Saturday, December 17, 2022

DHS Inspector General report on January 6

Why did DHS not warn law enforcement of the insurrection plot?
DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis is the sole intelligence agency in the U.S. government charged by law with sharing emerging threat information with its vast network of federal, state, local and tribal partners across the country. This is referred to as its duty to warn.

[...]

Inside DHS [in January os 2021, a] young analyst led the charge to activate the mechanism put in place to share critical intelligence among agencies.

[...]

On Dec. 20, 2020, [the] 21-year-old intelligence analyst went online to search for local Washington, D.C., fishing holes and stumbled upon the blueprint of a plot to storm the Capitol and execute members of Congress and law enforcement officers to prevent the certification of electoral votes to make Joe Biden the next president.

[...]

Every day, multiple times a day between Dec. 29 and Jan. 4, the analyst sounded the alarm on the urgent need for reporting that could be used to warn other agencies.

[...]

That person's attempts to sound the alarm were shut down, delayed or flat-out rejected at every turn, according to the analyst’s written account provided to inspector general investigators and an unredacted version of that final investigative report and other materials obtained by Yahoo News.

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“The threat assessment l drafted showed that all but one indicator of violence was [present] and there was an exceedingly high likelihood that mass violence would occur,” the analyst wrote in the account.

But the order to produce that intelligence product to send out to partner agencies never came.

[...]

The analyst’s letter that was provided to the investigators, and much of that person's account, reveals the extent of the threats the office was seeing online in the week before the attack.

[...]

A message from Jan. 1, 2021, states: “Also I found a map of all the exits and entrances to the capitol building. I feel like people are actually going to try and hurt politicians. Jan 6 is gonna be crazy.”

[...]

[T]he reporting did not publish till after the attack on the US Capitol was already well underway and too late to effect tactical law enforcement operations on the ground.”

[...]

By Jan. 5, the open source collection office still had not produced any reports or issued any warning on anything it had found, preventing the counterterrorism analyst and the entire mission center from warning agencies in D.C. of the threats they were seeing online.

[...]

[The DHS] Office of Intelligence and Analysis [is] now helmed by Undersecretary Ken Wainstein. He testified Tuesday morning before the House Homeland Security Committee, his first public hearing since being confirmed by the Senate in June. (On Nov. 30, Wainstein testified before the Senate in a classified hearing.)

[...]

Wainstein is a longtime national security professional who was brought in to improve workplace morale and to steady and focus an embattled office with a history of manipulating intelligence and abusing its sweeping authorities over the American public.

  Yahoo
Who was blocking and rejecting? Will there be charges, or just a report and "efforts" to ensure future warnings get passed on?

And, as for the young analyst who collected all the information and tried desperately to get higher ups to produce a report for warning law enforcement agencies, I wish he/she had the balls and the clear sense of necessity that the prosecutor in Rachel Maddow's report of the WWII Congressmen who aided the Nazis had. That man stepped outside his office and leaked the information to the public, exhibiting a personal "duty to warn."

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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