CREW investigating law enforcement agents sympathetic towards insurrectionists

Recent reports indicate that sympathy towards insurrectionists could have affected law enforcement responsiveness to the January 6 attack on the Capitol, requiring greater scrutiny of agencies like the Secret Service, CBP, CIA and ICE. A week after the insurrection, the FBI reportedly received an email that said “some bureau employees might not be particularly motivated to help bring to justice the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol and threatened lawmakers’ lives,” raising questions around how widespread this perspective was across other law enforcement arms and how it might have hindered law enforcement’s responsiveness to the attack.

CREW has launched an investigation, requesting records from CBP, CIA, FBI, ICE and USSS reflecting employee’ bias in favor of the individuals who attacked the Capitol.

To get a better sense of the sentiments within the FBI and potentially other divisions, the individual also “had to explain to an agent from a ‘blue state’ office the difference between opportunists burning & looting during protests that stemmed legitimate grievance to police brutality vs. an insurgent mob whose purpose was to prevent the execution of democratic processes at the behest of a sitting president.” They also wrote that a ‘red state’ officer had reported that “over 70% of his CT squad + roughly 75% of the agent population in his office, disagreed with the violence ‘but could understand where the frustration was coming from’ which led to the ‘protestors getting carried away.’”

Given an overwhelming amount of evidence that the Secret Service knew there would be violence and white supremacist groups at the Capitol on January 6 and apparently dismissed warning signs of violence, failed to report threats of violence to members of Congress in a timely fashion and then mass deleted texts off agents’ phones following the attack, it would come to no surprise if efforts to skirt accountability for responsiveness on January 6 were powered by overall sympathetic feelings towards insurrectionists within the agency. The public needs to know the extent that biases in favor of insurrectionists within agencies have made it more challenging for agencies to get accountability for the insurrection.