Everyone knew that there were going to be thousands of angry protesters showing up at the Capitol. Certainly, no one anticipated this type of breach, but you plan for the worst, and the Capitol Police should have planned for the worst, and they should have been prepared to defend that perimeter.
And, to this day, I'm completely shocked that they were unable to do so, because they had the manpower to do it. Why they failed to do so, I don't know. And, again, that doesn't take away in any way, shape, or form from the heroic acts of those individual officers, but there's a leadership failure there. And it doesn't shift blame off the individuals who committed crimes to get into that building; that's entirely on them, and that's disgraceful criminal conduct. But they should've been able to hold that perimeter. I don't know why it didn't happen.
Q How much responsibility, if any, do you put on the intelligence community for not issuing any specific warnings about January 6th?
A I think there were a lot of specific warnings about January 6th. I think that the Capitol Police certainly knew about threats. They knew that the Capitol was a target, just as we knew that the Department itself was a target, the White House was a target, Lafayette Square was a target. There was lots of targets all over D.C. that day. The Capitol was one of the obvious ones.
And intelligence was shared. I'll leave it to Director Wray and others to talk about exactly what intelligence was shared at what points in time and all of that. But you didn't need an intelligence report to know that thousands of angry people were going to be showing up at the Capitol that day who were upset about the election and who wanted to disrupt the congressional proceedings that day. And Capitol Police should've been prepared to handle that. I think they had the personnel. I think they had the intelligence. I'm not sure why it went the way it did.
