If a picture is worth a thousand words, the images circulating on social media of members of the National Guard in the halls of the Capitol are worth a thousand fears. After a seditious mob of Donald Trump supporters—counting QAnon followers, election-fraud truthers, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists in its ranks—descended on Washington last week, breaching police barriers and desecrating symbols of American democracy, counterterrorism professionals warn that the threat of violence in the days leading up to and during Joe Biden’s inauguration has hardly dissipated. Rather, sources I spoke with fear that it may be higher than ever. “They simply can’t treat this as a normal inauguration,” a former senior counterterrorism official told me. “The threat environment we are in remains highly volatile, and I think the concern of law enforcement professionals is that we’re going to see more violence in not only the days ahead, but the weeks and months ahead.”
The insurrection at the Capitol last week didn’t materialize out of thin air. “This element of our society has always existed. What Donald Trump did was set it free…. This didn’t happen overnight,” the former senior counterterrorism official said. “What we experienced at the Capitol on January 6 is the results of his work.”
While perhaps the most dramatic, the Capitol siege is certainly not the first flash of America’s heinous underbelly in recent years. From the Tree of Life massacre to the march on Charlottesville, the domestic terrorist threat of right-wing extremists and white supremacists has become increasingly apparent and, finally, impossible to ignore. “What we saw [last week] was the culmination of a threat that’s been neglected to be addressed, that’s grown year after year for the past 10 years,” Daryl Johnson, a former Department of Homeland Security analyst who wrote a 2009 intelligence report warning of a growing right-wing extremist threat following the election of Barack Obama, told me. “There’s no silver bullet that’s going to solve this problem.”
A security failure of a monumental scale is perhaps the only way to describe the breach of the Capitol on January 6. Sources I spoke with had more questions than answers as to what happened. Certainly, protecting D.C. presents a unique challenge. As one former senior DHS official explained, the task “involves a variety of cross-jurisdictional authorities, multiple components, agencies, departments, interacting with each other, not to mention some of them are federal and some of them are state,” which can create “a tinderbox for miscommunication.” But the threat seemed obvious to even the most passive observers. (Anecdotally, one congressional source I spoke with who lives within blocks of the Capitol said they moved their car in anticipation of violence last week.)
“No one should have been surprised that this type of activity was possible because it was actually specifically called for in these social media discussions,” the former counterterrorism official said. And indeed, it has since been reported that an FBI office in Virginia did warn of extremists’ plans to descend on Washington—despite initial denials from senior officials to the contrary. In court filings since, federal prosecutors have laid bare participants’ intent “to capture and assassinate elected officials.” This suggests not an intelligence failure, but a response failure. “What is a surprise is that more wasn’t done by local authorities and federal authorities to share that information and take steps to be prepared for the eventuality that there could be this type of a targeted attack directed at the Capitol and the people with it,” the official added.
Authorities have now adopted an aggressive posture. More than 100 arrests have been made in connection with the riot, FBI Director Christopher Wray said Thursday. In courtrooms, federal prosecutors have begun to flex and float serious charges tied to the “violent insurrection that attempted to overthrow the United States government.” And with threats of attacks on state capitols across the country and in Washington, D.C. in the coming days and on January 20, when Biden will be sworn in as president, law enforcement is fortifying potential targets and deploying forces. The presence of armed members of the National Guard in the Capitol is a stark display of the unprecedented nature of the preparations.
Yet, even as law enforcement tracks down individuals, now scattered across the country after skittering back to their various hometowns, and signals its strength, experts fear adherents to the abhorrent beliefs and conspiracy theories that undergirded the events at the Capitol have been both emboldened by what they see as a victory, and further radicalized by the death of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot by a police officer.
“I would be very concerned that what happened yesterday gets viewed as this milestone moment, the starting gun of what they perceive to be the oncoming societal collapse and civil war that’s going to lead to their white nation-state,” Elizabeth Neumann, who served as the assistant secretary for threat prevention and security policy at DHS, told me the day after the attack. The riot was rife with white supremacist imagery, Neumann explained, noting the gallows outside of the Capitol—a scene effectively cribbed from the white supremacist text The Turner Diaries, which was an inspiration to Timothy McVeigh, who committed the Oklahoma City bombing. “I’m very concerned that Republicans are fixated on Trump and Trumpism and are gonna miss the domestic terrorism aspect.”
Trump’s boot from Twitter and Facebook, coupled with his impeachment—the second in his single four-year term—is certainly a variable in the threat matrix. “The most important motivation now is to ensure that Donald Trump doesn’t have a second act, then he can’t recruit,” Juliette Kayyem, a former DHS official, told me last week. “It doesn’t mean that the violence ends, but the violence becomes less lethal when the leadership is essentially decapitated.… This is not a movement we can’t handle, the violence part of it is the only one we really need to care about. And then the rest will eventually align once he is completely isolated.”
In the days ahead, Trump and other elected officials have a critical role to play in either tamping down, or inciting, further violence. “Disenfranchisement empowers and emboldens extremism. And so the more people feel as though they aren’t being listened to, no matter the cause, no matter the country, and the more they can point towards examples that reinforce that rhetoric for them, the greater the risk in the moment,” the former senior DHS official said, describing domestic terrorism as “inherently political.” The former counterterrorism official pressed the point. “We need public officials—members of Congress, state legislators, governors—people who have intentionally amplified these disinformation narratives, we need them to stand up and fulfill their oaths of office and counteract or dispel some of these narratives.”
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