Capitol Riot Probe by Senate Faults Intelligence, Security Failures in Jan. 6 Breach
A bipartisan Senate report faulted Capitol security officials as well as federal agencies for intelligence and planning failures leading up to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, and recommended that the Capitol Police chief be able to unilaterally request help from the National Guard in an emergency.
The more than 100-page Senate report and its 20 recommendations reflect a bipartisan congressional investigation of the riot, during which supporters of former President Donald Trump temporarily interrupted the ratification of Democrat Joe Biden’s election win. The report doesn’t assess Mr. Trump’s role leading up to and during the riot, which Senate committee aides said was outside the scope of their probe.
Mr. Trump was impeached by the Democratic-controlled House earlier this year for inciting insurrection against the U.S. government. He was acquitted by the Senate.
“This report is not a comprehensive account of everything that happened in the lead up to and during the attack,” Sen. Gary Peters (D., Mich.), the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, told reporters. He and other Democrats have called for an independent commission to conduct a fuller investigation.
One key recommendation is to empower the Capitol Police chief to unilaterally request assistance from the National Guard in an emergency, instead of having to get approval from the Capitol Police Board, a process the report faulted as confusing and cumbersome. Congress would have to pass legislation to make that change. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) and Sen. Roy Blunt (R., Mo.) told reporters they would sponsor a bill to do so.
Other recommendations include bolstering training for Capitol Police officers, consolidating the Capitol Police’s intelligence units, reviewing how intelligence agencies handle social-media posts containing threats of violence, and clarifying the approval process for deploying the D.C. National Guard, among other changes.
The monthslong investigation was led by the top Democratic and Republican senators on the Senate Rules as well as Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committees. The panels said they held two public hearings, reviewed thousands of documents, interviewed current and former officials, and crafted recommendations for local and federal agencies.
Some of the key findings dealt with intelligence failures. The committees blamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security for not warning about potential violence targeting the Capitol, given that law enforcement agencies, including Capitol Police, “largely rely on FBI and DHS to assess and communicate homeland security threats.”
Although not a formal intelligence bulletin, the FBI did share at least one report warning of violence at the Capitol, which highlighted an online thread saying in part that “Congress needs to hear glass breaking” and called for war, the Senate committees found. But the FBI sent that report to law-enforcement agencies only the night before Jan. 6, the Senate report said. One Capitol Police intelligence unit received the warning but failed to share it widely internally before the riot, the investigation found.
The lack of warning stood in contrast with what the FBI and DHS had issued in the previous months surrounding protests, the committees said.
FBI and DHS officials pointed to the difficulty of distinguishing between constitutionally protected free speech versus credible threats of violence, the report said. But officials from both agencies acknowledged that intelligence agencies need to improve how they evaluate threats made on social media and online message boards, the report said.
Melissa Smislova, a top official at DHS’s intelligence branch, previously faced questions about why the unit didn’t issue a warning specific to Jan. 6 at a Senate hearing in March. “In hindsight, we probably should have,” Ms. Smislova responded.
But the committees said not all their questions were answered. Neither the Justice Department nor DHS have fully complied with the committees’ requests for information, the report said. Senate committee aides said they would continue to seek responses from agencies that weren’t forthcoming.
In response to the Senate report, a DHS spokesman said that the department is participating in investigations into Jan. 6 and reviewing how to improve intelligence gathering and communication about threats. “Addressing domestic violent extremism is a top priority for DHS,” the spokesman said.
In late May, Senate Republicans blocked the creation of a bipartisan, independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack. Republicans said that Democrats would make it a partisan exercise and that there was no need for a commission because the Jan. 6 riot was already being investigated by multiple congressional committees and by law enforcement.
The Senate committees’ report released Tuesday includes bipartisan condemnation of the riot. “January 6, 2021 marked not only an attack on the Capitol Building—it marked an attack on democracy,” the report said.
The report also stressed the human toll and linked seven deaths to the attack and its aftermath, including one rioter shot by police. Three police officers died following the attack, the report said. One Capitol Police officer was assaulted during the attack and suffered a stroke. He died the day after the riot of natural causes, according to the medical examiner’s office in Washington, D.C. Two other officers died by suicide after responding to the riot, officials have said, and roughly 140 law-enforcement officers reported injuries suffered during the attack, the report said.
The Senate investigation examined what the Capitol Police’s own intelligence units knew in advance of Jan. 6. One unit possessed information about online posts calling for violence at the Capitol, including comments referencing tunnels used by lawmakers on the Capitol grounds, the report said. But they failed to communicate the full scope of the threat to other officers and law-enforcement agencies, the investigation found.
The committees also said that Capitol Police leaders didn’t sufficiently prepare for the Jan. 6 joint session of Congress. Rank-and-file officers weren’t properly trained or given effective protective equipment, the report said. In one instance, Capitol Police had stored protective equipment on buses nearby, but when a platoon tried to retrieve it, the bus was locked, the report said.
The Capitol Police department acknowledged it must improve how it handles intelligence and planning and said it already has made some changes. But the department also defended itself and said that federal agencies didn’t provide specific, actionable intelligence about a large-scale attack ahead of Jan. 6. “Neither the USCP, nor the FBI, U.S. Secret Service, Metropolitan Police or our other law enforcement partners knew thousands of rioters were planning to attack the U.S. Capitol,” the Capitol Police said in a statement ahead of the report’s release.
The report also examined what happened during the roughly three hours it took for National Guard troops to arrive at the Capitol, after officials requested their support, a question that came up previously during Senate hearings.
The Capitol Police didn’t formally request assistance from the National Guard ahead of Jan. 6, but as the riot unfolded, Capitol officials scrambled to do so. National Guard troops didn’t arrive at the Capitol until around 5:20 p.m., and the report notes that the Defense Department and the Guard gave conflicting accounts of the delay. The House and Senate chambers had already been secured by that time, the report said, though the outside of the Capitol wasn’t cleared until later that evening. “No one could explain why [the Guard] did not deploy until after 5:00 p.m.,” the report reads.
The then-commanding general of the Washington, D.C., National Guard previously told senators he faced what he called unusual delays in getting approval to deploy Guard troops on Jan. 6. But Defense Department officials told the committees they needed time to create a plan for how the Guard would respond and that the Guard troops deployed relatively swiftly given that they aren’t meant to be first responders who can deploy within minutes.
