The January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was everyone’s fault but the District’s
Revelations and recriminations in the wake of the January 6 extremist attack on the United States Capitol have burned up news and social media for two weeks now.
The finger-pointing came fast and furious within days and has not let up, even as officials plan for the Inauguration of President-Elect Joe Biden.
Some news reports said the U.S. Capitol Police had failed to ask The Metropolitan Police Department (“MPD”) and the D.C. National Guard, in advance of the protest of the Electoral College vote count, for assistance typically made available through agreements between federal and local agencies.
Other reports of raw intelligence that the FBI in Norfolk shared with FBI officials in Washington warned of militant extremists coming to engage in “war,” prompting then-Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund to claim he did not receive any such assessment.
This weekend, The Washington Post reported that an internal Capitol Police report alerted officials throughout the agency of the potential for violence aimed at “Congress itself,” inciting an unnamed FBI source to claim the FBI did not receive that raw intelligence, either.
When Sund reportedly asked the D.C. National Guard in advance of the attack to lend assistance, the military allegedly denied the request, then slow-walked a more urgent response once violence broke out—the latter claim echoed by District officials.
After the Pentagon drew fire for being too slow to respond to the Capitol riot, officials objected that Capitol and D.C. police were unprepared and too slow to ask for military assistance—which all parties understood ahead of time would be limited to unarmed monitoring of traffic barricades and Metro stations.
Beating everyone to the punch, D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine went on cable news first thing the next morning and said “our federal partners let us down.”
Absent from the churn has been an assessment of the District’s own preparation for the catastrophic assault on the Capitol, or a candid look at the public statements by Mayor Muriel Bowser and her newly minted Chief of Police Robert Contee III, as well as other elected D.C. officials.
Since that fateful day, Bowser has deflected any responsibility for the confusion at the Capitol that left five dead and some 60 MPD officers injured—some of them traumatized for days after.
Just this week, the Post gushed about Bowser’s ubiquitous national media presence of late, and credited her for holding news conferences during and after the riot, as federal authorities ducked questions from reporters and the Trump administration went dark.
Arguments raged about threat assessment, planning and deployment of law enforcement and security forces, while Bowser, Racine, Contee and others cast blame, claimed credit for saving democracy, walked back pre-riot assertions of responsibility, pursued selective recourse and downgraded the District’s role in tomorrow’s Inauguration in “ensuring the Constitutional transition of power and our nation’s capital in the days leading up to it.”
Seizing her moment in the spotlight, Bowser instead has employed the tragedy in her campaign for statehood. Others have offered their own self-serving deflections.
Calling Capitol Police preparation “a complete failure,” D.C. Councilmember Charles Allen invoked racial comparisons between the relative ease with which the insurgents entered the Capitol, and the heavy-handed police response to the George Floyd riots that led to the creation of Black Lives Matter Plaza.
Ignoring that an angry mob marched without resistance down two of the most prominent avenues in the District of Columbia, Councilmember Robert White asked Racine to consider misdemeanor criminal charges against Trump, citing a D.C. law that it is illegal to incite a riot, defined as “a gathering of five or more people” who create “grave danger of damage or injury to property or persons.”
In place of accepting its share of responsibility for the systemwide breakdown, which will be investigated and analyzed for months, District officials have managed to avoid so much as a whiff of accountability, while throwing everyone else under the bus.
It’s a neat trick, but not without its contradictions and misdirections.
Bowser boxed the District in on January 5, with a letter to Acting U.S. Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller and Secretary of the Army Ryan D. McCarthy, ensuring them that the District was prepared for the First Amendment activities that according to widespread accounts were destined to unlawfully extend to the Capitol.
“[MPD] has coordinated with its federal partners, namely US Park Police, US Capitol Police and the US Secret Service—all of whom regularly have uniformed personnel protecting federal assets in the District of Columbia,” Bowser wrote.
“This week, MPD has additional logistical support of unarmed members of the DC National Guard, who will work under the direction of, and in coordination with, MPD.
“The District of Columbia Government has not requested personnel from any other federal law enforcement agencies. To avoid confusion, we ask that any request for additional assistance be coordinated using the same process and procedures.”
Bowser pointed to rallies and protests in 2020, when MPD encountered unidentifiable law enforcers without proper coordination, causing confusion that she said could hamper police ability to discern armed groups.
