The notion that last week's assault on the capitol could have been significantly worse gained additional credence this morning after NBC News reported the FBI was actually aware that some Red Hat planned to engage in violence.
In contradiction to security officials who've publicly claimed the capitol was left dangerously vulnerable because they didn't know there was a threat, one FBI official who spoke off the record to NBC News says they not only knew there was a threat; they also shared that information with capitol police.
This FBI official says they even visited extremists in person and convinced some of them not to travel to Washington.
WASHINGTON — The FBI and the New York City Police Department passed information to U.S. Capitol Police about the possibility of violence during the protests Wednesday against the counting of the Electoral College vote, and the FBI even visited more than a dozen extremists already under investigation to urge them not to travel to Washington, senior law enforcement officials said. [...]
"Prior to this event, the FBI obtained credible and actionable information about individuals who were planning on traveling to the protests who expressed a desire to engage in violence," the senior FBI official said. "The FBI was able to discourage those individuals from traveling to D.C."
The official added that "the FBI and our federal, state and local partners collected and shared available intelligence in preparation for the various planned events."
If the FBI went so far as to visit some of the coup plotters in person, and if they shared that information with Capitol Police, that obviously raises big questions about why the building was so poorly secured.
I think it's telling that no public security officials have held a press conference to address what happened last week and I don't expect they will in the last nine days of Trump's term in office. A small or even a failed terrorist attack or just your average mass shooting in America would ordinarily prompt regular press conferences for days if not weeks after the incident, but we haven't seen a single one since the attack last week.
Either they don't have answers or the answers are very bad.
Democrats in both the House and Senate are preparing to launch investigations of the attack.