‘Set Up to Fail’: House GOP Report Blames Dems, Capitol Police Leaders for January 6 Security Failures

In the lead-up to the anticipated release of the January 6 committee’s final report on the U.S. Capitol riot, five Republicans who were denied seats on the committee released their own report Wednesday that largely blamed Democrats and Capitol Police leaders for security failures that left the building exposed to violence from former president Donald Trump’s supporters.

Questions about why the U.S. Capitol was unprepared were mostly ignored by the Democrat-led January 6^th committee, according to the 141-page report, released by GOP representatives Jim Banks, Jim Jordan, Troy Nehls, Kelly Armstrong, and Rodney Davis. Their report appears to say little about Trump’s role in instigating the riot, a primary focus of the January 6 committee.

The GOP report found that the Capitol Police had obtained “sufficient information from an array of channels to anticipate and prepare for the violence that occurred.” But the Capitol was unprepared for a variety of reasons, “including internal politics and unnecessary bureaucracy.”

According to the report, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic leaders were closely involved in the security decisions leading up to the riot, and Republicans were excluded from key meetings and conversations around House security.

The report looks at the role of then-House sergeant at arms Paul Irving, who was a member of the Capitol Police Board. It concludes that he “succumbed to political pressures” from Pelosi and Democratic leaders “and left Republicans out of important discussions related to security.”

“As a critical member of the Capitol Police Board, the House Sergeant at Arms had an obligation to all Members, staff, and USCP officers to keep them safe by consulting stakeholders without partisan preference,” the report states.

In the aftermath of the George Floyd protests in 2020, Democratic leaders were also concerned about the “optics” of deploying the National Guard early to protect the Capitol, according to the report.

The report says that the Capitol Police’s front-line officers and intelligence analysts “were undermined by the misplaced priorities of their leadership.” The report found the Capitol Police’s intelligence division leader, Julie Farnam, spent weeks leading up to the riot overhauling the division, including assigning expert intelligence analysts to new roles and creating new processes for managing threat data. As a result, “information about planned protests and threats of violence were siloed and not properly analyzed and disseminated during this key period because of Farnam’s misplaced priorities,” the report states.

“That unit was disbanded by her almost on day one,” one Capitol Police intelligence analyst said. “We, at the time of January 6, we were not doing proactive searches of social media like we had been before. We were strictly reactive and responding to requests for information.”

According to the report, the Capitol Police department was plagued by “systemic department-wide training failures.” Officers were “under-trained and ill-equipped to protect the Capitol complex,” it found. One officer testified that “he went into the fight on January 6, 2021 with nothing  but his USCP-issued baseball cap,” the report states.

“The USCP was set up to fail, and there have been scant signs of progress toward addressing these weaknesses,” the report states.

The report concludes with recommendations, including separating security decisions from politics, reforming the structure of the Capitol Police Board, and making it more transparent.

“Security of the Capitol of the free world should never be left to partisan political operatives,” read a press release from the investigators provided by Banks’s office. “The Speaker’s failure to separate her obligations as the highest-ranking constitutional officer for Article I from her political prerogatives contributed directly to the failures of that day.”

The January 6^th committee’s final report was also expected to be released on Wednesday, but it has instead been pushed back to Thursday. A summary of the report released on Monday says that the committee found that Trump was ultimately responsible for the attack on the Capitol, and that “none of the events of January 6th would have happened without him.” It capped its public presentation on Monday by making criminal referrals of the former president to the Justice Department.