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Holt focused on the explicit talk of violence, writing in his report that Oath Keepers were “ramping up” pressure on their peers to join them in settling the election by force, “preferably with guns.”
“Nothing is going to happen unless we MAKE it happen,” began an exchange he highlighted in the report, which was passed along to the FBI.
“How much more of this s--- do you need to see … There is only one way. It’s not signs. It’s not rallies. It’s f---ing bullets!,” read the post from a person identifying as an Oath Keeper.
Holt and Brookie soon spotted a shift from threats to planning.
Members of self-styled militias from all over the country were sharing plans for protester convoys to Washington. A map was being circulated on MeWe showing three rally points — code-named Cowboy, Minuteman and Rebel — for the “MAGA Cavalry” that would ride on Jan. 5. Proud Boys and others shared the meetup spots up and down the Eastern Seaboard.
At the White House, Pence began telling advisers that he knew he was in the crosshairs — Trump would expect him to act.
The president at first took a conciliatory tack. My people are telling me you have more power than you think you have, he told Pence in a meeting a few days before Christmas. Repeatedly, Pence responded that he did not believe there was an avenue for him to stop the certification — but he said he would take a look at the arguments.
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Soon the vice president and his team were being lobbied by a clutch of pro-Trump lawyers including John Eastman, a conservative attorney who had written an op-ed questioning Harris’s U.S. citizenship and whether she was eligible to run for vice president.
Behind the scenes, the White House chief of staff was also spurring on a looming confrontation between Trump and his vice president.
Mark Meadows “was talking out of both sides of his mouth, telling Pence: ‘We know how this goes. We’re going to calm everything down. Don’t worry. We’re turning the temperature down,’ ” said a senior administration official. “And then he would tell Trump: ‘I’m telling Pence he has to do this. Pence is going to do it. It’s going to be great. Eastman is right. We’ll get him [Pence] to do it.’ ”
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Still, many White House and campaign aides did not view Jan. 6 as a critical day and were not worried about violence. The goal of Trump’s tweet in which he said Jan. 6 would “be wild,” they believed, was simply to attract a big crowd to give the television cameras a counternarrative to the coverage of the Capitol that day.
One senior administration official said he only realized how much Trump’s focus on Jan. 6 was activating his supporters when his mother, who lives in a Southern state, told him in late December that her friends were coming by bus. “A lot of people from the church are going to D.C. on January 6 — are you going to be there?” she asked him.
16 days to go
Three days before Christmas, D.C. police hosted their first teleconference to begin coordinating for Jan. 6. Among the agencies on the call: the FBI, Secret Service, U.S. Park Police and Capitol Police. Analysts from the fusion center run by Donell Harvin did not participate.
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For gun-carrying agents at the FBI and elsewhere, the nation’s network of fusion centers set up in response to 9/11 had long been viewed as producing uneven work. Some even disparagingly referred to them as “confusion centers.” Their mission was to keep tabs on open-source information and to make sure tips didn’t get lost between agencies. Yet early on, some social media posts that centers had flagged sent police on wild goose chases. “These guys often couldn’t find their lanes,” said one senior federal law enforcement official who was on the Dec. 22 call with the FBI and others.
The dynamic was particularly fraught in D.C. The National Capital Region Threat Intelligence Consortium, or NTIC, as the fusion center is known, is supposed to share intelligence from all law enforcement entities in the region. But D.C. is home to the FBI and the country’s other preeminent law enforcement and intelligence agencies, turning the pecking order upside down.
The FBI put more stock in the analysis of its own agents. Plus, D.C.’s fusion center is one of only a handful in the country housed in a civilian agency and not a police department, making law enforcement reluctant at times to distribute sensitive intel about ongoing investigations.
Still, D.C. officials relied on it for intelligence, and Harvin assigned an analyst to each new permitted protest that might turn violent and tasked them with gaming out whether the city would be able to handle it.
The Jan. 6 assignment went to the office’s most junior analyst, who quickly became spooked about what he saw. Almost daily, he brought Harvin disturbing new posts found online.
Extremists from different parts of the country were now coordinating logistics. They were mobilizing an informal army, exchanging tips about how to smuggle weapons into D.C., where to meet, what to wear, he noted.
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Prominent members of the Proud Boys — the group that Trump had told months earlier to “stand back and stand by” and that had been at the center of violence at the previous two Trump rallies — was soliciting money online for communications equipment and protective gear.
