WASHINGTON (AP) – Capitol Police knew that armed extremists were prepared for violence in the iconic building on Jan. 6 and even provided assault rifles to protect lawmakers, the interim chief acknowledged on Wednesday. But the wild invasion of the Capitol was much worse than the police expected, leaving them unprepared to fight it.
A day earlier, his predecessor as chief testified that the police expected an angry but more typical protest crowd of Donald Trump supporters. But interim chief Yogananda Pittman said the intelligence collected before the riot prompted the agency to take extraordinary measures, including special weaponry by officers, intercepting the radio frequencies used by the invaders and highlighting spies at the Ellipse rally, where President Donald Trump was sending his supporters on the march to the Capitol to “fight like hell”.
Pittman’s testimony, presented before a House hearing on Thursday, provides the most detailed account of US Capitol Police intelligence and preparations before the insurrection, when thousands of pro-Trump protesters stormed the Capitol with the goal to prevent Congress from certifying the election of Joe Biden’s victory over Trump.
Three days earlier, on January 3, the Capitol Police distributed an internal intelligence assessment warning that members of the militia, white supremacists and other extremist groups were likely to participate, that the protesters were armed and that it was possible that they would come to the Capitol to try to stop. disrupt the vote, says Pittman.
“Based on the assessment, the Department understood that this demonstration would be different from previous demonstrations carried out by demonstrators with similar ideologies in November and December 2020,” said Pittman in his prepared comments.
But at the same time, she argues that the police did not have enough intelligence to predict the violent uprising that resulted in five deaths, including that of a Capitol police officer. They prepared for trouble, but not for an invasion.
“Although the Department’s January 3 Special Assessment predicted a significant likelihood of violence on Capitol lands by extremist groups, it did not identify a specific credible threat indicating that thousands of US citizens would fall on the US Capitol by attacking police officers with the aim of break in the US Capitol building to harm members and prevent the certification of votes from the Electoral College, ”said Pittman in his statement.
Steven Sund, the former police chief who resigned after the riot, testified on Tuesday that the intelligence assessment alerted white supremacists, members of the far right Proud Boys and the left-wing antifa who should be in the crowd and could become violent .
“We had planned the possibility of violence, the possibility of some people being armed, not the possibility of a coordinated military attack involving thousands of people against the Capitol,” said Sund.
The FBI also sent a warning to local police officers about online postings that a “war” was coming. But Pittman said it was still not enough to prepare for the crowd that attacked the Capitol.
Police officers were at a great numerical disadvantage as thousands of protesters descended on the building, some of them wielding wooden planks, stun guns, spray spray and metal pipes as they broke into windows and doors and invaded the Capitol. Officers were hit with barricades, thrown to the ground, trapped between doors, beaten and bloodied while members of Congress were evacuated and Congressional staff huddled in offices.
Should the police be better prepared?
With the amount of information available to the Capitol Police, it is surprising that they have not taken additional steps to strengthen security and protect their officers, said Tom Warrick, a former counterterrorism officer who served in the Obama administration.
“On January 6, the only strategic location in the entire US national capital region that needed to be defended was the US Capitol,” said Warrick, now at the Atlantic Council. “So it was really disappointing to see people testifying that ‘we didn’t know there was going to be violence’. When you’re the target, you assume that things like that can happen even if you don’t have the intelligence.
Even without access to secure intelligence, there were months of public warning signs that troublemakers would try to do what they did, said Bruce Hoffman, former commissioner of the 9/11 Review Committee and a senior member of counterterrorism and homeland security for the Foreign Relations Council.
A plot discovered by the federal police to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer was a big red flag, and many of the rowdies went to social media to echo Trump’s calls to “stop the theft” and speculate about the violence.
“Historically, the pattern is always to blame an intelligence failure, when there can often be other reasons,” said Hoffman. “I think it was very obvious to anyone … that a confrontation was going to happen.”
Pittman also said the department faced “internal challenges” in responding to the turmoil. Officials did not adequately block the Capitol complex, even after an order was given by the radio to do so. She also says that police officers did not understand when they were allowed to use lethal force and that the less-than-lethal weapons that police owned did not have the expected success.
Although Pittman says in his testimony that sergeants and lieutenants should pass on information to department officials, many officers said they received little or no information or training for what they would face. Four officers told the Associated Press, shortly after the uproar, that they heard nothing from Sund, Pittman or other senior commanders when the building was invaded. In many cases, police officers were left to improvise or try to save colleagues in danger.
Pittman also faces internal pressure from his base, especially after the Capitol Police union issued a vote of censure against her last week. She is also expected to lead the department during the opening of several investigations into how law enforcement failed to protect the building.
Capitol Police are investigating the actions of 35 police officers on the day of the riot; six of those officers were suspended for payment, said a police spokesman.
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The merchant reported from Houston. Associated Press writers Ben Fox and Eric Tucker contributed to this report.