The FBI secretly deployed more than 250 plainclothes agents to the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021 riot, an operation so disorganized it unleashed searing frustrations among many of the FBI's rank-and-file that the bureau had lost its core competencies to "wokeness" and allowed its employees to become “pawns in a political war,” according to an after-action report kept from the public for more than four years.
Scores of FBI agents and personnel – many from the bureau’s premier Washington field office (WFO) – sent anonymous complaints to the after-action team detailing how agents were sent into an unsafe scenario without proper safety equipment or the ability to identify themselves readily as armed officers to other police agencies, the report obtained by
Just the News shows.
The most persistent complaint was that the bureau during the James Comey and Chris Wray era had become infected with political biases and liberal ideology that treated the protesters from the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter riots far differently than those arrested in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 episode.
“The FBI should make clear to its personnel and the public that, despite its obvious political bias, it ultimately still takes its mission and priorities seriously,” one employee wrote in a stinging review. “It should equally and aggressively investigate criminal activity regardless of the offenders' perceived race, political affiliations, or motivations; and it should equally and aggressively protect all Americans regardless of perceived race, political affiliations, or motivations.”
That agent urged FBI leaders “to identify viable exit options for FBI personnel who no longer feel it is legally or morally acceptable to support a federal law enforcement and intelligence agency motivated by political bias.”
One agent suggested the problem extended beyond the bureau to D.C. U.S. Attorney's office, indicating a more widespread problem with political bias.
"Currently, the US Attorneys office is dictating what it is that gets investigated. This is a dangerous precedent because we can barely get them to prosecute investigations that clearly meet thresholds needed for Federal prosecutions," the agent wrote. "However, their willingness to conduct a search warrant on someone's life for a misdemeanor seems ridiculous. It is unreasonable for the FBI to conduct investigations involving misdemeanor violations at a federal level... it is not our role."
Many of the agents’ feedback focused on the Washington Field Office and its culture. “WFO is a hopelessly broken office that's more concerned about wearing masks and recruiting preferred racial/sexual groups than catching actual bad guys,” one worker wrote.
Added another: “I wish you all would pay more attention to our safety than what type of masks we wear. If you are going to deploy us to a riot situation, then give us the proper damn safety equipment--helmet, face shield, protective clothing--and training!”
The after-action responses – 50 pages in all – were located by current FBI Director Kash Patel’s team and recently turned over to the House Judiciary Committee and its special subcommittee investigating security failures and weaponization of law enforcement during the Jan. 6 riot.
274 undercover agents embedded in riot , with no safety plans
The document has proven a bombshell to lawmakers, revealing for the first time that the FBI had a total of 274 agents deployed to the Capitol in plainclothes and with guns after the violence started but with no clear safety gear of way to be recognized by other law enforcement agencies working in the chaos of the riot.
You can read the after-action report below:
FBI-HJC119-J6IG-000001-000050.pdf
Wray, Patel’s predecessor, steadfastly refused to tell Congress how many if any agents went to the Capitol that day. And a prior DOJ Inspector General Report did not divulge the number, referring only to a SWAT team the bureau sent into the Capitol and having more than two dozen informants in the crowd.
The existence of mass FBI agents at the Capitol on Jan. 6 could also be a problem in many of the cases that were subsequently brought in court. If agents were witnesses at the Capitol and did not disclose it in the subsequent affidavits during prosecutions it could create grounds for defendants to appeal.
The document also reveals for the first time that there were widespread concerns for years inside the bureau – sentiments that boiled over after the FBI began sending SWAT teams to arrest Jan. 6 participants on misdemeanor charges – that the FBI had become biased in favor of liberals and against conservatives.
Despite the pre-existing report, Wray rejected that notion in testimony before Congress. “The idea that I’m biased against conservatives seems somewhat insane to me, given my own personal background,”
Wray told Congress in 2023.