Anti-government extremists known as “boogaloo boys,” some of whom with militia ties had been implicated two months earlier in a plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan, were discussing rendezvous points to stash weapons and stage rapid reserve forces to platoon into D.C. with avowed neo-Nazis — two elements in the far right that the analyst hadn’t commonly seen align.
By the time Harvin called a major planning meeting on Dec. 30, the young analyst was ready to present a worst-case scenario: Someone could plant an improvised explosive device near the Capitol, he said. With law enforcement distracted, extremists might then band together and attack government buildings, maybe even the Capitol.
Even as the meeting went on, Trump returned to Twitter and further egged on his supporters:
As a paramedic in the New York Fire Department, Harvin had responded to the World Trade Center on 9/11 and prided himself as someone who had learned to keep his cool. But now he was anything but. “This feeling came over that I was out of my depth, that I was in over my head,” he said. “I was kind of freaking out.”
Harvin called his boss, Christopher Rodriguez, director of the city’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency. The city might not be ready for the “unholy alliance” of extremist groups and masses of Trump supporters about to descend on the city, he said.
Rodriguez, who had served as a counterterrorism analyst at the CIA for more than 10 years, wanted a full briefing. They brought in the analyst, went through the data and Rodriguez agreed. The chatter about bringing guns to D.C., in particular, was off the charts. He consulted with then-acting D.C. police chief Robert J. Contee III, and the two briefed Bowser.
Bowser and her aides were worried about a repeat of the federal response to Black Lives Matter protests, when the Justice Department sent prison riot teams, U.S. marshals and others onto D.C. streets without name tags or badges identifying them as federal agents. The mayor would end up sending a letter to federal officials discouraging a repeat of such deployment on Jan. 6 unless federal agents would declare their presence to D.C. police.
She was also reluctant to request the National Guard, concerned that the troops could be given orders by the president and abandon their posts. But Bowser decided the city needed the manpower to free all available police officers to focus on the potentially armed protesters. On Dec. 31, the city submitted a narrow request to the Pentagon for troops to assist with mostly traffic control.
For their part, Pentagon leaders were not looking for a role in Jan. 6 security.
Milley was worried that once troops were activated and on the streets of the nation’s capital, it would be much easier for Trump to redirect them as he wished. He thought that was a distinct possibility, having little faith that Trump would suddenly act rationally and not in his personal self-interest to stay in power.
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Ryan McCarthy, the Army secretary, wasn’t sure he could rule out such a scenario, either, especially after Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and other senior defense officials after the election. He considered Esper and Joseph Kernan, a retired Navy SEAL who was undersecretary of defense for intelligence, to be good men and friends who were ousted without rational reason. McCarthy also was concerned about National Guard members getting into confrontations with protesters, as some federal forces had during racial justice demonstrations months earlier.
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Miller, who had been appointed acting defense secretary by Trump after the election, did not believe Trump would misuse the military, but shared the worry that a conflict could erupt between the forces and those in the crowd, instigated by the Proud Boys and other far-right groups. “I thought the demonstrators were going to try to bait us into a Boston Massacre-type situation,” he said.
The three also agreed there was another problem: optics. Given Trump’s rhetoric, his critics could view the deployment of soldiers within range of the Capitol as intimidating on the day that lawmakers were affirming the results of the election.
“I was very cognizant of the potential that this could be misconstrued by so many people as a power grab and play into the narrative that the military was on the cusp of overthrowing duly elected officials to redo an election,” Miller said.
In a Jan. 2 phone call, the three ended up deciding that the D.C. mayor’s proposal — to send Guard members elsewhere in the city to run traffic control — was “a sweet spot,” Miller said. It would allow the Pentagon to say it was helping, but keep troops out of the way of protesters as they took aim at the Capitol.
McCarthy and Milley discussed the particulars. A letter would need to be sent, laying out clear guardrails for the 340 troops who would be deployed. And it should come with one special restriction, they decided: a requirement that any change to the soldiers’ orders come all the way back to the acting secretary of defense for explicit approval. McCarthy said he could sign the letter. Miller said, no, he would do it. Milley welcomed Miller’s direct engagement, telling others he thought it would slow the ability of Trump to redirect troops into the political fray, and put one of the president’s own on the line should Trump flex his power as commander in chief.
