I would like to add another dimension to Alan’s post regarding January 6th by focusing on the intelligence analysis and decision-making by various government agencies prior to that day.
There has been a lot of ink spilled by the old legacy press regarding the DOJ Inspector General’s (IG) report that the FBI had 26 informants on the ground during Jan. 6. Some commentators have seized upon a particular finding in the report, that there were no FBI agents physically present within the crowd that day, as definitive proof against broader theories of FBI involvement.
Let’s leave aside whether the scope of the report could adequately cover all of the FBI’s activities or even how a single data point (lack of FBI agents on the ground) is used to dismiss a complex web of questions in order to reach simplistic conclusions.
Instead let’s focus on something more nuanced concerning potential intelligence gathering, informants, and other forms of involvement that preceded the events of that day.
First of all, the IG report was concerned with “confidential human sources” (CHS) and not the full scope of FBI activities. What it did report was that the FBI had 26 such people in the area of the Capitol that day, though not all breached the actual building or its grounds.
Second, the report stated the FBI failed to adequately canvas its field offices for intelligence from CHS that could have helped law enforcement with their Jan. 6 preparations.
The Inspector General’s report on January 6 reveals crucial details about security preparations that were largely omitted from the January 6 Committee’s findings. While media narratives portrayed the Capitol riot as an unexpected crisis, the reality of pre-January 6 security planning tells a different story.
The IG report details extensive planning meetings among multiple agencies: DC authorities, Capitol Hill security, Department of Justice offices, the FBI, and the Army. These discussions expose two issues: first, the Byzantine nature of security arrangements in DC, involving numerous agencies across overlapping jurisdictions that reduced the room for decisive action; and second, the FBI’s designated role as primarily an intelligence support function.
The FBI’s intelligence procedures were remarkably bureaucratic and convoluted. According to the report, the agency lacked formal procedures to quickly compile intelligence from field offices regarding specific events. While a “CEM” mechanism existed for gathering confidential human source information, its 90-day turnaround made it impractical for time-sensitive events. This bureaucratic gridlock manifested in bizarre ways: both the Washington Field Office and the Counter Terrorism Division believed an official request had been issued when it had not, yet neither followed through effectively.
It’s almost as if someone went through a lot of trouble (and self-denial) to not know.
Two pivotal decisions were discussed at these interagency meetings: whether to enhance Capitol security and whether to deploy the National Guard. Leadership opted to maintain existing security levels and to not the deploy the Guard, partly due to concerns about the optics of combat-equipped troops at the Capitol. However, in hindsight even modest security enhancements, such as upgraded fencing or a limited troop presence, could have provided effective crowd control and prevented the rioting that occurred.
It would be easy to write-off the intelligence failings as simply bureaucratic incompetence — an over-reliance on procedures — as opposed to a lack of imagination. The FBI’s role in these meetings included updates on their monitoring of domestic extremist movements in and around DC. However, the FBI failed to communicate a critical detail: they lacked a comprehensive security assessment because they hadn’t consolidated intelligence from their field offices regarding specific information on January 6 events. This meant that agencies such as the Capitol Police and the Army were making decisions about whether to upgrade their security posture based on incomplete information.
However, there is another part to the story.
The FBI had already infiltrated a number of key extremist groups. The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, groups whose members ultimately received the harshest sentences in the criminal investigations that followed, were heavily compromised by informants, including at the leadership level with the Oath Keepers’ vice president.
This deep penetration makes the intelligence failure all the more striking. How much did the FBI know about what was planned for that day? On the one hand it failed to inform the various agencies to adequately prepare to secure the Capitol; on the other hand it was already aware that the more dangerous groups posed little threat (or capability) of “insurrection.”
So perhaps another question needs to be asked. If the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys were so heavily infiltrated, what did the FBI know of their activities beforehand? As the IG report makes evident, the FBI was already tracking the movements of these supposedly dangerous groups in relation to January 6th, but they failed to convince the lead agencies that the groups were an adequate threat. Or to put it more conspiratorially, what was the role intended (however unwittingly) for those groups?
