The FBI was warned as far back as mid-December 2020 that far-right groups were viewing Donald Trump’s tweets as a “call to arms” in the campaign to overturn the 2020 election, NBC News reported on Wednesday.
The new revelation comes in the form of an email from an FBI informant obtained by the news outlet. According to NBC, the confidential FBI source remains one that the bureau uses to stay informed on the far right in America, and in the weeks leading up to January 6 was actively sending hundreds of pages of reports to the agency.
In those reports, the informant warned that there was a “big” possibility of violence breaking out in Washington DC as Congress met to certify the election, according to NBC.
“Trump tweeted what people on the right are considering a call to arms in DC on Jan 6,” the informant wrote in one report dated 19 December, outlining the problem clearly.
This report follows a revelations from the January 6 committee over the summer that top White House officials, including chief of staff Mark Meadows, knew well enough that armed individuals were likely to be present on the day of the attack and even expected violence to break out.
A top aide to Mr Meadows testified to the committee that a Secret Service agent had informed the chief of staff of the intelligence on that matter.
“I just remember Mr [Tony] Ornato coming in and saying that we had intel reports saying that there could potentially be violence on the 6th,” the committee witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, told lawmakers in her testimony. “And Mr Meadows said: ‘All right. Let’s talk about it.’”
Republicans have sought to cast blame on House and Senate Democratic leaders for not doing more to ensure that the Capitol was properly protected ahead of the attack. But the GOP as a whole has indicated a total indifference to the role of Mr Trump in inspiring the rioters to action, while many of their members have spun fictions about the day itself or attempted to minimise the threat posed by the rioters.
Members of the GOP who refused to be sat on the January 6 committee after two of their own were excluded due to their own public remarks on the issue as well as their statuses as potential witnesses before the panel released their own report on Wednesday, citing numerous failures by Capitol Police and other authorities on Capitol Hill, including Democratic leaders.
Republicans have largely yet to address why they themselves were not vocal about the need to secure the Capitol given that a GOP-controlled White House knew that violence was likely to break out and given their own immersion in the right-wing social media spheres where the planning of the demonstration (which turned into the riot) was taking place.
