January 6th Intelligence Failure Timeline

Introduction to the Timeline

This timeline presents a detailed listing of intelligence reports and other warnings that were available prior to the attack on the Capitol of January 6, 2021. Because this timeline is based solely on public, open-source information, it cannot be considered complete, but I believe it is the most comprehensive such list publicly available.

Some of these reports seem today as prescient, warning of violence on January 6, while other reports were more sanguine. A few, such as a warning that individuals were planning to fly an airplane into the Capitol on January 6, appear to have been false alarms—although without the benefit of an official inquiry that has access to the full classified record, we cannot know for sure.

We tend to learn the most about the inner workings of intelligence agencies after a major failure, and that truism certainly applies here. Students of intelligence, and hopefully intelligence agencies themselves, will be studying January 6 for years. The warnings and reports described here represent different aspects of the intelligence system, and for a former intelligence professional like myself who now teaches intelligence, they represent a remarkable example of what we call the “intelligence cycle”—how it works, or in this case, how it doesn’t work as well as the textbooks tells us it should.

That cycle begins with the requirements phase, with policymakers or other customers of intelligence asking questions of intelligence agencies, such as when Virginia Senator Mark Warner, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, contacted the FBI Deputy Director on January 4 to ask about the threat of violence on January 6. The next phase—which may occur simultaneously with the other phases—involves the collection of raw information, which in the case of January 6 came from sources as disparate as social media companies like Parler, and from private citizens who had (as the saying goes) seen something and wanted to say something.

This raw information is then processed and analyzed, and the January 6 timeline shows that intelligence analysis is far from a science. Warnings that one organization or analyst might see as threatening might be considered much less worrisome by another agency. Intelligence analysis is a subjective business, and as we see here warnings that one analyst might assess as indicating “nothing significant to report” can be seen by another as indicating that violence is possible or even likely.

Next, that information is turned into finished intelligence of many different kinds, ranging from daily intelligence reports (which may not get much attention) to special assessments. And finally, these intelligence products are shared with other intelligence agencies as well as with customers. It is an axiom in the intelligence business that intelligence is of no use if it doesn’t get to someone who needs it—and the timeline shows that the system of intelligence sharing within the American homeland security enterprise is very complex, involving familiar agencies such as the FBI, Secret Service, and DHS, but also organizations that you might not expect would have a role in assessing information about threats to the Capitol, such as a network of Transit and Rail Intelligence agencies, or the Postal Inspection Service.

This timeline is not itself an assessment or an analytical product, and its primary goal is to serve as a resource for others interested in understanding better what has been called a “massive intelligence failure.” But the timeline does tend to support the analysis of experts such as Mitchell D. Silber, who has argued that “[c]ollectively, the FBI, DHS I&A, and the Capitol Police has collected sufficient information to have imagined, warned about, and acted on the threat.”

Often the warnings before a disaster tend to be broad, general, and strategic in nature, such as the warnings before the 9/11 attacks that al Qaeda posed a threat to aviation (but which failed to point to the specific plot), or before the COVID-19 pandemic that the world was at risk from a global pandemic (without identifying the specific disease that would ultimately kill millions). Only rarely are the warnings before a catastrophe specific enough to provide what is known as “actionable intelligence.” But this timeline shows that in the days and weeks prior to January 6, there was a considerable amount of actionable intelligence available.

One lesson from this timeline may be that often the most perceptive analysts are not those closest to the situation. In the case of January 6, organizations and individuals who might be assumed to have the most at stake, such as the Capitol Police, often appeared to be less concerned with the possible threat than analysts in other parts of the country.

Perhaps the most important lesson may be that as comprehensive as this timeline is, we cannot know what other warnings and assessments remain hidden from view. Only an official January 6 commission, modeled on the 9/11 Commission and with ready access to the full classified record, can provide a complete answer to the question of why, in the face of the many warnings we see here, the U.S. government was not prepared on January 6 to address the threat that led to the deadly assault on the Capitol.

In today’s highly charged political atmosphere, it may not be possible to establish a bipartisan January 6 commission specific to the intelligence failures, but the next best option would be for the intelligence community, or individual elements such as the FBI and DHS, to conduct inquiries into what went wrong.  Such intelligence postmortems have a mixed record of success, but they can prove useful. After the 2009 shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, for example, then-FBI Director Robert Mueller ordered two separate investigations: an internal FBI inquiry, and an independent review conducted by former FBI and CIA director William Webster.  Such inquiries are needed now to resolve questions raised by this timeline and to help us avoid similar failures in the future.

Key sources of data in the timeline below include news media; organizations including the Anti-Defamation League, CREW, and Property of the People; and official reports from the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General, the Government Accountability Office, and a staff report from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and Rules and Administration Committee.

Numerous news organizations, think tanks, and analysts have produced timelines and chronologies highlighting other aspects of January 6, and the January 6 Clearinghouse includes several of the most useful. Others I consulted in developing this timeline include those produced by the National Security Archive, Grid News, and the Washington Post.

IMAGE: Members of the National Guard and the Washington D.C. police keep a small group of demonstrators away from the Capital after thousands of Donald Trump supporters stormed the United States Capitol building following a “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)