“I have found almost invariably, the people screaming the loudest about the politicization of the FBI are themselves the most political, and more often than not, making claims of politicization to advance their own views or goals, and they often don’t know the facts or are choosing to ignore them,” Wray added in an episode of the podcast “
FBI Retired Case File Review” that aired the same year.
Agent: “Our response to the Capitol Riot reeks of political bias”
But frontline agents repeatedly raised issues of liberal bias and wokeness in their after-action assessments. The words “politics” or “bias” were mentioned more than a dozen times in responses, and similar sentiments scores of times in the 50 pages.
“Our response to the Capitol Riot reeks of political bias,” one wrote.
Another added: “I wonder if our biases affected our preparedness.”
A third suggested the agents and analysts had become engrossed in the main business of Washington – politics – rather than crime fighting and blamed the bureau’s leadership for the slide.
“We have been used as pawns in a political war, and FBI leadership fell into the trap and has allowed it to happen,” that employee wrote. “We are supposed to call balls and strikes, regardless of political pressure, now we can’t even be trusted to be on the field,” another agent commented.”
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan vowed through a spokesman to get to the bottom of the still-untold secrets of Jan. 6 alongside of the Jan. 6 subcommittee chairman Barry Loudermilk.
“Due to our oversight, Chairman Loudermilk's leadership and Director Patel’s leadership, we continue to discover what exactly happened on Jan. 6,” Jordan’s spokesman Russell Dye told
Just the News.
"During the more than two years I have been investigating the events of January 6, I have seen evidence that suggests potential political bias within agencies that may have influenced their actions before, during, and after the events of January 6. But this report is more damning than anyone could have imagined and opens up even more questions," Loudermilk told
Just the News.
"Why is Congress just finding out there were significantly more FBI assets at the Capitol than previously identified? Were the courts that heard cases regarding January 6 made aware these agents were at the Capitol? Were any of the agents tasked to investigate individuals at the Capitol? Were they ever called to testify during the prosecutions of J6 defendants? Did any of the former FBI leaders testify about the additional personnel at the Capitol? These are just a few of the questions my committee will be asking," said the chairman.
The report solves one of the Jan. 6 mysteries: How did the FBI respond when violence began breaking out at the Capitol? Wray previously refused to divulge to Congress how many agents or informants were present during the incident.
“The initial response of having us again respond to a riot by ‘standing the line’ did not seem appropriate because we do not have the gear, equipment, or training for riot control,” one agent said.
“As in June, agents were again deployed onto the streets (specifically around the Capitol) and simply told to stand behind MPD. No other direction. When asked specifically what they were supposed to do or who to check in with, they were told simply that management said to go there and there was no answer,” another said. “FBI agents do not have training for, nor equipment for, riot control.”
Agents complained of politically-motivated "double standard"
The report also revealed agents strongly disagreed with how they were deployed and how cases were pursued after that day, seeing a double standard.
“The actions on January 6, 2021 were absolutely despicable and unacceptable in a civilized society. What is even more unacceptable was the hypocrisy displayed by the FBI and its leadership in their attempt to go after those involved in the Capitol Riots, while we as agents, watched cities burn across America during the summer of 2020,” one agent said.
“The conspiracy to commit crimes at the Capitol on January 6th, were also committed by bad actors during the summer riots of 2020 leading up to the election on November 3, 2020. Agents stood by on the ground in Washington, D.C. and observed stores being looted, burned, and ripped of anything of value,” the agent wrote.
“Even worse, officers were assaulted in the streets in broad daylight with cameras rolling, and yet our response then was nothing like the Capitol Riots response on and after January 6, 2021. I do not recall a single instance where the FBI, specifically FBI WFO, made any attempt to put the resources behind the summer riots of 2020, as they did during the Capitol Riots,” the agent explained.
The scathing comments from Washington Field Office agents assessing their own bureau’s work that day were
not included in an Office of Inspector General report reviewing the FBI’s performance in the lead up to and during the Jan. 6 electoral certification. That report only confirmed that there were “several hundred” agents deployed, but provided no further detail about the challenges they faced or their complaints.