So to take the IG’s report at face value we have to accept that the FBI, on a day that the Democrats called worse than 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, was amazingly incompetent. However, to take a step back and look at the entire intelligence picture involving FBI infiltration of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers raises more troubling questions of intent that have yet to be answered.
Now to jump ahead to events after Jan. 6.
The January 6th Committee, formed in the aftermath, seemed more focused on crafting a specific narrative than conducting a thorough investigation of security failures. The Committee was designed for exploitation and not investigation and information.
That part was clear early on when Nancy Pelosi rejected Kevin’s McCarthy’s Republican committee nominations.
The focus of the Committee report was on the preferred narrative, that there was an insurrection organized by Trump and others to overturn the results of the 2020 election. What the Committee spent little time doing, despite meeting for 18-months and interviewing over 1,000 witnesses, was analyzing why the Capitol was left unsecured given the prior planning involved and the intelligence assets available to the FBI.
Why? I would suggest that if the Committee had addressed this question it would have discovered that either there was never any serious threat (as the FBI knew from its infiltrations and CHS), or that if there was such a threat the FBI (and by connection the Capitol Hill Police, DHS and other agencies) were incompetent in unearthing it.
The Inspector General’s report leaves us with these two possible scenarios, neither of which aligns with the Committee’s preferred narrative. Both scenarios would have demanded a very different Committee report than the one that was produced.
In the end, the Inspector General’s report doesn’t just reveal security failures, it exposes the gap between institutional narratives and operational realities, raising questions that remain largely unanswered.
Perhaps these are questions we should be answering, given the way the January 6th Committee was used to paint a large percentage of the American population as threats to the country.
There is a third, and likely a fourth, possible scenario.
Given the demonstrations that occurred during and after Trump’s inauguration in 2016, and the widespread rioting in 2020, it is not unreasonable to assume that similar demonstrations would have occurred had Trump been declared the winner of the 2020 election. Getting the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other vaguely pro-Trump groups involved looks like an attempt to set up a Charlottesville writ large at some point in DC after his second term started. Given that Trump lost, and then chose to continue contesting the results, it seems to me that the planned demonstrations were repurposed as a means of discrediting Trump supporters. The transition of the FBI official in charge of the Whitmer ‘Fednapping’ scheme to DC prior to J6 is an interesting point. In either case, concealing what the FBI and other TLAs knew about the activities of their informants would be a priority. The FBI claims that the majority of the CHS in DC on J6 were not conducting intelligence operations yet none of them who trespassed in the Capitol or the exclusion zone have been prosecuted.
Christopher…
Yes there are alot questions about those FBI informants who were there on Jan. 6 and why they escaped what was the largest criminal investigation in US history.
One of the impressions I got from the report, and one that jibes from how bureaucracies worked, is that no one stood up and said “we need to make this work” either from securing the Capitol to performing a comprehensive intelligence assessment for Jan. 6 from the FBI field offices. For the FBI there were procedures to follow with certain time lines and if a response was compelled then it had to be of one form which had a different time line and couldn’t be used in certain ways. Everyone thought everyone else was doing it and so no one did it
The other agencies such as Capitol Hill police and the Army had to do with a decision-making matrix, to calculate risk though allot of that risk was political. To deploy troops to the Capitol or construct non-scalable fencing would have probably provided the visual deterrent to keep the protest under control, it would also have provided quite the optics. Those agencies would have needed a compelling reason to do so
All of this bureaucratic posturing is pretty common in DC; keep on mind that the intelligence (FBI), the muscle (National Guard), and the final decision-maker (Capitol Hill police) were all in different silos, different leadership with different priorities. Anybody who ever has had to play office politics 101 knows how to exploit these things
None of what happened on 1/6 was a bolt from the blue, it was considered days ahead of time and proper countermeasures were rejected. Not only from a domestic terrorist perspective but simply crowd control in terms of having tens of thousands of enthusiastic protesters come to the Capitol.
There is a gray area that needs to be explained. The FBI did not do enough to push the discussions toward those logical countermeasures; it’s not clear what level of confidence in their intelligence they imparted to the other agencies but certainly they knew of threats. They also knew that the most dangerous threats, the ones that the Jan. 6 Committee spent so much time on, had been infiltrated and their plans roughly known and they weren’t that much of a threat
The problem with IG reports is that they are laser focused; this one simply dealt with collection of information from informants through FBI field offices. It can not provide definitive proof whether there were agents on the ground and while it provides clues to decision-making criteria and procedures among the agencies, it doesn’t draw definitive conclusions because that’s not what the report set out to do.
