Why Did the FBI Dismiss Jan. 6 Warnings?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, presidents are not kings and the plaintiffs is not president. That was a U.S. judge rejecting the Former President Donald Trump’s request to withhold records about the January 6th insurrection on Capitol Hill. The ruling will give a bipartisan House Committee access to hundreds of pages of documents from the Trump White House. And that committee issued 10 new subpoenas to Former Trump officials. “The Washington Post” has conducted its own extensive investigation called the attack, before, during and after. It included more than 75 journalists and interviews with over 230 people. It was an incredible commitment to pursuing the facts. And here is Michel Martin speaking with “Post” reporters, Amy Gardner and Aaron Davis about the cascade of warnings we received before January 6th.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks, Christiane. Aaron Davis, Amy Gardner, thank you both so much for joining us today.

AMY GARDNER, “THE WASHINGTON POST,” NATIONAL POLITICAL REPORTER: Thanks for having us.

AARON DAVIS, “THE WASHINGTON POST,” INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER: Thanks.

MARTIN: You know, obviously the events of January 6th are of great interest to much of the country. We got basically real-time updates on what was happening that day. There were a lot of journalists there as well as other people sort of documenting the event. But you obviously felt there was much more to say. So, Aaron, maybe I’ll go to you first because you wrote the “Before” section. I want to spend a few minutes about, you know, what were the red flags. I mean, you write, while the public may have been surprised by what happened on January 6th, the makings of the insurrection had been spotted at every level, from one side of the country to the other. The red flags were everywhere. What were some of those red flags?

DAVIS: We were able to document that it wasn’t just random tipsters calling in to the FBI. There was a network of former national security officials tied in with researchers and academics who had been studying online extremism and they were feeding information directly to prosecutors, to the FBI to D.C. officials. We found confidential informants that the FBI tied directly into militias have been monitoring them for years. We’re also saying this is different and sending them alerts of what they were seeing. Social media companies, even Parler, which had gotten a pretty bad reputation for hosting a platform where white supremacists and neo-Nazis would gather, far-right extremists would talk about their plan, even Parler sent in 50 warnings to the FBI in the days leading up to January 6th an what they believe were clear examples of criminal behavior. We know that, in a broader sense, social media companies and Silicon Valley were sending dozens of such reports to what’s called the Fusion Center in California, and that’s one of a post- 9/11 kind of construct that was built around the country. So, we can go through the list but there’s lots of ways and the warnings coming in to authorities and we started — the next question of our reporting was, what did they do with all of these warnings?

MARTIN: There is this argument that, I just got caught up in it. A lot of the people who have been arrested, a number of the people who were detained or who have been locked up, I just got caught up in it. I mean, it was just a spontaneous thing that happened in the crowd. What you’re saying is that is not true. Certain people always intended to mount some sort of a violent attack. Is that accurate?

DAVIS: There were certainly elements within the crowd of people who showed up on January 6th who were talking about very explicit violent acts they wanted to conduct weeks ahead of January 6th. And you can almost demarcate the time leading up to January 6th as pre-December 19th and post-December 19th. December 19th is when President Trump tweets, it’s almost statistically impossible that I lost this election. There’s going to be a massive protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there. We’ll be wild. And there was a clear and immediate response by President Trump’s followers and those on the extreme far-right who had already been inclined to violence began plotting very specific plans for, here’s where we’re going to meet, here’s what time we’re going to leave to D.C, who is bringing their guns, where are we going to store guns when we get there, should we keep them across the bridge in Virginia so that they don’t get confiscated? Those kinds of discussions were going on beginning basically on the night of December 19th and December 20.

MARTIN: A lot of sources of intelligence, credible sources of intelligence were telling the FBI this. In fact, one of the people who you write about who start the series with is the head of the District of Columbia’s Homeland Security Office was basically begging the FBI to pay attention to this and some of the FBI’s informants were. So, what did the FBI do with all of that? What happened to all that intelligence?

DAVIS: We were able to get a hold of internal FBI documents that document two tips that came into the FBI. One on December 19th, one on December 20th. And those were, again, talking about this idea but it came with a little bit more specificity. They specifically were talking about, we want to go to D.C. We want to overrun police. We want to take lawmakers and we want to hold them and put them on public trial for their messing with the lection and Donald Trump’s version of events. And the FBI had that warning, had another one follow-up that night. The FBI took those two warnings, ran those posters through their internal databases of concerning post and previous messages that they have looked at. Found that there was no evidence of prior criminal or other things that might immediately trip an investigation, and they closed that case within 42 hours. The tip came in on a Saturday afternoon. By Monday morning, they said, there’s nothing to see here. And I think a lot of law enforcement agencies in the D.C. area took their cues from the FBI putting the green tag on these internal warnings saying that, this is a closed case, no need for further investigation.

