WASHINGTON (CN) — The U.S. government faced an attempted insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, because federal law enforcement failed to recognize weeks of intelligence warning of such an attack, the Senate’s homeland security committee said in a report released Tuesday.
Because Congress had been set to hold a joint session on Jan. 6 to certify President Joe Biden’s election victory, the report says the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security received tips as far back as December 2020 tips that right-wing groups such as the Proud Boys were planning to descend on Washington.
Nevertheless the agencies “continued to downplay the overall threat,” the report continues, even in the face of multiple warnings and awareness of social media activity in which supporters of the outgoing President Donald Trump were calling for violence on Jan. 6.
The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs has been investigating for months whether federal law enforcement adequately prepared for the insurrection. Citing an analysis of internal documents and communications between law enforcement staff, they say the FBI and Homeland Security clearly misjudged the threat to the Capitol.
“My report shows there was a shocking failure of imagination from these intelligence agencies to take these threats seriously,” said Michigan Senator Gary Peters, the committee's chair. “[T]here is no question that their failures to effectively analyze and share the threat information contributed to the failures to prevent and respond to the horrific attack that unfolded at the Capitol.”
The Senate report isn’t the first attempt at reviewing what went wrong on Jan. 6. A bipartisan group of senators released their own findings in a separate 2021 report, and the House’s own Jan. 6 committee published its findings late last year.
According to evidence collected in the report, senior officials at Homeland Security had slow-walked possible threats as late as the morning of the insurrection — despite intelligence that suggested preparations for an attack on the Capitol were underway.
Neither the FBI nor Homeland Security issued sufficient warnings to other federal agencies and the general public about possible violence on Jan. 6, the panel found. Strikingly, the FBI did issued two documents related to the insurrection, but did so only the night before the attack, and it failed to distribute them widely. Homeland Security did not publish any intelligence directly related to Jan. 6.
“This investigation found that part of the reason FBI failed to take more action to warn its federal partners and the public was because it failed to seriously consider the possibility that threatened actions would actually be carried out,” the report states.
Rather than on any possible threat to lawmakers or the Capitol, lawmakers found that the FBI chose to focus more heavily on clashes between protesters and counter-protesters.
Lawmakers also found that federal law enforcement failed to follow agency guidelines for using open-source intelligence — information gathered from publicly available source on the Internet, such as social media. While some agency officials have claimed that the FBI and Homeland Security don’t have the authority to monitor social media posts for possible threats, the report pointed out that guidelines for both agencies allow open-source data collection, with restrictions on constitutionally protected activity.
“The intelligence failures in the lead-up to January 6th were not failures to obtain intelligence indicating the potential for violence,” the report states. “Rather, those agencies failed to fully and accurately assess the severity of the threat identified by that intelligence.”
To address what the report called intelligence failures “at a fundamental level,” lawmakers suggested that the FBI and Homeland Security should, among other things, conduct after-action reviews on the collection, analysis and dissemination of information in the days leading up to the Jan. 6 insurrection. Homeland Security should also designate joint sessions of Congress as a national special security event, a category that requires increased interagency coordination and security preparations.
Lawmakers also recommended that Congress double down on its oversight powers over executive branch agencies. “For decades, the Executive Branch has increasingly shielded itself from congressional scrutiny,” they wrote. “To fulfill its Constitutional oversight obligations, Congress should consider additional ways to ensure compliance with its investigations and oversight requests, including reassessing the accommodations it grants to the Executive Branch.”
The Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol directly followed a speech in which former President Trump claimed that the 2020 presidential election had been rigged against him. It took hours for law enforcement to clear the Capitol building of the thousands of rioters as lawmakers took shelter in secure rooms within the complex.
Five people were killed during the melee and in its aftermath, and hundreds more suffered injuries. Four police officers who responded to the riot died by suicide in the months that followed. The damage to the Capitol complex itself meanwhile cost billions of dollars to repair.
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