The FBI should have done more to gather intelligence before the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot, says the Justice Department's inspector general. The report said no undercover FBI employees were on the scene and none of the bureau’s informants was authorized to participate. The report disputes a fringe conspiracy theory advanced by some Republicans in Congress that the FBI played a role in instigating the events that day, when rioters determined to overturn Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss to Joe Biden stormed the building in a violent clash with police, the Associated Press reports. The review was narrow in scope, but aimed to shed light on gnawing questions that have dominated public discourse, including whether major intelligence failures preceded the riot and whether the FBI in some way provoked the violence. It’s the latest major investigation about a day unlike any other in U.S. history, one that has already yielded congressional inquiries and federal and state indictments.
The report offers a mixed assessment of the FBI’s performance in the run-up to the riot, crediting the bureau for preparing for the possibility of violence and for trying to identify known “domestic terrorism subjects” who planned to come to Washington. It said the FBI, in an action the now-deputy director described as a “basic step that was missed,” failed to canvass informants across all 56 of its field offices for any relevant intelligence. That was a step, the report concluded, “that could have helped the FBI and its law enforcement partners with their preparations in advance of January 6.” The report did find that 26 FBI informants were in Washington for election-related protests, including three tasked to report on others who were potentially planning to attend. While four informants entered the Capitol, none had been authorized to do so by the bureau or to break the law or encourage others to do so, the report said. “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,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said at the time. The report said the FBI’s New Orleans office was told that protesters planned to station a “quick reaction force” in northern Virginia “in order to be armed and prepared to respond to violence that day in DC, if necessary.” That information was shared with the FBI’s Washington Field Office, intelligence agencies and some federal law enforcement agencies the day before the riot, but there was no indication the FBI told northern Virginia police, the report said.
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