A new House Republican report said whistleblower testimony reveals the FBI is categorizing cases stemming from the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, in such a way as to mislead about and artificially inflate the rise in domestic terrorism in the United States.
The GOP report said that “whistleblowers assert that the FBI pressured agents to reclassify cases as domestic violent extremism (DVE), and even manufactured DVE cases where they may not otherwise exist, while manipulating its case categorization system to feign a national problem.” The whistleblower claims were made public in an 80-page report released Thursday by the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH).
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Jordan’s report said whistleblowers contended that the FBI’s Washington Field Office was categorizing Capitol riot cases to make the rise in DVE cases look more like a national problem rather than a significant amount of it stemming from one violent riot in the nation’s capital over two years ago.
“According to whistleblower information, the FBI has manipulated the manner in which it categorized January 6-related investigations to create a misleading narrative that domestic terrorism is organically surging around the country,” the GOP report said. “Ordinarily, the FBI characterizes and labels cases according to the originating field office, with leads ‘cut’ to other field offices for specific assistance in that geographic location. With January 6 cases, however, the FBI has not followed its ordinary procedure, which would have resulted in the WFO leading the investigation and categorizing the investigations as WFO cases.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in August that “the number of FBI investigations of suspected DVEs has more than doubled since the spring of 2020.”
FBI Special Agent Stephen Friend contended to House investigators that “the manipulative casefile practice creates false and misleading crime statistics” because “instead of hundreds of investigations stemming from a single black swan incident at the Capitol, FBI and Justice Department officials point to significant increases in domestic violent extremism and terrorism around the United States.”
“By opening a separate case for each individual as opposed to one case with however many subjects are involved, they’ve turned one case into a thousand cases,” Friend continued. “And by spreading them to the field, they’ve given the impression that those domestic terror cases are around the country when, in fact, the subjects, if they committed any sort of violation or infraction, they committed a crime at the Capitol on one day as opposed to being a cell that’s operating in El Paso or Cleveland.”
The GOP report contended that “the FBI’s case categorization creates the illusion that FBI field offices around the country are investigating a groundswell of domestic terrorism cases, giving the impression that the threat of DVE is present in jurisdictions across the nation” while “the reality is simpler: The cases all stem from the same related investigation concerning the actions at the Capitol on January 6.”
House Republicans said, “This scheme permits the FBI leadership to misleadingly point to ‘significant’ increases in DVE threats nationwide.”
FBI Special Agent Garret O’Boyle claimed to House investigators that the FBI classified “every single Jan. 6 case … as a domestic terrorism case.”
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security revealed in October that a “significant” part of the massive rise in domestic terrorism investigations between 2020 and 2021 was related to the DOJ’s investigation into the Capitol riot.
The bureau and the DHS revealed the FBI was conducting approximately 1,400 pending domestic terrorism investigations as of the end of fiscal 2020, and that jumped to roughly 2,700 domestic terrorism investigations by the end of fiscal 2021. The U.S. government report said the FBI arrested approximately 180 domestic terrorism subjects in 2020, while it arrested roughly 800 such subjects in 2021.
The FBI and DHS said that “a significant portion” of the 2021 investigations “were directly related to the unlawful activities during the January 2021 siege on the U.S. Capitol.”
“One of the most significant terrorism threats to the Homeland we face today is posed by lone offenders and small groups of individuals who commit acts of violence motivated by a range of ideological beliefs and/or personal grievances,” the FBI and DHS report concluded late last year. “Of these actors, domestic violent extremists represent one of the most persistent threats to the United States today.”
Matt Olsen, the assistant attorney general in charge of DOJ’s National Security Division, similarly told the House Judiciary Committee in July that “the number of FBI investigations of suspected domestic violent extremism has more than doubled since the spring of 2020.”
Olsen added that “that jump, doubling, that number does include the Jan. 6 cases, and there, of course, we have over 800 arrests of individuals — not all of them are characterized as domestic violent extremists, to be clear, but many are, and those do account for at least a significant portion of that jump over the past two years in the number of investigations.”
Olsen announced the creation of a new “domestic terrorism unit” in January last year, and Attorney General Merrick Garland compared the Capitol riot to the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 when unveiling the Justice Department’s response to the Biden administration’s new anti-domestic terrorism strategy in June 2021.
The Justice Department said this month that “more than 1,033 defendants have been arrested in nearly all 50 states and the District of Columbia” in relation to the storming of the Capitol, including roughly 346 defendants charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement.
The new GOP report said FBI supervisory intelligence analyst George Hill told the committee that “the pressure on FBI agents to meet metrics also contributed to the manipulation of DVE data” and that Timothy Thibault, the former FBI assistant special agent in charge of the Washington Field Office who left the bureau in late August, and the FBI’s former Assistant Director of the Counterterrorism Division Jill Sanborn both “pressured agents to move cases into the DVE category to hit self-created performance metrics.”
Hill said that Wray and Sanborn set a “tone” to encourage agents “to identify opportunities where cases could be tagged as domestic terrorism threats.”
Sanborn denied this environment of pressure during closed-door testimony in February, telling House investigators she could not recall any instances in which an FBI agent was pressured to reclassify a case. She said the process was “rooted in intelligence” that “made the DVE threat fall more elevated on that continuum than it maybe would’ve been five years ago.”
Hill also told the House about Thibault’s alleged “level of excitement” at the prospect of targeting a “growing segment of our population” as domestic terrorists, calling Thibault almost “hysterical.”
House Judiciary Republicans led by Jordan also released a report just ahead of the 2022 midterm elections on the “politicization” of the Justice Department and FBI. Jordan said then that whistleblowers have pointed to Thibault as one of those involved in this alleged effort.
Whistleblowers have also said that Thibault “ordered closed” an “avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting” in October 2020, even though “all of the reporting was either verified or verifiable via criminal search warrants.” Those disclosures were revealed by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA).
Jordan’s late 2022 report also concluded that “the FBI downplayed and sought to reduce the spread of the serious allegations of wrongdoing leveled against Hunter Biden.”
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The 2022 report also alleged that “the FBI appears to not be aggressively investigating pipe bombs placed by political party headquarters … while prioritizing other January 6, 2021-related investigations.”
The person who planted pipe bombs the night before outside both the Republican and Democratic national committee headquarters in Washington remains at large. The FBI announced this January that the bureau was offering a combined reward of up to $490,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the attempted pipe bomber.
