The day before pro-Trump rioters led an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol last week, the FBI’s Norfolk office warned others in the bureau of concerning online chatter threatening violence, according to a new report from The Washington Post.
The newspaper obtained an internal document, called a situational information report, that had been sent Jan. 5 by the Norfolk-based officials. The Post said it painted a “a dire portrait of dangerous plans.”
“As of 5 January 2021, FBI Norfolk received information indicating calls for violence in response to ‘unlawful lockdowns’ to begin on 6 January 2021 in Washington. D.C.,” the document says, according to the Post. “An online thread discussed specific calls for violence to include stating ‘Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa slave soldiers being spilled. Get violent. Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal.”
People in the discussion online also shared a map of the Capitol’s tunnels.
Five people died Wednesday when the rioters stormed Congress, including a Capitol police officer and a woman shot by police. Since then, questions have swirled about how federal and local law enforcement were so unprepared when many of the plans had been made in plain sight online.
An FBI official familiar with the document told the Post that the Norfolk office wrote the report within 45 minutes of learning about the online conversation. It was raw intelligence and, at the time, the FBI didn’t know the identities of the people making the online statements, the official told the newspaper.
“It was not immediately clear how many law enforcement agencies outside the FBI were told, but the information was briefed to FBI officials at the bureau’s Washington field office the day before the attack,” the Post wrote.
The document contradicts a previous statement from Steven D’Antuono, the head of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, who on Friday told reporters “there was no indication” of anything planned for the day of President Donald Trump’s rally “other than First Amendment-protected activity,” the Post reported.
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The internal report out of Norfolk, according to the Post, noted that protest activity is protected by the First Amendment and not itself a threat, but that based on history and “known intelligence,” the protest could lead to violence.
One online comment agents spotted had said, “if Antifa or BLM get violent, leave them dead in the street,” while others included warlike terminology such as providing supplies to the “front lines” and evacuating “noncombatants.”
A spokeswoman for the FBI Norfolk office on Tuesday referred a Virginian-Pilot reporter to the bureau’s national press office, which did not respond to a request for comment.
At a press conference in Washington later in the afternoon, D’Antuono said that the bureau receives “enormous” amounts of information and intelligence.
“We have to separate the aspirational from the intentional, and determine which of the individuals saying despicable things on the internet are just practicing keyboard bravado, or they actually have the intent to do harm,” he said. “In the latter, we work diligently to identify them and prevent them from doing so.”