“To be clear, the District of Columbia is not requesting other federal law enforcement personnel and discourages any additional deployment without immediate notification to, and consultation with, MPD if such plans are underway.
Perhaps the most misleading, Bowser wrote, “MPD is well trained and prepared to lead the law enforcement, coordination and response to allow for the peaceful demonstration of First Amendment rights in the District of Columbia.”
News outlets leapt to criticize Bowser for waiving off the feds when she tweeted out her letter on January 5. The backlash was such that in a post-riot interview, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell afforded Bowser the unchallenged claim that her letter pertained to coordination of plans to protect D.C. property.
Contee, a 30-year veteran who had taken the helm of MPD just four days before the riot, staked out a similar position during a news conference, on January 7, in which he sought to clear up “disinformation” regarding MPD’s responsibility, which he said is “to provide public safety services to the vibrant communities that make up this great city.”
After several meetings with regional partners leading up to President Donald Trump‘s rally at the Ellipse, the Chief said he felt “very comfortable” with the deployment, which occurred after his counterpart at the Capitol called for backup.
“I’m proud of our officers. They fought, and we restored the People’s business. What we did do is restore democracy for all of America, and assisted our partners, the US Capitol, and their approximately 2000-member force, by providing a swift response to an escalating situation.
“MPD members will continue to be responsible for local DC, but we are willing and capable, as we saw yesterday, of assisting our partners at any moment.
“Again, when US Capitol Police call for assistance, MPD answer[s] the call.”
The morning after the attack, Racine attempted to back up Bowser and Contee, but in the process gave an assessment that appeared to fly in the face of the Mayor’s January 5 letter, which she walked back in her interview with Mitchell.
“DC law enforcement officers, frankly, they did their jobs,” Racine said, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “And they went out and afterward, they helped the Capitol Police restore order and arrested folks pursuant to the curfew order that Mayor Bowser invoked. Our federal partners let us down.”
Racine did not specify what “partners” he was referring to, however, and he did not respond to questions from The Dig. His office said it did not have any further information to share.
That did not mean the Attorney General did not have any information, though the nature of it depends on who you talked to after the attack.
On January 4, Racine reportedly joined a Zoom call with the Council that occurred in a rare closed session. Similar to Bowser’s January 5 letter, the objective and the upshot of the meeting is unclear.
According to an attendee, Bowser, Contee and D.C. Director of the Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency Chris Rodriguez “were there to discuss what we thought could be violent actions at the Capitol.”
“It was unusual, in that it wasn’t open to the public,” said the attendee. “And I can’t ever recall being in a public safety meeting like that with the Attorney General and all of these other officials.”
Rodriguez cited raw intelligence that the Proud Boys and other factions were coming to town, the attendee said, and that the gathering was going to be larger than originally expected.
But the conversation steered not toward the Capitol—where Bowser had claimed to have coordinated with its police—but the District, the attendee said.
Some Council members were concerned about the potential for chaos after the Trump rally, and Contee said MPD would be responsible for crowd control outside federal properties. Officials talked about monitoring downtown hotels, and the Chief appeared to have compartmentalized the prospects of a right wing insurrection as a concern for the Capitol Police, another attendee said.
That attendee said Bowser anticipated the mass rally to resemble other Trump events, and that MPD could handle the demonstration with the (unarmed) backup assistance of the National Guard, and the U.S. Park Police, which has jurisdiction over the Ellipse.
Despite Bowser’s claim in her letter that MPD was in coordination with Capitol Police and the Secret Service—which has been somewhat absent from the post-riot analyses—the Capitol Police has taken the brunt of criticism, amid competing claims of federal intelligence failures.
“Capitol Police has to rely on federal intelligence, and the feds didn’t do an adequate threat assessment,” the second attendee said.
To no one’s surprise, Sund resigned almost immediately after the attack, drawing pressure from Congressional leaders for the Sergeants-At-Arms of the Senate and the House of Representatives to follow suit.
In a post-riot press conference, Bowser backed away from her January 5 assurance to D.C.’s federal partners that MPD was prepared to lead the “law enforcement, coordination and response to allow for the peaceful demonstration of First Amendment rights in the District of Columbia.”
Then she, too, piled on the Capitol Police.
“I made the decision that I needed MPD to focus on law enforcement activities and [of] being able to respond to any hot spots and that’s why we needed…the DC National Guard, to help us maintain a perimeter around our areas of concern. The Capitol Police and the leadership at the Capitol, they did not make the decision to call in Guard support.”
