Photos from January 6 riot shows pro-Trump rioters attempting to overthrow the election
Mark Frauenfelder
There is no question that the January 6th assault on the Capitol was a preplanned, premeditated act of domestic terrorism that should have been stopped by the FBI and DHS before it began. What is the reason for the massive response failure to Trump's violent coup attempt?
The "blue team" of the January 6th committee is investigating.
The blue team, working behind the scenes, has a different focus: To provide what may be the only detailed appraisal of why the American government failed to anticipate and stop the coordinated violence that sent federal lawmakers scrambling to safety in their own building.
That includes the unanswered question of why the FBI — the domestic intelligence agency whose primary mission since 9/11 has been to prevent a terrorist attack in the United States — didn't do more to act on threats made publicly or passed along to the bureau by social media companies.
"We're looking precisely at that very question," a senior January 6th committee aide told NBC News. The committee is working "to understand why there was not," a joint FBI-DHS intelligence bulletin on the many threats, the aide said, "even though, obviously, there's been tremendous coverage about the warnings in plain sight." Such bulletins are routinely published before large public events.