FBI was warned weeks before Jan 6 that far-right saw Trump’s tweet as call to arms: Report

When Former United States President Donald Trump sent a tweet on December 19, 2020 summoning his supporters to a wild protest on January 6, one of the FBI’s own confidential sources warned the agency that the far-right considered Trump’s message “a call to arms,” according to an NBC News report.

As per the report, the confidential source warned there was a “big” threat of violence on January 6. The hundreds of pages of reports were sent to the FBI in the weeks before the deadly attack on the US Capitol.

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The information the source sent to the FBI in the weeks before the Capitol attack, pulled from extremist conversations on several social media platforms, included discussion of civil war, talk of hanging traitors and calls for militants to take up arms. It outlined messages like war is inevitable, hell is going to break loose, locked and loaded, my powder is dry, my guns are clean, I’m not afraid of death and I’ll gladly take lives for the preservation of our country. It included information on a “boogaloo” extremist who was ready to die in DC, according to an NBC report.

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The additional information adds to the growing list of evidence that the FBI received intelligence that hinted January 6 was a major threat and the pro-Trump extremists wanted to kill Congress members. It shows that the warnings weren’t just coming from average Americans sending information into the FBI tip line, but also from at least one trusted source checked by the FBI.

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The January 6 committee’s report avoided criticizing law enforcement failures in the lead-up to the attack because committee leaders decided to keep the focus on Trump. The full report is set to be released on Wednesday.

NBC reported, the source said they were perplexed by the committee’s refusal to reach what appeared to them, and to many experts, as an obvious conclusion: that law enforcement failed to adequately respond to intelligence prior to the January 6 incident. “The bureau saw this coming,” they said.

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In nearly two years since January 6, the public has gained a decent amount of information regarding the tips the FBI received ahead of the Capitol attack, including one from the son of a Capitol rioter on Christmas Eve 2020. The threat of violence on January 6 was not exactly a secret to anyone looking at the chatter from pro-Trump extremists on the social media before the attack. The January 6 committee has itself highlighted that Trump’s “will be wild” tweet was a major inflection point.