How law enforcement failed on Jan. 6
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 1 November 2021
⏱️ ? minutes
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Summary
In the days leading up to Jan. 6, mounting red flags tipped law enforcement agencies off to the coming violence. Why did they fail to act?
Read more:
All year, journalists at The Washington Post have been seeking to understand: How did the insurrection on January 6th happen? Why wasn’t it stopped?
A new three-part investigative series by The Washington Post reveals how law enforcement officials failed to heed warnings of violence on Jan. 6., the bloody consequences of President Donald Trump’s inaction during the siege, and how a deep distrust of the voting process has taken root across the country.
On Post Reports, we’re taking you behind the scenes of this mammoth reporting project, talking to the journalists who worked on it about what they learned and how.
On today’s episode, we look at what law enforcement agencies knew about plans to storm the Capitol and when they knew it. And we try to understand why little was done even after terrorism experts across the country met to discuss the coming riot.
Investigative reporter Aaron Davis takes us inside the failures of law enforcement leading up to the attack on the Capitol.
If you value the journalism you hear in this podcast, please subscribe to The Washington Post. We have a deal for our listeners - one year of unlimited access to everything the Post publishes for just $29. To sign up, go to washingtonpost.com/subscribe.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Right after January 6th, it felt like there was this moment of unity. Democrats and Republicans |
| 0:08.7 | denounced the violence of the insurrection. But after just a couple of days, |
| 0:13.6 | lawmakers could no longer agree on the basic facts of what happened. |
| 0:17.9 | And so as I watched this debate unfold, I thought, you know, this is really an opportunity for the |
| 0:22.4 | post to fulfill what is a core of our mission, which is to tell definitive stories about the events |
| 0:30.1 | that shape our country and our politics. Matteo Gold is a national political enterprise |
| 0:35.4 | and investigations editor for the post. One of the things that I had in my mind was the 9-11 |
| 0:40.3 | Commission report. I thought, what if we could do that for this and what if we could also place |
| 0:44.4 | into context, what January 6th means to America at this moment at a time when we're really more |
| 0:50.4 | divided than ever? The 9-11 Commission report was intended to be a definitive retelling of what |
| 0:56.4 | happened on that day. Who the key players were, what went wrong, and what could be learned from |
| 1:01.9 | the tragic failures of intelligence. And Matteo thought we could do that for January 6th. |
| 1:07.9 | I started reaching out to editors on different desks to ask for resources because we knew this |
| 1:13.4 | was going to be an undertaking that would take the whole newsroom. Over time, Matteo and national |
| 1:18.7 | editor Stephen Ginsburg rallied a team of 75 journalists from all corners of the newsroom, |
| 1:24.7 | all striving to answer one big question. How did writers overtake Capitol Police and |
| 1:30.9 | interrupt the democratic process on January 6th? Who got this ball rolling? Who arranged and coordinated |
| 1:41.2 | what was obviously a planned attack on the Capitol? We're going to walk down to the Capitol. |
| 1:51.2 | And we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. |
| 1:57.2 | We'd have some bits of intel that would filter back to the law enforcement agencies. |
| 2:02.5 | And then the question is what did they do with it? How did the word go out? How was it planned? |
| 2:14.5 | How did a bunch of people show up with zip ties and wood to build gallows? It bugs me that we still |
... |
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