Much reporting on the Jan. 6 insurrection has focused on “failures of preparedness and intelligence sharing by the U.S. Capitol Police, the FBI and the Pentagon,” ProPublica reports this morning. The involvement of Donald Trump White House officials has gone largely uninvestigated.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Thursday she would convene a Select Committee to investigate the mayhem of Jan. 6. How much cooperation the committee could either get or compel from White House officials is unknown, but their roles should be part of that investigation:
ProPublica has obtained new details about the Trump White House’s knowledge of the gathering storm, after interviewing more than 50 people involved in the events of Jan. 6 and reviewing months of private correspondence. Taken together, these accounts suggest that senior Trump aides had been warned the Jan. 6 events could turn chaotic, with tens of thousands of people potentially overwhelming ill-prepared law enforcement officials.
Rather than trying to halt the march, Trump and his allies accommodated its leaders, according to text messages and interviews with Republican operatives and officials.
Katrina Pierson, a former Trump campaign official assigned by the White House to take charge of the rally planning, helped arrange a deal where those organizers deemed too extreme to speak at the Ellipse could do so on the night of Jan. 5. That event ended up including incendiary speeches from Jones and Ali Alexander, the leader of Stop the Steal, who fired up his followers with a chant of “Victory or death!”
The record of what White House officials knew about Jan. 6 and when they knew it remains incomplete. Key officials, including White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, declined to be interviewed for this story.
ProPublica obtained a Dec. 27 text from Women for America First organizer Amy Kremer that suggests the White House was warned that the Stop the Steal rally organized by Alexander and Cindy Chafian, an Alex Jones ally, could get out of hand. In particular, any impromptu march on the Capitol. Kremer, who has known Mark Meadows since his early days in Congress, denies speaking with Meadows or other White House officials about the matter. Kremer did not answer ProPublica’s questions about the text and Meadows refused to comment on whether he’d been contacted.
An intelligence report from that day obtained by ProPublica shows that the Capitol Police expected a handful of rallies on Capitol grounds, the largest of which would be hosted by a group called One Nation Under God.
Law enforcement anticipated between 50 and 500 people at the gathering, assigning it the lowest possible threat score and predicting a 1% to 5% chance of arrests. The police gave much higher threat scores to two small anti-Trump demonstrations planned elsewhere in the city.
However, One Nation Under God was a fake name used to trick the Capitol Police into giving Stop the Steal a permit, according to Stop the Steal organizer Kimberly Fletcher. Fletcher is president of Moms for America, a grassroots organization founded to combat “radical feminism.”
“Everybody was using different names because they didn’t want us to be there,” Fletcher said, adding that Alexander and his allies experimented with a variety of aliases to secure permits for the east front of the Capitol. Laughing, Fletcher recalled how the police repeatedly called her “trying to find out who was who.”
A Senate report on security failures during the Capitol riot released earlier this month suggests that at least one Capitol Police intelligence officer had suspicions about this deceptive strategy, but that leadership failed to appreciate it — yet another example of an intelligence breakdown.
On Dec. 31, the officer sent an email expressing her concerns that the permit requests were “being used as proxies for Stop the Steal” and that those requesting permits “may also be involved with organizations that may be planning trouble” on Jan. 6.
A Capitol Police spokesperson told ProPublica on April 2, “Our intelligence suggested one or more groups were affiliated with Stop the Steal,” after we asked for a copy of the One Nation Under God permit, which they declined to provide.
Yet 18 days later, Capitol Police Acting Chief Yogananda Pittman told congressional investigators that she believed the permit requests had been properly vetted and that they were not granted to anyone affiliated with Stop the Steal. Pittman did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment.
One Nation Under God obtained a permit from Capitol Police to gather on Capitol grounds, while Women for America First held the Park Service permit for the rally on the Ellipse where Trump spoke. His decision to speak “came as a surprise to both rally organizers and White House staff,” or so they told ProPublica. Trump’s announcement from the stage that the crowd would be marching to the Capitol shocked Women for America First organizer Jennifer Lynn Lawrence. The rest is history.
As of Thursday, 500 have been arrested, including 100 for assaulting police. Marcy Wheeler adds, “FBI has released 410 BOLOs, most for assault, and well over 200 of those people remain at large. And of course, the FBI has not yet apprehended the pipe bomber.”
A lot of people “did not respond” to or “declined to comment” on ProPublica’s questions about planning leading up to the Jan. 6 insurrection still under investigation by the FBI. Pelosi’s Select Committee has a lot of questions that need answering.