There are no real answers beyond the narrow scope of the report, only troubling questions that will have to wait for the Kash Patel buzzsaw
The first thing that should happen is entirely in the province of Congress. They should impeach every judge on the FISA court that first accepted transparent lies from the DOJ and then did nothing as they were exposed. All of the DOJ and FBI personnel should be pursued for perjury if it’s still possible or, for the lawyers, have their privilege of practicing in the federal courts withdrawn and ethics referrals made to the state bar associations. The latter is, I believe, in the purview of the Supreme Court.
as with charlottesville, the goal was chaos, hence the 23 uncharged assets who entered the Capitol, many of those who were walking inside the grounds, it takes a certain chutzpah to make it a criminal offense, General Milley gave the game up with his interview to Jeffrey Goldberg, why fire tear gas on unarmed protesters, because you wanted the objections stopped could it have mattered,
The J6 event was obviously an op.
It was pre-announced, giving the regime plenty of time to arrange for “assets” to be in place and plenty of time plan what to do with them, all in service to the never-Trump narrative.
But it failed and Trump is back.
The real purpose of these reports is to provide cover so the regime can claim that what happened was just a series of oopsies and not a criminal conspiracy.
In other words, just the usual incompetence and definitely not treason. We just need a bigger budget and it will all be better!
I’m old, so I remember 9/11 and the aftermath. I used to think the presence of Jamie Gorelick on the 9/11 commission was a terrible mistake, since she created the wall between the FBI and CIA to prevent the latter from informing the former that Bill Clinton was taking Chinese money. Eventually I figured out that her placement on the commission was the Deep State making sure metaphorical heads didn’t roll- and none did.
I’m just not interested in any more ass-covering reports from bureaucrats. People need to lose their jobs, their pensions, and many of them belong in prison.
There is a lot of ruin in a nation, but only so much. We can’t stumble along for much longer with a government that can’t manage basic functions like security for the Capitol, or won’t, because it wants reasons to send its opponents to prison.
The gap between the threat supposedly posed by right-wing protesters, according to propaganda from the political classes, and the threat actually perceived by law enforcement, is a well-known and long-standing phenomenon. The press starts using the language of violence and threat as soon as two or more conservatives plan on gathering in one place, and everybody knows that in reality what’s actually going to happen is that they’ll parade around peacefully, pick up their garbage and go home. It happens reliably enough that way that it completely takes them by surprise any time it doesn’t. By contrast, every police force in the country, including the FBI, knows it’s time for phalanxes of police in riot gear whenever the “mostly peaceful” left-wing “activists” show up.
The, generally young and fairly recently hired, FBI field agents (pawns) sprinkled among the crowd, dressed like the crowd, and not just taking notes are an un-cited problem.
Look at the phony rightish protesters in khaki and masks and who were summarily ID’d and chased out by actual patriots in several demonstrations subsequent to Jan 6. The masking is a dead giveaway.
They sacrificed all integrity and hardly became whistleblowers; jobs and promotions at stake. Just not enough fortitude to quit the FBI and its contracting assets.
It was the dog that didn’t bark because there was nothing to bark at. The FBI had thoroughly infiltrated the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. They knew, dead to rights, that neither organization was planning any violence. On the contrary, those organizations were planning to PREVENT violence.
The FBI knew that, but that data didn’t support the FBI and the Democratic Party narrative. The narrative had to change, so the FBI lied, made up evidence and planted evidence, to make it seem the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers were the source of the problem.
They were not. The FBI knew they were not but lied anyway. The leadership should all be in jail.
The FBI has been identifying conservatives to persecute using the technique of geo-fencing where you can select a location and time and buy data from the telecoms to see who was there. Apply that technique to phone numbers associated with the FBI.
The Jamie Gorelick “wall” between intelligence and criminal investigators kept the FBI from talking to the FBI.