MARTIN: Why is that? I mean, forgive me. I’ll just say it. I mean, I think the FBI has taken a very different position with Muslims. There are stories about, you know, activists in numerous cities where social justice protests have taken place being questioned. You know, I’m sorry. One can’t help but notice the difference in response and why is that? And what does the FBI have to say about that?

DAVIS: You’re exactly right. We went back and forth with the FBI a few times on this. One of their final set of responses to us, they used a term we haven’t heard before in discussing these pro-Trump protesters. They called it, the actions they were seeking, that they were discussing about January 6th were aspirational. Meaning, that they were aspirational acts that they haven’t had enough specifics to actually show that they are going to carry out. Now, there — to your point, there are a lot of Muslims in the country who hear the word aspirational and think very differently about that. There are people who are serving federal prison terms right now, federal prison terms for being convicted for aspirational plotting and terrorist acts in the days and years after September 11th. You know, one thing I was struck by in all of this was that, you know, the FBI, D.C. police, Capitol Police, it wasn’t like this was the first time this ever happened. This — you know, many pro-Trump protesters came to D.C. twice between when the election happened and November 3rd and then on January 6th, first on November 14th, where MAGA Rally for President Trump and then again on December 12th. And each of those times, we were able to documents that the things that they were talking about doing online in the days leading up to those two earlier protests, they came and did as advertised. And before December 12th, they said, we’re going bring 700 Proud Boys and we’re going to go after antifa. Well, the after-action report from the D.C. police pegs it at about 750 Proud Boys were in D.C. that night and there were stabbings and arrests and D.C. police officers were assaulted. So, to say that there was aspirational when you got these two examples of it already happening to a lesser degree but they clearly have been violence by this group, by elements within this group.

MARTIN: So, Aaron, I’m just going to put the question to you. Is it because these are white men, mainly white men that they do not take it seriously?

DAVIS: The bureau pushes back very hard on this idea that we didn’t really treated them somehow differently. However, you can only have to look as far as some of the warnings that — in how they moved within the FBI. Even the night before January 6th, if you remember, there’s this one that comes in from the Norfolk Field Office and it that says, you know, the MAGA cavalry is going to — is riding tonight to D.C. and same kind of thing, they’re going to meet, they’re going to go after the capital itself, that Congress is the target. And they bend over backwards in this alert that comes in from the FBI field office in Norfolk saying, this is all the First Amendment protected speech, we think. There’s really nothing we can do here. And that was used over and over again with these — characterizing these internal warnings past around about January 6th. To boil it down, and yes, there clearly was an element within the FBI that could not believe that President Trump’s supporters that a lot of middle age white men would do what they did on January 6th, to physically attack the police, to go in and try to take control of the government.

MARTIN: Amy, what about you — Aaron, if I could just ask about all of these figures in law enforcement whom you interviewed, how are they sitting with this now that it’s all sort of out there in the public, any response from them?

DAVIS: You know, they still believe, I would say, not uniformly but we still get the sense from the bureau that they did what they could do and there’s not more that they could have done heading into January 6th. And so, I think that’s something that they’re going to have to wrestle with and hopefully, Congress can ask with — you know, with the demand for more answers than I can as a journalist. But I do hope that the bureau, that Department of Homeland Security, that all the agencies who played a part in this continue to wrestle with that going forward.

MARTIN: So, Amy, you wrote the after section. What are the main takeaways from your reporting?

GARDNER: Sure. I think what (INAUDIBLE) and I tried to do with the reporting that we and, you know, dozens of other reporters at the “Post” pulled together for this project was to document the degree to which the forces that work behind January 6th were still active around the country. And so, we identify two or three different sort of pockets of activity and information that we wanted to really dig into and quantify to the best of our ability. We wanted to find out the degree to which President Trump’s disinformation about the election results in 2020 had taken hold of the Republican Party, and we did that by doing a massive survey of every Republican candidate who’s expressed an interest to date, this is as of the end of the summer when we working on this piece of the story, who had embraced his disinformation in one way or another. That included anybody running for statewide office. U.S. senator, governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, and really importantly, secretary of state, which in most states in this country, administers elections. And we found 10 Republican candidates or people thinking about running for secretary of state around the country, which we found fascinating and alarming. It’s become a litmus test, in a way. If you don’t declare that something was off in the 2020 election, the former president will not support you. He’s made that very clear. And it’s worked because now, Republicans around the country believe they must embrace the lie that Trump really won the election last year as the cost of entry into the arena of politics right now.

