Federal prosecutors haven’t presented evidence in court of protestors’ premeditated plans to attack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 despite hundreds of social media posts easily found on the Internet, raising questions on whether the FBI missed or failed to act on the threats, reports NBC News.
“You know there will be riot police preventing us from getting in the capitol building,” one anonymous poster wrote in December. “What if we created a stampede/crush situation? Start pushing from the back. Surely they will have to get out of the way or get crushed. They’re not going to start shooting people.”
“If we occupy the Capitol building, there will be no vote,” another person wrote on a forum titled TheDonald.win.
“GOTTA OVERWHELM THE BARRICADES AND COPS,” a person responded.
“Bring handcuffs and zipties to DC,” read another post from a user named CommunismSucks. “No more tolerating ‘elected’ officials who hate our country. January 6th is the chance to restore this country. Barging into the Capitol through multiple entryways is the surest way to have our bases covered and apprehend these traitors.”
The Department of Justice has arrested and charged 421 people with crimes stemming from the Capitol attack that forced Congress to go into lockdown. Lawmakers were attempting to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election when the breach happened.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., told NBC News the posts, “sitting in plain sight on the internet before Jan. 6, paints a clear picture of a planned and coordinated violent attack.”
“It’s important to understand how much of this the FBI and DOJ knew, when they knew it, and how they decided which pieces of information warranted action.”
The FBI and DOJ declined to comment on the report.
Daniel Jones, a former FBI analyst and longtime Senate investigator who is now president of Advance Democracy, the nonprofit that gathered material from TheDonald.win, told NBC the FBI missed a number of threats leading up to the attack.
“There are thousands of posts — with tens of thousands of comments — detailing plans to travel to Washington and engage in violence against the U.S. Capitol,” he said. “The ultimate end goal of this violence was, on behalf of Trump, to disrupt the Congress and overturn the presidential election.”
NBC said it is not clear whether any of the posters are among the defendants charged. FBI officials have insisted there wasn’t an intelligence failure.
“None of us had any intelligence that suggested individuals were going to storm and breach the Capitol,” Jill Sanborn, then the FBI’s top counterterrorism official, told a Senate committee on March 3.
“We do not have at this point someone explicitly saying our plan is to force entry into the Capitol in order to stop the certification,” an assistant U.S. attorney told a federal judge on March 12.
Source: Newmax
