(Credit: Jag Reporter)
Numerous confidential informants alerted the FBI prior to the Jan. 6, 2021 riot that there was the strong possibility of “armed” conflict at the U.S. Capitol, but that intelligence was not disbursed aggressively enough to force a change in security that fateful day, the first congressman to review those source reports tells Just the News.
Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., the chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee investigating Jan. 6 law enforcement failures, said he was floored to see the specificity of threats and the consistency in warnings that multiple confidential human sources provided the FBI and that the intelligence was serious enough that it should have prompted more security and possibly even a cancellation of President Donald Trump’s speech that day on the Ellipse.
Loudermilk said the intelligence reports came weeks and days in advance of the Capitol riot from about two dozen informants embedded in radical groups around the country and that many of those informants came to the Capitol to keep assisting the FBI.
“I was surprised that we found this significant intelligence that was derived from these people embedded in these organizations,” he said Friday night in an expansive interview on the “Just the News, No Noise” television show. “There is no way that at least the Washington Field Office or the FBI headquarters was not aware that there were elements, not the entire crowd. There were elements of people coming to Washington, DC with the intent of attacking the Capitol of the United States.”
The Georgia lawmaker credited current FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi for giving him access to the intelligence reports of the informants and said that it opened a whole new avenue of inquiry into whether some elements inside the FBI withheld intelligence that could have helped Capitol Police better prepare or repel the violence that occurred that day.
“We’re really having a hard time finding really any tangible reports that were sent to the Capitol Police or other agencies. And so my question is, what did they know? When did they know it, and what did they do with the information?” he said.
“I can tell you unequivocally, they had to know that there was something not only bad going to happen, but the reports coming from these confidential human sources, not just one, but multiple sources from multiple organizations across multiple field offices across the nation, were reporting the same thing,” he added.
Loudermilk said the informants made clear to their FBI handlers “that not only was there going to be violence in Washington, DC, at the Capitol on January 6, most of the reports were it was going to be a whole lot worse than what actually it turned out to be.”
Pressed further, Loudermilk said he was waiting to have documents further declassified but confirmed multiple informants told the FBI that groups were planning an armed attack on the Capitol, lawmakers or law enforcement during the certification of the 2020 election results that cleared the way for Joe Biden to become the 46th president.