FBI chief: Bureau got unverified warning before Capitol attack

FBI Director Christopher Wray on Tuesday labeled the deadly Jan 6 attack on the US Capitol domestic terrorism and defended the agency's sharing an intelligence warning of a possible attack on the building the night before with Capitol Police and District of Columbia police even though it was raw and unverified.

Wray told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that an intelligence report from the FBI's Norfolk, Virginia, office was raw and unverified, but conveyed specific threats made online against members of Congress, maps of the tunnel system under the Capitol complex and places to meet before traveling together to Washington. The Norfolk memo from Jan 5 remains undisclosed.

Wray said that the report, which concluded that extremists were "preparing for war"', was communicated in less than an hour to law enforcement partners, including the Capitol Police, the District of Columbia's Metropolitan Police Department and other law enforcement partners via three channels: an email the night before; verbally at an FBI command post briefing in Washington and posted to a shared national law enforcement portal.

"Now, again, the information was raw. It was unverified. In a perfect world, we would have taken longer to be able to figure out whether it was reliable," Wray said. "But we made the judgment, our folks made the judgment to get that information to the relevant people as quickly as possible." He said that the three methods were used "to leave as little as possible to chance".

The Norfolk report first came up publicly at a Feb 23 Senate hearing when top Capitol law enforcement officials described cascading intelligence breakdowns before the attack on the building, including failure to adequately distribute the bulletin provided by the FBI the night before the riot.

Officials in charge of Capitol security have indicated that the FBI warning failed to reach senior levels and wasn't sufficiently vetted. Capitol Police and Washington DC metropolitan police indicated in earlier hearings that they didn't view the material as particularly urgent because it was unconfirmed.

Last week, former Capitol Police chief Steven Sund told a separate Senate investigating committee that the intelligence never made it to him and others before the attack.

Sund acknowledged that the bulletin landed at the Capitol police agency's intelligence unit but was never forwarded.

MPD Chief Robert Contee said last week that the report wasn't communicated with any particular sense of high alert, noting that it had arrived as an email at 7 pm the evening before the insurrection.

"I would certainly think that something as violent as an insurrection in the Capitol would warrant a phone call or something," Contee told a Senate panel.

Wray said he hadn't seen the report until after the riot but that the handling of it was typical for such intelligence.

Wray declined to disclose the cause of death of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who died following the insurrection, and he evaded saying whether a cause of death had been determined. Wray said the matter is still under investigation.

Authorities have been pursuing a suspect seen in riot footage spraying officers, including Sicknick, with a chemical agent. At least five people, including Sicknick, died as a result of the insurrection.

Wray also said he is deploying intensive resources in every field office to pursue perpetrators of the Capitol attack. The FBI has arrested at least 280 people allegedly involved in the attack and have charged more than 300.

Wray said the FBI has received more than 270,000 digital tips from Americans that have helped the bureau identify people who allegedly participated in the attack. "Some have even taken the painful step of turning in their friends or their family members," he said.

Asked why the FBI had not been more prepared for the violence, Wray said the bureau had for months released intelligence reports related to domestic terrorism — some specifically tied to the election — both publicly and to other law enforcement agencies such as the Capitol Police.

Wray said the bureau was reviewing its actions but agreed that the insurrection was not an "acceptable result". "We aim to bat a thousand," he said.

In response to questions from Democratic senators, Wray said that people associated with the antifascist movement known as Antifa weren't involved in storming the Capitol and that rioters were genuinely Trump supporters, not posing falsely as them.

Wray also said the number of domestic terrorism cases investigated by the FBI has doubled during his tenure as FBI director, from about 1,000 cases in 2017 to 2,000 by the end of 2020.