The intelligence: 'A normal fucking day'
On the morning of January 4, members of a civil disturbance unit gathered in a briefing room. A small group of officers were shown a document from Capitol intelligence officials that projected as many as 20,000 people arriving in Washington that week.
The crowd would include members of several militia and right-wing extremist groups, including the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Bois and the white supremacist Patriot Front. Some were expected to be armed, according to one officer who attended the briefing. The document anticipated that there could be violence.
The officers weren't allowed to physically share the document with anyone else, but they relayed its substance to the rest of their squad in a separate meeting. Together, the unit members discussed possible scenarios and pored over a map of the Capitol and its surroundings to identify vulnerable areas that could erupt in conflict.
The iconic west front of the Capitol emerged as an obvious target. Donald Trump was going to speak at the Ellipse across from the White House; from there, it's a direct walk past the Washington Monument and the reflecting pool outside the Capitol to the western facade of the building.
The riot squad knew that if the crowd was going to violently confront police, that's where it would probably happen.
But the intelligence the unit relied on to make that judgment was not widely shared within the department. Several officers assigned to other commands told ProPublica they received no warning whatsoever going into January 6.
"We went to work like it was a normal fucking day," one said.
"It was business as usual," said another, who has been on the force for more than 15 years. "The main thing we were told was to be on the lookout for counterdemonstrators ."
The Capitol Police force is made up of four main divisions, each responsible for safeguarding its own section of the Capitol complex. But ProPublica learned that these divisions operate in silos, often out of sync with one another.
On January 6, their failure to coordinate led to disastrous results. One group of officers was left stranded, separated from their riot gear, which sat unused on a parked bus near the Capitol while unprotected officers endured beatings with metal pipes and flagpoles.
The officers said that in the past, weekly Capitol Police intelligence briefings had kept the force well-informed about potential security threats from upcoming events. But those briefings stopped years ago.
Several weeks before January 6, many officers were ordered by their leadership to return their helmets because they were so old, the officers said. One officer told ProPublica he had received his helmet decades ago, and the padding was rotted out.
Many said their helmets were never replaced. On the day of the riot, the department only had helmets available in medium size, one officer said. Many officers didn't have gas masks. Most hadn't received riot training in years.
"They've been asking about this for over 10 years — this kind of equipment, this kind of training," said one officer, who asked for anonymity out of concern for retribution. "We've always talked about the big one."
McFaden, the officer who retired last month after more than two decades as a Capitol Police officer, said that the communication failure going into January 6 was consistent with recent history.
As second-in-command at the Capitol Police union, McFaden said, he met with then-Chief Steven Sund and other leaders of the force every two weeks.
"We'd consistently ask them, for years, 'What are the contingency plans for upcoming events?'" McFaden told ProPublica. "We'd always get either a no response, or that things were in flux and it's a national security issue and we can't divulge that information at this time."
In the absence of communication from the upper ranks on how to prepare, officers turned to social media or to each other.
One officer said he first heard about the planned protest a week before, when a friend from another federal agency called him to say, as he recalled: "You all are gonna have your hands full next week. You got some mean boys coming up there." The officer was confused. "What do you mean?" he replied.
As the day drew nearer, the chatter became more tense. Twitter and Facebook were abuzz with hotel rooms filling up, and Trump supporters were pouring into Washington, announcing their plans to initiate a "civil war" or "revolution."
On a well-trafficked pro-Trump forum, one of the most popular posts from January 5 said Congress "has a choice to make tomorrow": certify Trump's victory, or "get lynched by patriots."
Officers, particularly the younger ones, spent shifts glued to their phones, forwarding ominous posts to their sergeants.
Similar warnings reached the Capitol Police's intelligence division. ProPublica obtained a previously unreported 17-page Capitol Police operational plan that showed select officials were notified of "numerous social media posts" encouraging protesters to arrive armed.
The document, which is dated January 5, also states that white supremacists and the Proud Boys were expected to attend the rally, along with "other extremist groups," including antifa, the left-wing movement that has clashed with far-right groups and drawn the ire of some Republicans. The plan called for "counter-sniper teams" on the Capitol dome and officers monitoring for concealed weapons, but did not discuss a potential breach of the Capitol.
Other intelligence reports reviewed by ProPublica reveal inconsistencies — a sign of internal confusion about how best to respond.
ProPublica also obtained four daily reports from the department's intelligence division that were shared widely among commanders of the force, spanning the dates January 4 through January 7. The documents make no mention of expected extremist groups or the possibility that demonstrators would be armed. Instead, they note simply that "folks could organize a demonstration on USCP grounds."
The intelligence reports provide a kind of threat scale that gauges the likelihood of arrests. The January 6 rally was scored as "improbable," meaning it had a 20% to 45% chance of resulting in arrests. Two small anti-Trump counterdemonstration s organized by local left-wing and antifascist groups were assigned the same risk level.
Sund, who submitted his resignation as chief of the Capitol Police on January 7, later said he had tried to call in the National Guard two days before the riot.
He said the sergeants-at-arms — the House and Senate officials responsible for security of lawmakers — denied his request. Both officials have since resigned. Reached by phone, former House sergeant-at-arms Paul Irving declined to comment. Former Senate sergeant-at-arms Michael Stenger did not immediately respond to a message left by phone.
In an emailed response to questions for this story, Sund said he and other departmental leaders were not responsible for assigning risk levels to upcoming events and that he is "not sure of the process" the Capitol Police intelligence division uses to assess risk. He said intelligence was shared with division commanders to pass along to their troops, and that he emailed the assistant and deputy chiefs on January 5 to ensure officers knew what to expect the following day.
Sund also said "the force did much more to prepare for the events of January 6 than we did to prepare for BLM demonstrations," including expanding the perimeter around the Capitol and coordinating support from Metropolitan police. He said any "breakdown in communication" on January 6 was "surely the result of the extraordinary events of that day."
He also defended his actions in an eight-page letter to congressional leaders dated February 1, saying, in essence, that he and his fellow leaders did the best they could with the information they had.
Sund said he ordered an "all hands on deck" response, meaning every available officer "would be working." He said he deployed about 250 specialized crowd control officers, "approximately four platoons" of which were outfitted in riot gear.
He said that during the riot he urgently requested help from a variety of federal and local agencies. He added that the Capitol Police ordered more helmets and received about 100 of them on January 4. But he acknowledged that "a number of systems broke down."
"I also wish we had had better intelligence and warnings as to the possibility of this type of military style armed insurrection," Sund wrote, pointing out that there was a shared responsibility across a number of agencies. "The entire intelligence community seems to have missed this."