Washington (CNN)The United States Capitol Police's Inspector General has issued a scathing preliminary report about the department's "deficiencies" leading up to the January 6 riot that left five people dead and nearly 140 law enforcement officers injured.
A source familiar with the report told CNN that Inspector General Michael Bolton found that the department failed to send out intelligence the agency possessed as early as December 30 suggesting January 6 protestors may have been "inclined to become violent," adding that the department did not prepare a detailed plan directing all aspects of Capitol Police force.
"USCP did not prepare a comprehensive, Department-wide plan for demonstrations planned for January 6, 2021," Bolton wrote, according to the source familiar with the report, which is one of several fast-tracked reports about the insurrection.
CBS News was first to report the details of the watchdog's findings.
Bolton also criticized the department for failing to pass along information from others, such as the now-widely reported FBI Norfolk memo that warned for potential violence and a "war" at the Capitol that was disseminated on January 5. According to the report, a Capitol Police intelligence officer sent the email around internally.
Former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund and Acting Police Chief Yogananda Pittman testified the memo never reached the department's top ranks.
Bolton's report noted even the intelligence that Capitol Police used to prepare was rife with conflicting conclusions -- an observation Acting House Sergeant at Arms Timothy Blodgett noted in a recent hearing about failures by Hill security officials.
Some of the intelligence shared within USCP concluded the chances of civil disobedience and arrests related to the January 6 protest were improbable, despite another assessment that pointed out the anger and frustration among protestors could lead to violence targeted toward Congress.
These initial reports are preliminary, but they are the most substantive and credentialed review into the events of January 6 to date, a congressional source familiar with the documents told CNN on Wednesday. They include a series of findings and recommendations but they are not the IG's final report on the matter, the source added.
House Defense appropriations subcommittee Chairman Tim Ryan said in a statement Wednesday that he had reviewed the report and was looking into the possibility of his committee holding a hearing. "I appreciate IG [Michael] Bolton undertaking this valuable and extensive report," the Ohio Democrat said.
Past testimony
In a congressional hearing on February 25, Pittman told lawmakers the agency never obtained information about a credible threat.
"Since the 6th, it has been suggested that the department was either ignorant of or ignored critical intelligence that indicated that an attack of the magnitude that we experienced on January 6th would occur," Pittman said. "The department was not ignorant of intelligence indicating an attack of the size and scale we encountered on the 6th. There was no such intelligence."
Pittman acknowledged the department knew there was a possibility for violence, and increased staffing. However, in an exchange with Virginia Democratic Rep. Jennifer Wexton, Pittman admitted the staffing for January 6 did not match typical staffing for a high-profile event such as the State of The Union. During the question-and-answer session, Pittman said the State of the Union would call for "a full hands-on deck" response of around 1,800 officers.
She admitted the department had only 1,200 officers by noon on January 6, and just 1,400 by 4 p.m. -- hours after the rally turned into an all-out riot at the Capitol.
Pittman said the department planned for possible violence by increasing its civil disturbance response by roughly 120 officers and expanded protective details to six officers, up from four officers.
Police force responds
In a statement to CNN, USCP acknowledged "it had internal challenges including communication issues and inadequate training, which it is correcting," but reiterated its position that there was nothing more it could have done to stop insurrectionists from storming the Capitol.
"Despite its challenges, the Department strongly believes that, short of excessive use of deadly force, nothing within its arsenal on January 6 would have stopped the violent insurrectionists that descended on the U.S. Capitol. Going forward, in additional to enhanced physical infrastructure, the Department believes that external support will be necessary for certain events," the statement said.
USCP also defended its preparations ahead of the January 6 riots, noting significant improvements to security posture were made based on the information that was available in the days prior.
"The Department's preparations were based on the information it gathered from its law enforcement partners within the intelligence community, none of which indicated that a mass insurrection of this scale would occur. Even the intelligence from the FBI's Norfolk office was self-identified as raw and not to be acted upon," the statement said.
A QAnon revelation suggests the truth of Q’s identity was right there all along
The extremist movement’s leader had purported to be a top-secret government operative. But a possible slip-up in a new documentary about QAnon suggests that Q was actually Ron Watkins, the longtime administrator of the 8kun message board.
The identity of Q, the supposed top-secret government operative and prophet of the extremist ideology QAnon, has for years been a fiercely debated mystery. But a possible slip-up in a new documentary suggests the answer was always the most obvious one: Ron Watkins, the longtime administrator of the message board 8kun, the conspiratorial movement’s online home.
Most major QAnon researchers have long speculated that Watkins had written many of the false and cryptic posts alleging that former president Donald Trump was waging war against an elite international cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Watkins has long denied his involvement, saying he was merely a neutral backroom operator of the site and never a participant.
But in the Sunday finale for the HBO series “Q: Into the Storm,” filmmaker Cullen Hoback points to what he argues is a key piece of evidence that Watkins had lied about his role in the more than 4,000 messages Q had posted since 2017.
