Buzzfeed got access to the Capitol Police internal memoranda in advance of the January 6th protests. It’s not good:
The chief of the Capitol Police and its top intelligence officer personally approved permits for six demonstrations to be held on Jan. 6, 2021, despite signs that one of the applications was filed for an organization that didn’t exist and that five of them were a proxy for a group staging large, violent protests across the country.
Capitol Police documented concerns that organizers had attempted to conceal their affiliation with Ali Alexander, the right-wing activist behind the group Stop the Steal, in a secret effort to coordinate their protests against the results of the 2020 presidential election. Despite those concerns, and COVID-19 policies that capped demonstrations at 50 people each, the Capitol Police force’s intelligence assessment said there were “no plans for participants to enter the buildings” and noted “no adverse intelligence related to the upcoming event.” It assessed “the Level of Probability of acts of civil disobedience/arrests to occur” during the demonstration “as Highly Improbable.”
I think we know why they weren’t concerned, don’t we? These were Real Americans. You know, the “good people” who don’t commit violence like the you-know-whats.
It’s always been obvious to me that the reason nobody thought there would be violence on that day is because of their bias that white Trump supporters are just good patriotic Americans when in fact, there were many warnings that there is a very violence extremist element among them. In fact, the worst terrorist act in American history before 9/11 was committed by one of them.
And frankly, I don’t see a lot of evidence that January 6th changed that.