No undercover FBI agents present at Capitol riot: Watchdog

WASHINGTON (CN) — A government watchdog determined Thursday that the FBI failed to collect enough intelligence before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, despite preparing for potential violence that day.

The Justice Department inspector general’s office also revealed in the long-awaited report that no undercover FBI agents were present that day, debunking a popular conspiracy theory among Trump supporters and Jan. 6 defendants, and that none of the bureau’s informants were authorized to participate.

“We found no evidence in the materials we reviews or the testimony we received showing or suggesting that the FBI had undercover employees in the various protest crowds, or at the Capitol, on Jan. 6,” the inspector general said.

The inspector general said that, while the FBI undertook “significant efforts” to identify domestic terrorism subjects who planned to travel to Washington for Jan. 6, there was a specific step it failed to take: canvassing its field offices for intelligence on potential threats.

Canvassing is a “basic step” the FBI takes in advance of large events like the Super Bowl or Inauguration Day, FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate told the inspector general, and would have been the most thorough approach to “understanding the threat picture prior to Jan. 6.”

“We determined that, despite some discussions about issuing a formal intelligence collection product specific to both the Jan. 6 electoral certification and the Jan. 20 inauguration, the FBI only issued an intelligence collection product for the inauguration.”

The inspector general found that the FBI tasked three confidential human sources, known as CHSs, with traveling to Washington to report on certain domestic terrorism subjects, including certain leaders of the far-right groups the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys.

However, none of the three were authorized to enter the Capitol or a restricted area, nor were any of them directed by the FBI to encourage rioters to break the law.

There were an additional 23 other CHSs in Washington on Jan. 6, four of whom entered the Capitol during the riot and 13 of whom entered the restricted grounds around the Capitol. The remaining nine did not enter the Capitol or the restricted grounds.

None of those who entered the Capitol or the surrounding area have been prosecuted, which the U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C. told the inspector general was part of its general practice to not charge individuals whose only crime was entering the grounds outside the Capitol.

The inspector general noted that it did not find evidence of any critical intelligence that the FBI had missed by not ordering its field offices to canvass the CHSs prior to Jan. 6.

“Nonetheless, as numerous FBI officials told us, CHS information can be used to corroborate other sources of reporting to help the FBI develop as complete an understanding as possible,” the inspector general said. “The FBI therefor should have canvassed its field offices for any relevant CHS information in advance of Jan. 6.”

Conservative conspiracy theorists, Republican lawmakers and certain Jan. 6 defendants have claimed since the riot that the government placed undercover agents among the crowd to incite the day’s violence, as a way to place the blame for insurrection on anyone but President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters.

The theories even targeted other Trump supporters, like Jan. 6 defendant Ray Epps, who was at the center of such debunked claims in part because of his presence Peace Circle — between the Capitol and the National Mall — when the crowd broke the first police line.

Epps, a former Marine and onetime leader of the Arizona chapter of the Oath Keepers, was sentenced to a year of probation in January.

He attended several of his court proceedings via Zoom from a recreational vehicle he and his wife began living in after selling his home in Mesa, Arizona, due to threatening messages that blamed him for initiating the violence.

The FBI issued a statement in response to the report on Thursday, noting that the bureau disagrees with certain assertions regarding the FBI’s specific steps taken before Jan. 6 and the scope of its intelligence efforts.

Nonetheless, the FBI said it accepts the inspector general’s recommendations for future events, such as the upcoming electoral certification on Jan. 6, 2025.

The FBI noted that while the Department of Homeland Security did not designate the 2021 certification as a national special security event, or NSSE, it has designated the upcoming certification as such. The FBI said it was working with the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service and the U.S. Capitol Police to prepare for the certification and the inauguration.

“The FBI is nonetheless committed to assessing our policies and procedures for other, non-NSSE future events, as recommended, to ensure that they clearly set forth the division of labor among FBI field offices and divisions,” the FBI said.

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