I’d go with incompetence to be honest. It’s very consistent with past performance. I think the idea they could plan – anything, really – has been disclosed as a fantasy, for all to see.
What’s not seen here in this presentation is the impact of FBI personnel and “resources” actually instigating what violence there was.
That’s the dog that’s not barking.
If the FBI owned the vice-presidency of that so-called “terrorist” group, then who prodded them to do anything destructive or even criminal? A Tik Tok video?
The report in question also leaves some large holes in just what federal agents, “resources” really were there and participating, above and beyond the 26 mentioned.
IG report: Oh, look a squirrel…
Re: “…could have provided effective crowd control and prevented the rioting that occurred.”
Sorry If that was a riot then all the BLM and Antifa “protests” were out and out civil war. There was no riot, no insurrection, no guns and people actually invited into the Capital.
Nope, this was a deep state operation to make Trump look bad and set the stage for impeachment.
So how’s the hunt for the “bomber” going?
I reject the characterization of “extremist” groups.
Who decided to shoot innocent, peaceful people with rubber bullets and tear gas?
Every deep state agency has already been established to be corrupt, crime-ridden and fundamentally dishonest. Normal people are smart enough:
1. Not to trust reports from those govt agencies which have proven they aren’t trustworthy.
2. Assume those conspirators who chose to lie, steal, slander and cheat with regards to Trump for the previous five years (and subsequent four years) did so on Jan 6.
Ray Epps is the tell. The single most-obvious case of “inciting to riot” the whole day, and NOTHING gets done with? They *take him off* the wanted list? After literal years of public outcry, they finally “prosecute” him and give him a few months of probation?
There are plenty of other tells, but that is the single most obvious. Well, the footage of “MAGA” people already inside, joking with their police coworkers before anyone was let in or breached might be even worse, but that one took getting government footage know about.
If you can’t explain the *COMPLETELY* disparate treatment of Ray Epps (and the “protesters” already inside), then this was a government opp. The end.
LOTS of people need to go to jail for what happened on January 6, 2000, and 99% of them were on government payroll to do it.
Deoxy,
Yes.
And a lot of seemingly sane people continue to give govt the benefit of the doubt re: credibility and honesty. I really don’t understand why. One would think that hundreds of documented examples of dishonesty, corruption and criminality might have made an impression by now.
Sp here’s a possible scenario for the next 18-24 re: Jan. 6, COVID, hiding Joe’s decline, etc….
Republicans hold the trifecta: House, White House, Senate.
Haul everyone who worked in the West Wing in front of House of congressional committees, especially re: hiding Joe’s dementia, digging into who was really making decisions,. Extend that to any West Wing conversations about Trump lawfare, Jan. 6, all of that
Normally you would get the West Wingers (as opposed to political appointees in the various government departments) claiming executive privilege and shutting up. That’s the way it would have worked over the past two years, so why bother?
Except starting 12:01 PM, January 20th, 2025, the head of the executive branch is Donald Trump who can waive that privilege
I expect the West Wingers to still clam up. Maybe Biden will issue blanket pardons for all of them for all past deeds, but the moment they clam up after Jan. 20 that referral for contempt of Congress goes to a Trump-run DoJ.
It’s going to be a target-rich environment coming up and there needs to be priorities, but I’m guessing that a full investigation into covering up for Joe Biden is not only badly needed for the country(those responsible should permanently banished from public life), but are going to haul down alot of people who would otherwise make mischief over the next 2 years
Once they start talking about Biden, get them to talk about everything else.
Mike: “Republicans hold the trifecta: House, White House, Senate.”
Let’s be honest with ourselves — many of the “Republicans” in the House and Senate are simply Democrats who chose to run as Republicans in districts & states where Democrats running as Democrats would have stood no chance of getting elected. And getting elected is all those RINOs care about.
Prediction — what we are going to see in the next 2 years is the House & Senate “Republicans” obstructing President Trump every step of the way. Let’s hope that Trump has a plan, because he is going to need one. In this environment, hoping for any kind of Truth Commission on the “Joe Biden” years is likely to be forlorn. If President Trump can make progress on cutting foreign entanglements, fixing illegal immigration, and starting the re-industrialization of the US … that will be all (or more than all!) we can hope for.