The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security downplayed or ignored a massive amount of intelligence information leading up to the Jan. 6 Capitol bombing, according to the chair of a Senate panel due to release a new report Tuesday on intelligence failures leading up to the revolt.

The report details how the agencies failed to recognize and warn of the potential for violence, as some supporters of then-President Trump openly planned the siege in posts and forums online.

Among the multitude of information that was overlooked was a December 2020 tip to the FBI that members of the far-right group Proud Boys were planning to be in Washington for the certification of President Biden’s victory and that it was their “ plan is to literally kill people,” the report said. said. The Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee said the agencies were also aware of many social media posts that foreshadowed violence, some calling on Trump supporters to come armed and storm the Capitol, kill lawmakers or bring the place to the ground to burn down.

Senator Gary Peters (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Homeland panel, said the failure was largely a lack of imagination to consider threats that the Capitol could be breached credible, echoing the committee’s findings September 11 on intelligence failures leading up to the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.

The report from the panel’s majority aides says the intelligence community has not been completely recalibrated to focus on the threats of domestic, rather than international, terrorism. And government intelligence leaders did not raise the alarm, partly because they could not have suspected that the US Capitol would be overrun by rioters.

Still, Peters said, the reasons for rejecting what he called an enormous amount of intelligence were an easy explanation.

While several other reports have examined the intelligence failures around Jan. 6, including a bipartisan 2021 Senate, House Committee report dated Jan. 6 last year, and several separate internal reviews by the Capitol Police and other government agencies, the latest study is the first congressional report to be published. focus solely on the actions of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis.

In the aftermath of the attack, Peters said the committee interviewed officials from both agencies and found some fairly constant pointing at each other.

Everyone should be responsible because everyone has failed, Peters said.

Using emails and interviews collected by the Senate Judiciary Committee and others, including from the House Jan. 6 panel, the report details the information the agencies received in the weeks leading up to the attack.

There was no failure to obtain evidence, the report says, but the agencies failed to fully and accurately assess the severity of the threat identified by that intelligence, and to formally distribute guidance to their law enforcement partners.”

As Trump falsely claimed to have won the 2020 election and tried to undo his defeat by telling his supporters in a White House speech that day to fight like crazy, thousands of them marched to the Capitol. More than 2,000 rioters overpowered law enforcement, assaulted police officers and caused more than $2.7 billion in damage to the Capitol, according to a report released by the U.S. Government Accountability Office earlier this year.

By breaking windows and doors, the rioters sent lawmakers fleeing for their lives and temporarily interrupted the certification of Biden’s election victory.

Even as the attack happened, the new report found, the FBI and Homeland Security downplayed the threat. While the Capitol Police struggled to clear the building, Homeland Security still struggled to assess the credibility of threats against the Capitol and report its intelligence.

And at a briefing at 10 a.m. that morning, even as protesters at Trump’s speech and near the Capitol wore military-grade ballistic helmets, body armor, radio equipment, and backpacks, the FBI informed that there were no credible threats at the time. goods.

The lack of adequate warnings meant that law enforcement was not adequately prepared and there was no paved perimeter around the Capitol, such as during events such as the annual State of the Union address.

The report includes dozens of tips about violence on January 6 that the agencies received and rejected due to lack of coordination, bureaucratic delays or fear on the part of those collecting the information. For example, the FBI was unexpectedly prevented from trying to find social media posts planning the Jan. 6 protests when the contract for their third-party social media monitoring tool expired. At Homeland Security, analysts were hesitant to report open-source intelligence after criticism in 2020 for gathering information on US citizens during racial justice demonstrations.

A tip the FBI received prior to the January 6 attack was from a former Justice Department official who sent screenshots of online messages from members of the extremist group Oath Keepers: There is only one way in. They are not signs. They are not rallies. They are f bullets!

The social media company Parler, a favorite platform for Trump supporters, sent several messages directly to the FBI that it found alarming, adding that there was more to where this came from and that it was concerned about what would happen on January 6.

[T]it’s not a rally nor is it a protest anymore, read one of the Parler posts sent to the FBI, according to the report. This is a final stand where we draw the red line at Capitol Hill. … don’t be surprised if we take the #capital [sic] building.

But even as it received the warnings, the Senate panel found that the agency said over and over that there were no credible threats.

Our country is still considering the consequences of January 6, but it is clear that there is a need for a re-evaluation of the federal government’s domestic intelligence collection, analysis and dissemination processes,” the new report said.

In a statement, Homeland Security spokesman Angelo Fernandez said the department made many of those changes two years later. The department has strengthened intelligence analysis, information sharing and operational readiness to help prevent acts of violence and keep our communities safe.

The FBI said in a separate response that since the attack it has increased its focus on sharing information quickly and has centralized information flow to ensure other entities are notified more quickly. The FBI is committed to aggressively combating the threat posed by all domestic violent extremists, regardless of motivation, the statement said.

FBI Director Christopher Wray has defended the FBI’s handling of intelligence leading up to Jan. 6, including a report from the Norfolk, Va., field office on Jan. 5 citing online messages that raised the possibility of war in Washington. the next day. The Senate report noted that the memo failed to mention the many other warnings the agency had received.

The fault-finding of the FBI and Homeland Security Department echoes the blistering criticism directed at the US Capitol Police two years ago in a bipartisan report released by the Senate Homeland and Rules committees. That report found that the police intelligence unit was also aware of social media posts calling for violence, but did not notify top management of what it had found.

Peters says he asked for the intelligence community’s investigation after other reports, such as the House Panels’ investigation last year, focused on other aspects of the attack. The January 6 panel focused more on Trump’s actions, concluding in its report that the former president was criminally involved in a multi-part conspiracy to overturn the legal results of the 2020 presidential election and has failed to act to protect his supporters from attacking the Capitol. .

It’s important for us to realize these failures to make sure it doesn’t happen again, Peters said.