When asked whether she was irked that there wasn’t “a more ratcheted up response specifically at the Capitol,” and to offer her take on Army Secretary McCarthy’s reference to “a delay of getting federal forces into the district,” she replied, “I think that a more robust presence on the grounds of the Capitol would have prevented people from getting into the building. Yes.”
Bowser doubled-down when a Fox 5 DC reporter said Capitol Police were “just seemingly letting people inside” and made only 13 arrests for unlawful entry. “It’s one thing to have several officers on the ground, but what do we do if they’re not as effective as they possibly should be?” the reporter asked.
“I think you’ve laid out another question that will be subject to investigation. I think that’s an important question. We not only need people, we need effective deployment of those people. Yes.”
Both Contee and Bowser have emphasized that MPD does not have authority to enter Capitol grounds (or federally controlled areas) without a request from the respective agency with jurisdiction.
“We can’t decide to be their police–but we have a regional cooperating system in place,” Bowser said.
The Mayor also noted she must seek approval from the Secretary of the Army for the National Guard to deploy to D.C. This, she took as an opportunity to advocate for statehood, noting that D.C. police defended a building where “706,000 D.C. residents did not have a single vote.”
“[W]hen we become the 51st state or before then, our Congresswoman has a bill in the Congress right now to give the mayor control of the DC National Guard,” Bowser said. “What’s different is we would not make a request to the Secretary of the Army for Guard support. We would not be restricted in any way from how to deploy the Guard.”
Having explained away any shortcoming in planning and deployment, Contee sought to deflect responsibility for alleged threat assessment failures.
“There was no intelligence that suggested that there would be a breach of the US Capitol,” he told reporters. “The intelligence leading up to that, we won’t talk specifically about the intelligence that we had, but we anticipated certainly that there would be an increased number of people into our city, in comparison to the previous two demonstrations, certainly knew that.”
He then pivoted back to assertions of a coordinated effort involving multiple law enforcement agencies—most of which played a reactive or belated role in restoring the Capitol.
“[Not only did we activate the National Guard, but we also initiated mutual aid with several area law enforcement agencies before yesterday. So I think that that’s a really important note to make in terms of our preparation for this. So based on the intelligence, not only did we have the National Guard, but we had…mutual aid services for DC residents for Washington. That’s really, really, really important.”
MPD was unable to make Contee available for an interview, and directed The Dig to its press conferences and Twitter feed.
Bowser’s office also referred specific questions for this article to press conferences.
The District’s self-serving explanations have gone uncontested for the most part, as opposed to the Capitol Police and the National Guard, which have been openly at odds with one another.
A Pentagon timeline states that on January 2, Miller, the Acting Secretary of Defense, conferred with McCarthy, Secretary of the Army, to discuss Bowser’s request for support from the National Guard.
Officials across the board acknowledged the National Guard would be providing unarmed support to the District.
On January 3, the Department of Defense confirmed that the Capitol Police was not requesting such assistance.
Sund has proffered a version of events that he informally sought National Guard assistance on January 4, the night before Bowser’s letter, but by then it was established that the Guard’s role was merely to supplant MPD in the event D.C. police officers were called to the Capitol.
The National Guard is not a rapid response agency, which became abundantly clear when Bowser declared the January 6 incursion at the Capitol a riot, at 1:49 pm, less than an hour after Contee sent 100 officers to assist the Capitol Police, which by 1:00 pm were overmatched.
Once a riot is declared, MPD has broad authority to enter any property in the District to deal with the crisis. But by 2:26 pm, according to the timeline, rather than commanding his 3,700 member force, Contee was on a call with Sund and McCarthy, trying to clarify a request by Sund for National Guard deployment to the Capitol, according to reporting by the Post.
Once the Defense Department approved the request, troops had to decamp to the National Armory to prepare for armed deployment. They did not arrive at the Capitol until shortly before 6 pm–nearly five hours after rioters had burst through the front doors in malevolent fashion, and after most of the violence had subsided.
Somewhat overlooked is that the Secret Service, which was mentioned in Bowser’s letter (along with the Capitol and Park Police), and the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which were not, did not reach the scene until after insurgents had forced their way inside.
Even when those agencies answered the call, their mission was to protect Congressional members and staff, not the Capitol itself, which D.C. and Capitol police were left to defend.
