the U.S. Capitol that day. The report says there were no undercover FBI employees at the U.S. Capitol or surrounding protests on Jan. 6 – despite rumors that have circulated for years on social media and in right wing media that such people were present.
The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack delved very little into the FBI’s handling of intelligence ahead of Jan. 6, 2021.
According to more than a dozen committee staffers told the Washington Post in November 2023 that former representative and committee vice chair Liz Cheney exerted tremendous pressure to focus the final report on Donald Trump’s role instigating the attack. These staffers said at the time that they were deeply disappointed that the public would not get to learn about important evidence unrelated to Trump – presumably including the FBI’s handling of warnings ahead of the attack.
The scant attention to the FBI also drew criticism from Republicans, who accused the Democrat-controlled committee as partisan.
The committee assembled four teams of investigators: the Gold Team to look at Trump’s actions, the Blue Team to dig into the law enforcement and intelligence community’s failure to assess the looming threat and prepare for the well-forecast attack on the Capitol, the Green Team to look at financing for the attack and the Purple Team to examine militia groups and extremism.
In the end, the committee’s report focused heavily only on the work of the Gold Team, leaving reams of evidence out of reach of the American public.
As the fourth anniversary of the Capitol riot approaches, the Justice Department says about 1,572 defendants have been charged with at least one federal crime. Nearly 600 of those defendants are charged with assaulting, resisting or obstructing law enforcement officers, and the FBI was still making arrests in the case as recently as Tuesday.
Of those charged, 1,251 have either pleaded guilty or been convicted at trial, with about two-thirds convicted of misdemeanors such as trespassing and one-third convicted of felonies including assault and “civil disorder,” or rioting.
As of Dec. 6, 1,068 defendants had been sentenced, the Justice Department said, and 645 of those received jail or prison time. The rest received either probation or home detention sentences. The average felony sentence is about 39 months, according to a Washington Post database, and the average misdemeanor sentence is about 60 days, though fewer than half of misdemeanor sentences included jail time.
More than 94% of felony defendants received a jail or prison term, the Post data shows. The longest sentence, 22 years, was imposed on Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the far-right Proud Boys, for seditious conspiracy, and Oath Keepers’ leader Stewart Rhodes received an 18-year term. Both men were convicted by juries of organizing their followers to travel to D.C. to disrupt the electoral vote certification.
President-elect Trump said he may pardon supporters involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol as soon as he takes office.
Trump said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that those incarcerated are “living in hell” and that on his first day in office, he would help riot defendants who have been put through a “very nasty system.”
“I’m going to be acting very quickly. First day,” Trump said. “They’ve been in there for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.”
Trump said there may be exceptions if defendants were “radical” or “crazy.”