FBI chief calls Capitol attack ‘domestic terrorism’ and defends US intelligence

The FBI director, Chris Wray, has condemned the 6 January riot at the US Capitol as an instance of “domestic terrorism”, while defending the bureau’s handling of intelligence indicating that violence was likely.

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“That attack, that siege, was criminal behavior, plain and simple, and it’s behavior that we, the FBI, view as domestic terrorism,” Wray told the Senate judiciary committee on Tuesday. He also said the bureau was pursuing about 2,000 domestic terrorism investigations, up from 1,400 at end of 2020.

Donald Trump incited the Capitol attack, telling supporters at a rally near the White House to “fight like hell” in an attempt to overturn his electoral defeat based on the lie, repeatedly thrown out of court, that Biden won thanks to electoral fraud.

Five people including a Capitol police officer were killed. Trump was impeached on a charge of inciting an insurrection but acquitted when only seven Republican senators voted to convict.

Wray told senators the attack had “no place in our democracy, and tolerating it would make a mockery of our nation’s rule of law”.

The FBI was aggressively pursuing those who carried out the attack, he said, adding that investigations were under way in 55 of 56 FBI field offices. More than 200 people have been charged.

His comments in his first appearance before Congress since the Capitol attack amounted to the FBI’s most vigorous defense against the suggestion it did not adequately communicate to police the distinct possibility of violence as lawmakers gathered to certify presidential election results.

Wray told lawmakers information was properly shared before the riot, even though it was raw and unverified.

A 5 January report from the FBI field office in Norfolk, Virginia, warned of online posts foreshadowing a “war” in Washington the following day. Capitol police leaders have said they were unaware of that report and received no intelligence from the FBI that would have led them to expect the sort of violence which ensued.

Wray said the Norfolk report was shared though the FBI’s joint terrorism taskforce, discussed at a command post and posted on an internet portal. Ideally the FBI would have had more time to try to corroborate it, he said.

“Our folks made the judgment to get that to the relevant people as quickly as possible,” Wray said.

He was also pressed on how the FBI is confronting a national security threat from white nationalists and domestic violent extremists and whether it has adequate resources to address those issues. Wray described white supremacist extremism as a “persistent, evolving threat” that has grown since he took over the FBI in 2017.

White supremacists make up “the biggest chunk of our domestic terrorism portfolio overall”, he said, adding that such people “have been responsible for the most lethal attacks over the last decade”.

The violence at the Capitol made clear that a law enforcement agency that remade itself after the 11 September 2001, attacks to deal with international terrorism is now scrambling to address homegrown violence from white Americans. The Biden administration has asked its national intelligence director, Avril Haines, to work with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security to assess the threat.

In his opening statement, Wray said: “6 January was not an isolated event. The problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a number of years now, and it’s not going away any time soon.”

The committee chairman, Dick Durbin, asked if the FBI believed the insurrection was carried out by “fake Trump protesters”. The Illinois Democrat’s question came two weeks after the Republican Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson amplified baseless claims that leftwing provocateurs carried out the Capitol attack.

“We have not seen evidence of that at this stage,” Wray said. In answer to Patrick Leahy of Vermont, another Democrat, he said: “We have not to date seen any evidence of anarchist violent extremists or people subscribing to antifa [antifascist groups] in connection with [6 January].”

Wray has kept a low profile since the Capitol attack. Though he has briefed lawmakers and shared information with law enforcement, Tuesday’s hearing was his first public appearance before Congress since before the election.

He was also likely to face questions about a massive Russian hack of corporations and US government agencies, which happened when elite hackers injected malicious code into a software update.