Why DHS Failed To Warn The Country About Jan. 6 | Talking Points Memo

The crowd was rushing in. Nearly everyone with the power to stop it seemed caught by surprise.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1354307
3 Likes

It’s not like the Wolf was at the door…

53 Likes

Hanging chad – seems to have taken on a different context just 20 years on…

41 Likes

Joe Shit the Rag Man would’ve known that trouble was acomin’ and planned for it.

Gonna need some names for the 9/11 style Commission that investigates this.

40 Likes

That’s about what I expected. Thanks for the reporting, Josh K!

67 Likes

White people don’t appear to be scary, no matter what they’re doing and black and brown people are scary, no matter what they’re doing. It’s as simple as that.

77 Likes

Funny how appointing political toadies to important jobs in security might lead to failures in assessing threats accurately.

91 Likes

I finally read this article posted here a few days ago. The author talks about the lack of coordination among various law-enforcement agencies. I naively thought that had long since been addressed, since the failure to even try to prevent 9/11 was blamed on this refusal to share information.

https://arcdigital.media/qanon-woke-up-the-real-deep-state-72bbfcb79488

I also read a comment last night that West Point had a task force that investigated domestic terrorism, and after it released its damning report, McConnell defunded it. Is that true?

ETA. The West Point report dealt with the recruitment of people who had left the military being recruited by white supremacist groups. This was seven years ago, according to the commenter.

37 Likes

Vladimir has certainly received his money’s worth.

36 Likes

Hasn’t the Wolf skedaddled from DHS by now?

6 Likes

The intelligence community kept their promise after 9/11 that there would be no more 9/11s. They never made any commitments about 1/6.

33 Likes

It was a coup: planned, strategized, “war-gamed”, fomented, executed, as part of a criminal conspiracy.

And, once again: Stacey Abrams is the most important political organizer in this country. Had we lost GA, we’d never again have had a free and fairly-counted election, much less an investigation of the plot. Much respect to Warnock, Ossoff, and all the on-the-ground organizers, as well.

137 Likes

Given the WH’s post-riot continuation of efforts to delay the congressional certification of the vote, I don’t think it’s too fantastic to think that there was an intentional aspect to lack of preplanning or effective reinforcement response. The dereliction of duty at DHS was only one of many stalling tactics.

37 Likes

Hmmmm, lemme guess, does it having anything to do with the two dozen stories we read about last summer that the white supremacist President wanted evidence of white supremacist threats suppressed by his white supremacist infiltrated national security agencies?

Am I in the ballpark?

72 Likes

It’s still going, apparently. Here’s the report from last summer, and Qanon is in it.

30 Likes

If someone had died would it have been the type of event where the Don could take some kind of moral leadership, make with the tears and take custody of the nation while we mourned the deaths of Nancy Pelosi, AOC, and the rest? Take out the iffy Repubs too. Make it look equal.

It’s not whether you’re a good liar, it’s whether you have the ball.

5 Likes

going to have to root them out of DHS, FBI, DOJ.

35 Likes

Good! Thanks.

3 Likes

I’ll tell you what – us locals did our own threat assessment and everyone of us concluded that there was no way in hell we wanted to be in DC on the 6th. This should not have sneaked up on anyone.

The question is whether the Executive Branch told DHS to look the other way, or ignored requests for action.

58 Likes

Part of the failure had to do with the ubiquity of the threat. Former DHS officials told TPM that after years of Trump supporters mouthing off about violence online, it had gotten somewhat more difficult to distinguish between what was a real threat and what were paper tigers.

Normalizing deviancy. Political appointees playing favorites within the homeland security sphere. Blocking Congress from prompt and comprehensive oversight by withholding documents and preventing officials from testifying. Yes, Executive branch blatant malfeasance have become so commonplace over the past four years, it’s gotten difficult to remember how a competent bureaucracy functions.

41 Likes
Comments are now Members-Only
Join the discussion Free options available