WASHINGTON ― No undercover FBI agents were at the Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, and no paid informants encouraged Donald Trump’s supporters to riot that day, according to a new report from a Department of Justice watchdog.
“We found no evidence in the materials we reviewed or the testimony we received showing or suggesting that the FBI had undercover employees in the various protest crowds, or at the Capitol, on January 6,” the Justice Department wrote in a summary of Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s final report on the Jan. 6 attack of the U.S. Capitol.
The report is a significant blow to Republican conspiracy theories about the Jan. 6 attack on Congress.
Some of Trump’s Republican allies have asserted that the violence of the attack was, in part, the byproduct of undercover FBI agents or informants whipping up the crowd. While trial testimony, including informant testimony at seditious conspiracy trials, confirmed there were informants on the ground on Jan. 6, FBI Director Christopher Wray has emphatically denied that the agency was in any way involved in fueling the chaos at the Capitol.
The inspector general report offered a more authoritative debunking of the Republican claims about FBI agents or informants participating in the riot.
While there were more than two dozen of the FBI’s confidential human sources in Washington that day, none had been authorized to enter the Capitol, break the law, or encourage others to do so, though 13 of them entered restricted grounds and four entered the Capitol building. Only three of the overall group had actually been asked to report on specific domestic terror case subjects who wound up involved in the riot. The others came to Washington “on their own initiative and were not tasked by FBI field offices to attend the events,” the report said.
Based on dubious analysis of video from the riot, Republicans have claimed FBI agents or informants were involved.
“I do not believe that there would have been the same level of criminal acuity on January 6 of last year but for the involvement of the federal government,” former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) told HuffPost in 2022.
Horowitz’s report has been a long time coming. He said he would produce findings a week after Donald Trump’s supporters — hundreds of far-right extremists, including members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers — stormed the Capitol, assaulting hundreds of police as Congress was forced to delay its certification of the 2020 election.
Trump repeated his vow to pardon the 1,500 rioters charged with federal crimes in a Time magazine interview published Thursday. Hundreds have been charged with assaulting police officers.
“We’re going to look at each individual case, and we’re going to do it very quickly, and it’s going to start in the first hour that I get into office. And a vast majority of them should not be in jail,” Trump told Time.
Trump, who was indicted in August 2023 for allegedly conspiring to subvert the results of the 2020 election, among other felony charges, saw his case dismissed by special counsel Jack Smith on Nov. 25. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan dismissed it without prejudice, meaning that if prosecutors wished to try bringing the case again, they could, though the odds are exceedingly unlikely that will be the outcome.
