Those DHS failures occurred following Murphy’s ouster at the end of July 2020, when I&A, as the office is known, was placed under new leadership. The office, according to multiple reports, failed to sound the alarm in the run-up to January 6, when the Capitol fell victim to precisely the kind of white supremacist violence Murphy says Wolf and others downplayed.
Experts studying the January 6 assault have specifically identified white supremacists as part of an increasingly emboldened constellation of domestic terrorism threats coming from the far right. The acting chief of the Capitol Police has said white supremacist groups were present that day. Yet a bipartisan Senate report released last month found that “DHS I&A never produced an intelligence product, bulletin, or warning specific to the January 6 Joint Session of Congress.”
A senior federal source told POGO that under Murphy, the office had been monitoring threats of violence over social media—an approach that would have spotted some of the many warning signals ahead of the January 6 attack. But, the source said, “After Murphy was removed, the focus changed to more general, so-called ‘strategic intelligence issues’ instead.” Similarly, Mitchell D. Silber, the author of a recent Atlantic Council report on January 6 intelligence failures, told POGO, “Once they fired Murphy, the message went out to analysts working in I&A that you shouldn’t speak truth to power. And that message would have lasted right up to and including January 6.”
After Senate Republicans refused to approve a bipartisan commission to investigate the attack, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a select committee to investigate the matter. Still, the IG office reviews of Murphy’s claims, and their relationship to January 6, are significant given that the select committee may end up relying on the IG's findings.
“How does the leadup to January 6 happen? Those months beforehand are critically important,” said Troye, now director of the Republican Accountability Project, which has advocated for an independent commission to examine January 6.
But the public and Congress may never get a full picture of the pre-January 6 intelligence debacle or why it occurred—at least not one informed by the investigations under Cuffari’s supervision.
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Did Whistleblower Reprisal Help Set the Stage for a January 6 Intelligence Failure? - Project On Government Oversight (POGO)
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