WASHINGTON – The FBI director warned senators on Tuesday that domestic terrorism was “spreading across the country”, reaffirming the threat from racially motivated extremists while escaping any difficult questions about the bureau’s actions before the Capitol siege .
The director, Christopher A. Wray, who has remained largely out of public view since the Jan. 6 rebellion, condemned former President Donald J. Trump’s supporters who ransacked the Capitol, resulting in five deaths and dozens of police injuries. .
“This attack, that siege, was criminal behavior, pure and simple, and it was behavior that we, the FBI, considered domestic terrorism,” said Wray. “It has no place in our democracy.”
He also revealed that the number of domestic terrorism investigations in the FBI has risen to 2,000 since he became its director in 2017. The riot on Capitol Hill was part of a broader threat that had grown significantly in recent years, Wray said.
He did not split the investigations over an ideological divide, but The New York Times reported that agents opened more than 400 domestic terrorism investigations last year, while violence exploded during racial justice protests, including about 40 cases of possible adherents of the extreme left anti-fascist movement known as antifa and 40 others in Boogaloo, a movement of the extreme right that seeks to start a civil war. The FBI also investigated white supremacists suspected of threatening protesters.
Mr. Wray’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee was the first before Congress since the attack on the Capitol. He was freed from the drama after similar testimony last year, when Trump – who named Wray to his post – attacked him for detailing the threat from far-right extremists and fed a false narrative that antifascists were the real danger. In contrast, the Biden government has made combating domestic terrorism a priority.
As a result of last year’s violence, the FBI and the Justice Department decided to raise the threat posed by anti-government and anti-authority extremists, such as militias and anarchists. Still, office workers listed the threat below the level posed by racially motivated violent extremists, such as neo-Nazis.
The FBI and the Department of Justice make these determinations based on violent attacks, such as shootings or bombings, and use the levels to decide where to focus resources.
Wray pointed to another alarming trend: the number of white supremacists arrested in 2020 has almost tripled since he started running the FBI three years earlier.
White supremacists have killed dozens of people in the United States since 2015, opening fire on a black church in South Carolina and synagogues in Pittsburgh and California, as well as targeting Hispanic buyers at a Walmart in Texas.
The political implications of the threats were revealed at the hearing. Although Republicans condemned the attack on the Capitol, some were quick to point out the unrest last year in Portland, Oregon and other cities, highlighting the destruction of property and attacks on the police. In a spasm of violence, an alleged antifa supporter killed a pro-Trump protester in Portland in August.
Still, it was the first murder in more than 20 years for what the bureau called a “violent anarchist extremist”.
Wray said repeatedly in response to questions from Democratic senators that people associated with antifa were not involved in the Capitol invasion and that the protesters were genuinely Trump supporters, not posing as them.
Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the committee’s Democratic president, accused the Trump administration of minimizing the threat from white supremacists, while fueling a narrative that left-wing anarchists, like those who identify with antifa , were the greatest danger to the country.
Reciting the litany of mass shootings, Durbin added: “Let’s stop pretending that the threat of antifa is equal to the threat of white supremacy.”
The Capitol Police carried a large part of the blame for the January 6 attack. Its interim chief, Yogananda D. Pittman, acknowledged to Congress that the authorities did not do enough to prevent the “terrorist attack”.
In fact, there were several indicators of the potential for violence on January 6. Federal police officers knew that militia members like the Oath Keepers and far-right groups like the Proud Boys planned to travel to Washington, some potentially armed. Many supporters of QAnon, a dangerous conspiracy theory that has emerged as a possible threat of domestic terrorism, should also attend a protest demonstration where Trump spoke before the attack.
In addition, the FBI office in Norfolk, Virginia, produced a report a day earlier warning of possible violence and mentioned people sharing a map of tunnels in the Capitol complex. However, the information has not been verified, and a part citing a warning of an impending “war” appeared to come from a single online topic.
The FBI provided the report to the Capitol Police, although its former chief, Steven A. Sund, said he never made it through the ranks.
Wray said that FBI officials have passed on Norfolk information on at least three occasions to other law enforcement agencies. He said he had not seen the report until after the riot, but that his handling was typical of such intelligence.
Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, asked what Capitol Police leaders should have done if they had seen the January 5 report.
“I really want to be careful not to be an armchair quarterback,” said Wray. He later said he did not have a “good answer” about why Sund did not receive the report.
With signs pointing to violence or worse on Jan. 6, Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, pressured Wray about why the FBI did not “sound the alarm in a more visible and audible way”.
Wray said the bureau released intelligence reports related to domestic terrorism – some specifically linked to the election – for months and publicly and to other law enforcement agencies, such as the Capitol Police.
He said the bureau was reviewing its actions, but agreed that the insurrection was not an “acceptable outcome”.
“Our goal is to hit a thousand,” said Wray.
But it was clear that the federal police underestimated the potential for violence on January 6 among Trump supporters, many of whom portrayed themselves as supporters of the law.
The antifa focus between Trump and some of his cabinet officials and the change of law enforcement sources in the spring and last summer may have contributed to the FBI not paying attention to the growing anger among Trump supporters about false allegations of electoral fraud that culminated in the attack on the Capitol, said current and former law enforcement officials. Trump himself had defended this conspiracy theory, influencing his followers with the baseless notion that the election had been stolen.