The reports that have surfaced in the days since the riots have raised questions about what officials across the law enforcement and homeland security spectrum knew, shared with one another, and acted on.
A recurring theme is the distinction in different types of intelligence. In the post-riot fog, such reports have spawned defensive delineations of social media chatter, general intelligence, and specific, actionable intelligence.
Above the fray, Bowser has staked out a revised role for the District in policing the Inauguration, in an equally commanding tone that now points to inter-agency cooperation and improved federal intelligence, but commits MPD only to policing its own streets.
In a January 9 letter to Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Chad Wolf, she wrote, “We believe strongly that [the Inauguration] will require a very different approach than previous inaugurations given the chaos, injury, and death experienced at the United States Capitol during the insurrection.
“While I will be reaching out to a broad range of local, regional, and federal partners to enhance cooperation among our bodies, I strongly urge the Department of Homeland Security to adjust its approach to the inauguration in several ways.”
In bold type, the Mayor requested extended national security measures from January 11 to January 24, a “pre-disaster declaration” to enable enhanced federal assistance in concert with FEMA, and coordination between major federal agencies, Congress and the Supreme Court, “which will ensure MPD’s ability to focus its local mission in the District’s eight wards.”
“Earlier this week,” she continued, “MPD officers acted heroically rushing to back up the Capitol Police to stop the assault on the Capitol. Consistent with established protocols and practices, it is the primary responsibility of the federal government to secure federal property in these situations.”
All of which strikes a revisionist tone and further casts a shadow over what did–and did not–happen on January 6, according to a veteran of over 30 years of planning and infrastructure work for rallies and mass protests in the District.
Despite claims and characterizations by Bowser, Contee, Racine and members of the D.C. Council that intelligence and planning failures lie elsewhere, all available information leading up to January 6 suggested that an actual coordinated preparation and response incorporating the District’s ample resources was needed to turn back the angry hordes that day.
“These people work together all the time,” the veteran event producer said, asking to remain anonymous in order to speak candidly. “Down the line, from the Capitol Police to the Park Police to the MPD to the U.S. Secret Service, the fact that there was no actionable intelligence at the Ellipse, within close proximity to [the White House] is insane.”
Even with a failure of intelligence flowing down from the highest levels of the security and law enforcement, the expert said, “This was an unlawful assembly the minute they stepped off the Ellipse.”
Indeed, the Park Service, on January 4, issued multiple gathering permits for the January 6 rally, according to sources briefed on the matter by law enforcement. The Dig obtained three of them, including a Public Gathering Permit issued two days before the attack for a “First Amendment Rally” at the Ellipse, where Trump was scheduled to speak.
Women For America First applied for that permit, which anticipated 30,000 participants—revised upwards from an original request for 5,000. Intelligence aside, a plain reading of that permit foreshadowed where the rabble was headed.
“Women For America First will not conduct an organized march from the Ellipse at the conclusion of the rally,” an Activity Overview reads.”Some participants may leave to attend rallies at the United States Capitol to hear the results of Congressional certification of the Electoral College count.”
The expert source tells The Dig that when a group or organization applies for such a permit, U.S. Park Service officials hold a roundtable to include the applicant, the Park Police, the lead permit ranger with the U.S. Park Rangers, and any other law enforcement partners that should expect to be on hand for the protest or rally.
“With the proximity to the White House, the Secret Service should have been at that roundtable,” the expert says. “MPD should have been in on that as well.
“They all should have been all over this. All of these agencies have their own intel, and it’s shocking to me that intel didn’t trickle down to the people who needed to know this stuff.
“These people have relationships that go back years. Everybody knows everybody.”
One unanswered question that has eluded the press—and that neither Bowser, Contee nor their federal or Congressional partners are anxious to answer—is whether on January 6 there was what is known as a Joint Operations Command Center, or JOCC, which MPD usually coordinates, being the agency with the most personnel, resources, expertise and experience in dealing with protests and First Amendment rallies in Washington, D.C.
The veteran source could not recall ever having seen such a large setup and staging of a rally on the Ellipse—certainly not one in which there was no joint command operation in place.
The fact that some 8,000 protestors bent on destruction marched down Constitution Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue on D.C. property unimpeded and without a permit was mind-boggling to the veteran of 30 years.
Asked whether by any definition of intelligence, threat assessment and planning, local and federal agencies should have stood up a JOCC and prepared a truly coordinated plan for that fateful day, the source replied, “How could they not?”
