Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirmed Thursday that the FBI used confidential sources as part of its response to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, a revelation that lends clarity to an aspect of the event that has long been a source of speculation.
Horowitz said in a long-awaited 84-page report that 26 FBI sources were in Washington for the riot. Some of them were embedded among rioters in restricted areas, and four FBI sources also entered the Capitol with the rioters. He noted, however, that the FBI did not authorize any of those sources, also known as informants or “confidential human sources,” to enter restricted areas or the Capitol or to otherwise break the law.
The FBI sources who entered the restricted areas have not faced any charges to date, Horowitz said.
Horowitz also noted that no FBI employees, which are different than the FBI confidential human sources, were working undercover at the riot.
The FBI had tasked three of the 26 sources with being in Washington on Jan. 6 to “report on domestic terrorism subjects,” Horowitz said. The other 23 traveled to the city “on their own initiative and were not tasked by the FBI to do so,” he said. The FBI used these 23 sources in advance of Jan. 6 to gather information about the riot.
The DOJ, through U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves’s office in Washington, has charged more than 1,500 people in connection to the riot in the past four years. A majority of them have faced minor trespassing violations, while hundreds of others have faced more serious charges, such as assaulting police officers or destroying property.
The defendants were largely supporters of President-elect Donald Trump and participated in the riot as part of a protest of the 2020 election results. Since the incident, a faction of Trump’s supporters have spread the theory that law enforcement organized the riot or abetted participants, but Horowitz did not reach this conclusion.
The inspector general did find that the FBI failed to properly check with its field offices as part of its preparation for Jan. 6. FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate conceded that the bureau missed this “basic step” during an interview with Horowitz.
“While the FBI undertook significant efforts to identify domestic terrorism subjects who planned to travel to the Capital region on January 6 and to prepare to support its law enforcement partners on January 6 if needed, we also determined that the FBI did not take a step that could have helped the FBI and its law enforcement partners with their preparations in advance of January 6,” Horowitz wrote.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) told the Washington Examiner that the report raised several questions for him that he planned to follow up on, including how four FBI sources entered the Capitol.
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“Now when regular Americans do that, they get in trouble for that,” Jordan said. “So how did they get in? Did they go through a broken window? They walk right in the door? What’d they do? Another fundamental question is, why weren’t they charged? How much did they get paid? … We know one guy who was being reimbursed actually entered the Capitol. So, we’re paying a guy for information who actually didn’t follow the rules and broke the law. What did we pay him?”
Horowitz said his investigation did not include reviewing the DOJ’s prosecutorial activity, but rather it involved reviewing the FBI’s preparations and responses to the riot. He said he interviewed more than 200 witnesses and reviewed hundreds of thousands of documents as part of his investigation.
