ARGUMENT: Intelligence failureThe Questions FBI Director Christopher Wray Wasn’t Asked
It was the most catastrophic intelligence failure since Sept. 11, 2001. One of the three branches of American government faced violent invasion. The invaders threatened the lives of the speaker of the House, the vice president of the United States, and all members of Congress. People died. Many more were injured. Moreover, Tia Sewell, Benjamin Wittes write, the intruders successfully interrupted the basic functioning of American democracy: its peaceful transfer of power and its ability to honor the results of an election in which those in power lost. “Yet on March 2, the man who heads the intelligence component chiefly responsible for domestic intelligence matters, for terrorism investigations, and for combatting violent extremism appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee and had a pleasant exchange with senators. The committee members seemed positively uninterested in his agency’s obvious institutional failure in the run-up to Jan. 6.”
It was the most catastrophic intelligence failure since Sept. 11, 2001. One of the three branches of American government faced violent invasion. The invaders threatened the lives of the speaker of the House, the vice president of the United States, and all members of Congress. People died. Many more were injured. Moreover, Tia Sewell, Benjamin Wittes write in Lawfare, the intruders successfully interrupted the basic functioning of American democracy: its peaceful transfer of power and its ability to honor the results of an election in which those in power lost.
They add:
Yet on March 2, the man who heads the intelligence component chiefly responsible for domestic intelligence matters, for terrorism investigations, and for combatting violent extremism appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee and had a pleasant exchange with senators. The committee members seemed positively uninterested in his agency’s obvious institutional failure in the run-up to Jan. 6.
FBI Director Christopher Wray is a decent man and he has served under incredibly difficult circumstances. We are in no sense braying for his blood. We do want to suggest, however, that the failure of senators to ask him basic questions about the FBI’s performance is an abdication of their own responsibilities…. Wray and the FBI should not be getting a pass here.
Sewell and Wittes continue:
The first of these questions concerns the relationship between the number of predicated investigations of which Wray is publicly proud, on the one hand, and the FBI’s almost total lack of visibility into the planning for Jan. 6, on the other.
…
Wray congratulated himself for the bureau’s 2,000 predicated investigations of violent extremism, the FBI also contended that it had no specific insight into what was likely to happen on Jan. 6 until the day before the insurrection. These two points don’t sit well together.
Can it really be that not one of the thousands of open investigations allowed the bureau to examine public social media postings that made the plan to storm the Capitol a matter of public knowledge and conversation?
….
There’s a second key question that neither Wray nor Sanborn had to address—and that is the role of implicit bias in blinding the FBI to the gathering storm in the run-up to Jan. 6. It is simply unimaginable that, if a group of American Muslims sympathetic to the Islamic State were tweeting about storming the Capitol and mustering by the thousands in Washington using violent rhetoric similar to that used by the insurrectionists, the bureau’s intelligence efforts would have been so anemic.
Sewell and Wittes conclude:
The problem here is not that the FBI has failed, as Wray put it, to bat 1000. It is that the bureau failed spectacularly on a matter of the highest possible stakes on which there was every reason to think success was achievable, and that it does not appear to understand the magnitude of its failure or to be interrogating the reasons for it. That is bad.
How much worse is it that senators do not appear inclined to force officials to confront these questions?
