WASHINGTON – The FBI director warned Senators Tuesday that domestic terrorism “is metastasizing across the country” and reiterated the threat from racially motivated extremists while largely avoiding tough questions about the bureau’s actions prior to the Capitol sieges Has.
Director Christopher A. Wray, largely out of public view since the January 6 riot, condemned supporters of former President Donald J. Trump, who raided the Capitol, resulting in five deaths and numerous police injuries led.
“That attack, that siege was pure and simple criminal behavior, and we, the FBI, consider it domestic terrorism,” Wray said. “It has no place in our democracy.”
He also revealed that the FBI’s domestic terrorism investigations had risen to 2,000 since he became its director in 2017. The Capitol uprising was part of a wider threat that had grown significantly in recent years, Wray said.
He didn’t break the investigation down an ideological divide, but the New York Times reported that agents opened more than 400 domestic terrorism investigations over the past year when racial justice protests broke out, including about 40 cases against possible ones Supporters of the far left anti-fascist movement known as Antifa and another 40 in the Boogaloo, a right-wing extremist movement that wants 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 his first before Congress since the attack on the Capitol. It was free of the drama, according to similar statements last year, when Mr Trump – who named Mr Wray to his post – attacked him for detailing the threat posed by right-wing extremists and fomenting a false narrative that anti-fascists were the real danger. In contrast, the Biden government has made the fight against domestic terrorism a priority.
As a result of last year’s violence, the FBI and the Justice Department decided to increase the threat from anti-government and anti-authority extremists such as militias and anarchists. Still, the bureau officials said the threat is one level below that portrayed by racially motivated violent extremists such as neo-Nazis.
The FBI and Justice Department base these determinations on violent attacks like shootings or bombings and use the levels to decide where to concentrate resources.
Mr Wray pointed to another alarming trend: the number of white supremacists arrested in 2020 had nearly tripled since he headed the FBI three years earlier.
White supremacists have killed dozens of people in the United States since 2015, opened fires at a black church in South Carolina and synagogues in Pittsburgh and California, and targeted Hispanic shoppers at a Walmart in Texas.
The political implications of the threats at the hearing. While Republicans condemned the attack on the Capitol, some were quick to draw attention to riots in Portland, Oregon and other cities over the past year, emphasizing property destruction and attacks on the police. In an attack of violence, an avowed Antifa supporter shot and killed a pro-Trump protester in Portland in August.
Still, it was the first murder in more than 20 years that the office classifies as an “anarchist violent extremist”.
Mr Wray repeatedly responded to questions from Democratic senators that people connected to Antifa were not involved in the storming of the Capitol and that the rioters were true Trump supporters and did not falsely pretend to be them.
Illinois Senator Richard J. Durbin, the Democratic chairman of the committee, accused the Trump administration of downplaying the threat posed by white supremacists while fueling a narrative that left anarchists like those who identify with Antifa are at greater risk for the country represented.
Mr Durbin rattled off the litany of mass shootings, adding, “Let’s stop pretending that the threat from Antifa equals the threat from the white supremacists.”
The Capitol Police have largely assumed the blame for the January 6 attack. Its acting chief, Yogananda D. Pittman, has acknowledged to Congress that the authorities have not done enough to thwart the “terrorist attack.”
In fact, as of January 6, there were several indicators of the potential for violence. Federal law enforcement officials knew members of militias like the Oath Guards and far-right groups like the Proud Boys were planning to travel to Washington, some possibly with guns. Many supporters of QAnon, a dangerous conspiracy theory that has been identified as a potential threat to domestic terrorism, should also attend a protest rally where Mr Trump spoke prior to the attack.
In addition, the day before the FBI’s Norfolk, Virginia office released a report warning of possible violence and mentioned people sharing a map of tunnels in the Capitol complex. The information was not verified, however, and part of it citing a warning of an impending “war” appeared to have come from a single online thread.
The FBI forwarded the report to the Capitol Police, though its former boss, Steven A. Sund, said it never made it.
Mr Wray said FBI officers leaked the Norfolk information to other law enforcement agencies at least three times. He said that he only saw the report after the uprising, but that the handling of it was typical of such intelligence agencies.
South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham asked what Capitol Police leaders should have done after seeing the January 5 report.
“I really want to be careful not to be a chair quarterback,” said Mr. Wray. He later said he did not have a “good answer” as to why Mr Sund did not receive the report.
With the signs of violence or worse on Jan. 6, Connecticut Democrat Senator Richard Blumenthal pressed Mr. Wray on why the FBI “did not raise the alarm in a more visible and ringing way.”
Mr Wray said the office had been publishing intelligence reports related to domestic terrorism – some specifically related to the elections – publicly and to other law enforcement agencies such as the Capitol Police for months.
He said the office was reviewing his actions but agreed that the uprising was not an “acceptable outcome”.
“We want to hit a thousand,” said Mr. Wray.
It was clear, however, that on Jan. 6, federal law enforcement agencies underestimated the potential for violence among Trump supporters, many of whom posed as law enforcement supporters.
The focus on Antifa with Mr Trump and some of his cabinet officials and the relocation of law enforcement agencies this past spring and summer may have helped the FBI fail to peak the growing anger among Mr Trump’s supporters over false allegations of electoral fraud that were culminating When he stormed the Capitol, current and former law enforcement officials have said. Mr. Trump himself had promoted this conspiracy theory and influenced his followers with the unfounded notion that the election had been stolen.