MARTIN: I mean — is the volume of threats that election officials and state officials are receiving. Can you talk more about that?

GARDNER: That’s right. The other big pot that we wanted to sort of fill up and quantify and show readers just how prevalent it was was this idea of threats to election officials and political leaders who had weighed in on the results of the election. I took a really deep dive into Georgia over the last 18 months covering the rollout of the elections throughout 2020 and the aftermath as well. And I remember vividly, the day that Gabriel Sterling, a top official in the secretary of state’s office in Georgia, sent me a screen shot of a letter he had just received with the U.S. Postal Service, written in this very friendly-looking bubbling handwriting that basically said, he and his family had better watch out. He was about to be married and it was really chilling for him. And we heard about voice mail messages. We knew Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state in Georgia, had, at one point, had sharp shooters on the roof of his home. So, we did a really big survey. We called into every state in the union and reached state election officials, local election officials and did our best to get some sense of how prevalent it was. We found instances in the hundreds of threats written, voice mails, phone calls, snail mail, as I mentioned, and we also compiled many of those threats in some audio clips that we embedded into the project and they’re bone chilling. They’re graphic, profane, crude, and scary. They’re terrifying, actually.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You [bleep] my [bleep] election. We’re going to try you and we’re going to [bleep] convict your piece of [bleep] and we’re going to hang you.

(END VIDEO CLIP)-

MARTIN: You pointed out that nearly a third of Republican candidates have embraced the lie that the election was stolen.

GARDNER: That’s right.

MARTIN: So, that means that two-thirds have not. So, what do they think about all this? I mean, do they think it is acceptable? Do they not see that they might then be the target of this kind of conduct? What do they think about all this?

GARDNER: There are a number of Republican politicians around the country who have stood up and said, no, the election wasn’t stolen. And they have paid the price. Clint Hickman, the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors until recently, he voted for President Trump, he campaigned with President Trump last fall in Arizona last fall. But when he refused to say the election results were wrong or riddled, you know, with fraud, he paid the price. He was actually escorted out of his home on January 6th. Sheriff deputies came to his home when the violence began unfolding on Capitol Hill and was told, you need to leave here with your family. Pack your bags and they went and stayed with a relative. And the other thing that you see down at the local level are election clerks, election recorders, voter registrars, the names vary according to the state, who are saying, to heck with this. I didn’t sign up for this. I didn’t sign up to go home at night and check my closets to make sure there’s nobody there hiding, which one clerk in Michigan told us about. And so, it’s been traumatic and it’s difficult for election officials to figure out how they’re going to populate the election staffs going forward, because if those who wanted to stand up for the truth and for the accuracy of the results are not wanting to fill these jobs, who will? And that’s a scary thought for folks as well.

MARTIN: Well, well, you note in Virginia, for example, recently as speaking the elections were held in Virginia and New Jersey and the prevailing candidate in Virginia, the gubernatorial Glenn Youngkin, a former private equity investor, clearly not a rue (ph), initiated his campaign for governor by, you know, raising the big lie. He won. I’m just curious, like, why this event which was so traumatic for some people, that others are so indifferent to it? What is your sense of it?

GARDNER: Yes. I was very curious to see how it was going to play out last Tuesday night when Glenn Youngkin, as you said, defeated Terry McAuliffe here in Virginia where I sit right now. And especially because at around 7:00 or 7:30 after the polls closed, we had been led to believe that the largest community in Virginia, Fairfax County, was going to release its early absentee totals immediately, like before 8:00. And then, a journalist tweeted, it looks like they’re not going to release them before 8:00, stay tuned or something like that. And the pro-Trump universe erupted and major figures, major supporters of President Trump, people like (INAUDIBLE), you know, lots of folks who just absolutely run with the lie that the election was stolen, starting tweeting and posting on Telegram and other places, Facebook, that, oh, here we go, everybody eyes on Fairfax, they’re figuring out how many votes they need throw this election for Terry. And it turns out that Fairfax did post those early and absentee results by 8:00 and the rest of the results came in, most of them, by 10:00, which is actually early for Fairfax. I can say this with credibility as a long time Virginia politics reporter. And so, then you go back to social media, OK. What now? Youngkin won. Was it fraud, or wasn’t it? And the answer is, oh, no. There was fraud. It’s just that our people came out in such numbers that we overcame the algorithms and we won anyway. And so, some of the theories that you hear about how the fraud actually happens defy logic and defy rational thinking, and that’s one of the problems that you have right now. And so, people are believing what they’re hearing even when it defies logic sometimes.

MARTIN: Amy Gardner, Aaron Davis, thank you both so much for speaking with us about your important reporting.

DAVIS: Thank you.

GARDNER: Thank you.