The right has flipped the story of the FBI and Jan. 6 upside down

[cigaretteman]

The best place to begin, as they say, is at the beginning.
President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. He refused (and still refuses) to accept that loss, claiming that the election had somehow been stolen and grasping at anything that might even hint that this was true. Many or most of his supporters believed him.


Get the latest election news and results

By mid-December of that year, his available options had narrowed. States finalized their electoral votes and submitted them to Washington on Dec. 14. So, a few days later and after meeting with his advisers, Trump summoned his supporters to a rally in the capital on Jan. 6, pledging that it would “be wild.”
Skip to end of carousel

Sign up for the How to Read This Chart newsletter​

Subscribe to How to Read This Chart, a weekly dive into the data behind the news. Each Saturday, national columnist Philip Bump makes and breaks down charts explaining the latest in economics, pop culture, politics and more.

End of carousel
Tens of thousands came. Trump urged them to march to the Capitol to protest the counting of those electoral votes. Thousands did. A riot ensued.

What happened on Jan. 6, 2021, is because of Trump, full stop. That’s different than saying “Donald Trump told people to riot” because, while he assembled the crowd and stoked its fury that day, he didn’t tell his supporters to do what they did. But if perhaps he hadn’t stoked them and particularly if he hadn’t assembled them and certainly if he hadn’t lied to them about the election, there’s no riot.

ADVERTISING

Because Trump bears the blame, he and his supporters have looked for alternative explanations. In the hours after the riot, some of them latched onto the idea that the violence — which unfolded at multiple locations around the building — had been driven by leftist agitators. This was obviously baseless and got no traction. So Trumpworld turned to another of its favorite bêtes noires, the government itself.
🏛️
Follow Politics
For example, Trump allies, including Tucker Carlson, claimed that a man named Ray Epps was involved in triggering the violence, at times claiming that he was working for the government. Epps, a Trump supporter, had no link to the government and did not encourage violence on Jan. 6.

The Epps allegation presented a weakness for the conspiracy theorists: It could be falsified. So the most popular story became a nebulous one, that government actors were seeded in the crowd and encouraged the riot to unfold.

We should again stop and note that this explanation is not needed.
Consider Dominic Pezzola, a member of the Proud Boys who was filmed smashing a window at the Capitol and who was one of the first people inside the building. During 2020, the Proud Boys had increasingly centered their actions around Trump and stood ready to back his efforts to retain power. They (and other groups, such as the Oathkeepers) had planned for and discussed violence at the Capitol well before Jan. 6; in fact, several Proud Boys had engaged in violence after a pro-Trump rally in D.C. the month before.

These people needed an FBI agent to tell them what to do? Not that there was any reason for the FBI to want to create a riot. If the bureau’s leaders disliked Trump (even though the FBI director was appointed by him), they only had to wait two weeks for him to be out of office.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/12/13/right-has-flipped-story-fbi-jan-6-upside-down/

 

[cigaretteman]

The FBI would have good reason to have been in contact with extremist groups, though — surreptitiously. The bureau often (and not without controversy) identifies people within suspect groups who might offer information and insight into what’s unfolding. These informants, called “confidential human sources” in FBI vernacular, are familiar characters in movies and TV shows, providing occasional information to law enforcement as they otherwise engage with the targets of investigations. The FBI had numerous informants within the Proud Boys.
Guidelines from the Justice Department explain that a confidential human source, or CHS, is “any individual who is believed to be providing useful and credible information to the FBI for any authorized information collection activity, and from whom the FBI expects or intends to obtain additional useful and credible information in the future, and whose identity, information, or relationship with the FBI warrants confidential handling.” FBI handlers are instructed to offer several warnings to CHSs, including that they have “not been authorized to engage in any criminal activity,” have “no immunity from prosecution for any unauthorized criminal activity” and are “not employee of the United States Government.”

On Thursday, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz released a report criticizing the FBI’s actions before Jan. 6. After all, the bureau failed to disrupt or derail the riot, despite its investigatory efforts and despite internal signals that something was brewing.

What attracted the most attention from the inspector general (IG) report, though, was the first delineation of how many of the people who were at the Capitol were also serving as FBI informants. Here are pertinent excerpts of the report:

“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. … We determined that three CHSs had been tasked by FBI field offices in the days leading up to the January 6 Electoral Certification, with the required approval of the [Washington Field Office (WFO)], to travel to DC for the events of January 6 to report on domestic terrorism subjects who were possibly attending the event. …”
“In addition to these 3 CHSs, we found that 23 other FBI CHSs were in DC on January 6 in connection with the events planned for January 6. 3 None of these FBI CHSs were authorized to enter the Capitol or a restricted area, or to otherwise break the law on January 6, nor was any CHS directed by the FBI to encourage others to commit illegal acts on January 6.”

No FBI employees. Twenty-six informants, of whom four entered the Capitol and 13 entered the restricted area outside the Capitol where thousands of protesters congregated. Three were directed to be there, perhaps to track some of the dozens of people on the FBI’s terrorism watch list known to have been in D.C. that day.

Importantly, the report notes that “many of these 26 CHSs had provided information relevant to the January 6 Electoral Certification before the event and that a few CHSs also provided information about the riot as it occurred.” One informant expressed concern about members of Congress. One even told the FBI about the Proud Boys’ travel plans before Jan. 6. But many — presumably a heavy majority — weren’t in contact with the FBI on Jan. 6 in part because their handlers didn’t know they were there!

The report gives the lie to the idea that the FBI stoked the riot. And yet, on the political right and within Trumpworld in particular, the opposite narrative has taken hold: The admission that informants were at the Capitol is an admission of FBI involvement — just as they’d said all along.
An excerpt of the IG report that included references to the informants circulated on social media. Vice President-elect JD Vance claimed that “this was labeled a dangerous conspiracy theory months ago,” with ally Elon Musk expressing his approval.

“If you uttered the facts in this IG report last year,” Vivek Ramaswamy insisted, “you were labeled a ‘conspiracy theorist.’”
That’s not true. There is an essential, fundamental difference between receiving information from informants and illegally instructing those informants to trigger a riot. The IG report indicated only the former. This bears repeating, because it’s the crux of the entire discussion. That people who knew pro-Trump, potentially violent actors and were informing the FBI were also present at the Capitol is not hard to understand. But there is no evidence at all that (1) they were involved in violence, (2) they stoked violence, (3) the FBI or anyone else asked them to stoke violence or (4) that the widespread, large-scale violence was seeded by nefarious actors at all.

The presence of informants at the Capitol — even the general number — had been indicated previously. The FBI, in keeping with standard practice, declined to divulge information about those informants, a refusal that was presented as dissembling or suspicious.

And to many, that’s what matters. The IG report is presented as vindicating the conspiracy theory — not because it does, but because the intent of the theory is to present a countervailing explanation for what happened, however flimsy. There is no more evidence today than there was Wednesday that the FBI stoked the riot at the Capitol; in fact, there’s less. But since the goal posts had been usefully shifted to center on what the FBI was or wasn’t saying, that any official information about informants was made public counts as a victory in Trumpworld, one that its denizens allow to trickle up to validate the broader claim that the riot wasn’t Trump’s fault.
Which brings us back to the beginning. It was obviously his fault, as any honest assessment of the events of Jan. 6 must necessarily conclude. But because Trumpworld abhors even honest criticism, everyone else gets the blame.