In a final scene, after Watkins talked about how he had shared baseless claims about voter fraud after Trump’s loss in the 2020 elections, he told Hoback: “It was basically three years of intelligence training, teaching normies how to do intelligence work. It was basically what I was doing anonymously before, but never as Q.”//
To Hoback, it was an inadvertent admission that Watkins had actually been Q, crafting secret communiques and shaping the movement for “normies,” or normal people, to consume. But in the scene, Watkins smiled and cleared his throat, seeking to correct — or further muddy — the record: “Never as Q. I promise. I am not Q.”
The evidence is circumstantial, and no proof affirms Watkins’s role. Watkins, for his part, messaged his 150,000 subscribers on the chat service Telegram late Sunday, “Friendly reminder: I am not Q. Have a good weekend.”
But the revelation has reinvigorated debate about the clues of Watkins’s role in one of the biggest conspiracy-theory movements of the Internet age. QAnon has incited violence and criminal acts, and the FBI has designated it a domestic terrorism threat.
Watkins and his father, 8kun owner Jim Watkins, were the only people who could boast of a behind-the-scenes dialogue with the nameless prophet, and QAnon’s rise had served to give the bizarre duo a level of attention and infamy that they seemed to relish in video live streams and online posts.
The core anonymity and opaque operation of 8kun, however, seemed to make identifying Q impossible, even as the movement trended toward violence and was cited as inspiration by many of the Trump supporters who rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Jim Watkins, left, and his son, Ron Watkins, in the HBO documentary "Q: Into the Storm." (HBO)
As QAnon’s following grew, Q never seemed to show any interest in sharing his exclusive intelligence “drops” anywhere but 8kun, a rickety online watering hole — even when the site, formerly known as 8chan, went offline for nearly three months after a series of mass shootings in 2019.
It was also unclear why such an elite strategic mastermind — with a prized view into the engine of Trump’s secretive war — would trust only a father-son duo, living in the Philippines, whose main claim to fame was a crude website of hate speech, pornography and extremist memes.
For some researchers, the admission does not resolve all lingering questions about Q. Some argue persuasively that, while Ron Watkins probably knows who is behind QAnon, the account could be driven by more than one person, or a team of writers crafting messages for public display.
VIDEO Fredrick Brennan, the original founder of site 8chan, describes how Twitter posts by longtime administrator Ron Watkins potentially linked him to "Q." (HBO)
“It is a collective ensemble of different interested parties that have different levels of knowledge and different access points to the infrastructure,” said Joan Donovan, director of the Technology and Social Change Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center. “There’s no single person who could be Q.”
‘My faith is shaken’: The QAnon conspiracy theory faces a post-Trump identity crisis
It also does not resolve the true birth story of Q, who first posted on 4chan in 2017 — amid a flurry of anonymous troll posts from purported Trump-administration insiders — before moving to 8chan and the Watkinses’ control in 2018. Some researchers point to differences in writing styles at that time to suggest the Q persona changed hands.
On a live stream last week, Ron and Jim Watkins proposed an alternative explanation: that Q was either Stephen K. Bannon or Hoback himself. (Hoback said the claim is false. Bannon did not respond to requests for comment.)
The documentary, however, made few waves in the online circles frequented by QAnon believers. Nearly all of the most popular QAnon discussion boards and Telegram channels ignored the Watkins interview, instead focusing on the movement’s latest topics of interest, mostly involving false claims about coronavirus vaccines, President Biden and the Suez Canal.
Q, who once posted several times a day, hasn’t said a thing since Dec. 8. But the movement in many ways has outgrown Q, by having elevated a widespread corps of QAnon promoters, merchandisers and social media influencers who offer their audiences a flurry of absurd baseless claims and far-right talking points.
To many researchers, the identity of QAnon’s leader is less important now than what the rise of QAnon says about the Internet: How it can give global reach to misinformation and rally people to believe incredible, impossible things.
“At the end of the day, the HBO documentary ends exactly where we were before: That Ron Watkins is the one with the ability to be Q or know Q, and that perhaps his father Jim Watkins also played some role in continuing the Q persona. … The ‘definitive proof’ is still missing,” said Rita Katz, executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors online extremism.
“Even if it was only Ron Watkins, the movement has grown far beyond one person or alias. It is now a global societal virus that has become a vessel for everything from [anti-vaccine] misinformation and coronavirus conspiracy theories to political agendas,” Katz added. But “everything Jim or Ron Watkins say should be taken with skepticism — even if that statement comes in the form of a bizarre ‘slip-up.’”
Drew Harwell Drew Harwell is a technology reporter covering artificial intelligence and the algorithms changing our lives.Follow
Headshot of Craig Timberg Craig Timberg Craig Timberg is a national technology reporter for The Washington Post. Since joining The Post in 1998, he has been a reporter, editor and foreign correspondent, and he contributed to The Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the National Security Agency.Follow
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