The U.S. Capitol Police in Washington D.C. have conducted a secret internal review in the aftermath of the peaceful protests on January 6th, 2021, which determined that there were numerous shortcomings in extra security measures and intelligence-gathering prior to the protests.
According to Just The News, the report was completed on June 4th, 2021, and cited a total of 53 different areas of failure in need of corrective action. The report highlights Capitol Police’s inadequate security measures on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) watch. Among other issues, the report claims that leadership of the Capitol Police had obtained intelligence indicating that there would be protests on January 6th, in opposition to the counting of the suspicious and possibly fraudulent electoral vote from the 2020 election, but the intelligence was not passed along.
“The assessment for 1/6 contained a BLUF that did not express the severity of the threat or the fact that USCP actually had knowledge of a plan in place,” the report states. “The statement that protesters may be armed was included, but it was never expressed with the urgency that they planned to overtake the Capitol and target Members of Congress.”
This particular failure was directly attributed to Speaker Pelosi, who, upon taking over, dismantled the Capitol Police’s open-source intelligence unit dedicated to scanning social media for possible threats. “Individuals with the most experience extrapolating open-source material were not tasked with reviewing social media to glean intel related to the event,” the report noted.
The report was compiled by gathering observations from 44 different submissions from Capitol Police commanders and frontline officers to the Coordination Unit, detailing which failings and shortcomings led to security being so unprepared when the peaceful protesters entered the building itself.
Members of Congress reacted to the report by calling out Pelosi’s role in deliberately weakening Capitol security. Congressman Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) said that “the recently revealed After-Action report confirms what I’ve been saying for years, that Speaker Pelosi and Congressional Democrats are not focused on the serious security failures that occurred under their watch.”
“The Democratic Majority’s incompetence and unwillingness to fix long-standing issues was a main contributor to the security failure on January 6th,” Davis continued. “There must be immediate accountability and reform.”
Former New York Police Department (NYPD) Commissioner Bernard Kerik also criticized congressional leadership following the report, saying that the report’s findings proved a “lack of leadership” in Congress, as well as “a lack of preparedness.”
This is an event on this day that they were looking at for a week or two prior,” Kerik explained. “You mean to tell me that nobody, nobody made any preemptive plans on how they were going to deal with any protests, any crowd, any large gathering around the Capitol for their quick reaction force? That’s crazy.”