McCarthy followed Miller’s letter with his own, further putting the Guard in defensive mode. They would have no weapons, and in a verbal order, he added that Guard troops were to stay west of Ninth Street, essentially no closer than a mile to the Capitol. And in another unusual restriction, soldiers would carpool in vans to their traffic-control duties, leaving Humvees and other military vehicles at the armory.
7 days to go
On the last weekend of 2020, the FBI lost access to Dataminr, a third-party service that can alert agents and analysts to important social media posts about breaking news, as well as when, where and how often key words and phrases appear in online posts.
The shutdown had been months in the making. The bureau advertised in early 2020 that it wanted to sign a new contract for “social media alerting,” describing the service as “mission-critical.”
But the end-of-the-year changeover limited the FBI’s understanding of what was happening online at a key juncture, just as extremists were mobilizing. FBI agents started using an alternative service known as ZeroFox that was unfamiliar to many in the bureau. The change came as a surprise, causing confusion about how to use the new system.
Some agents and analysts felt the new service was a significant downgrade, particularly when it came to tracking things on Twitter. Within the FBI, some frustrated agents quickly started using a derisive nickname for ZeroFox — replacing the “Fox” with a similar-sounding expletive, to indicate how little use it seemed to have.
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“It wasn’t that we were blind, it just turned out to be a bad time to have less visibility into what was happening online, because we were changing systems and a lot of people didn’t really know the new system,” said one person familiar with the matter.
On New Year’s Eve, Harvin’s team set up a call with analysts at the Capitol Police. The growing intensity of online threats reminded John K. “Jack” Donohue, the new director of intelligence for the police department, of a foreign terrorism operation. As a young New York Police Department officer, Donohue had been an intelligence analyst and had trained in the methods of the Islamic State and related foreign terrorist groups after 9/11. He understood how isolated followers could be activated online, drawn to a violent cause that gave them purpose.
Donohue was especially worried by the volume of well-known white-supremacist groups whose members said they planned to come, as well as a sense among them that they had the approval of, if not a direct order from, the president of the United States.
But Donohue was new to the job. Since taking over in November, he and his newly arrived deputy, Julie Farnam, a longtime Department of Homeland Security division chief, had been working to professionalize a Capitol Police intelligence unit that was widely seen as an embarrassment. Capitol Police leaders feared letting their intel unit brief other agencies because its work product was so shabby. The department didn’t routinely share its collected intelligence with rank-and-file officers, something Donohue was planning to change. He kept studying the threatening online posts.
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All the while, Trump was keeping the pressure up, seeking a soft spot in the system.
In tweets, interviews and statements, he harangued the FBI, governors, state lawmakers and even local election officials. “The 2020 election was rigged. It was a scam and the whole world is watching and they’re laughing at our country. They’re laughing at us,” Trump said when he called into a hearing of Republicans in Arizona to discuss purported fraud.
Behind the scenes, the president zeroed in on three maneuvers in his attempt to overturn the election. He pressed Justice Department officials to assert there were irregularities in the vote. He goaded state officials to reopen the counts. And as a last resort, he kept lobbying his vice president to simply cast the results aside on Jan. 6.
In a Dec. 27 phone call, Richard Donoghue, a senior Justice Department official, took notes on the president’s brazen efforts. William Barr’s replacement, Jeffrey Rosen, had just told Trump the department couldn’t “snap its fingers” and change the outcome of the election. Trump responded, asking the acting attorney general to simply play along: “Just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressman,” Donoghue wrote.
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The president’s supporters were following his lead, bombarding Republican officials in states such as Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona to take action. “It’s pretty apparent you don’t know everything that is going on,” Arizona Senate President Karen Fann (R) reassured one constituent in a Dec. 29 email, adding that the Senate had gone to court to enforce a subpoena on Maricopa County, in part to inspect its voting machines.
“We have the full support of Trump and Giuliani,” she added.
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Clint Hickman, the Republican chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, was enjoying a New Year’s Eve dinner in Phoenix with his wife and some friends when his phone rang at about 8 p.m. It was a Washington number.
He let the call go to voice mail, then, curious, ducked out of the loud restaurant to check the message. It was from a man who said he was an operator at the White House switchboard, calling to inform Hickman that the president wanted to speak to him.
Hickman didn’t know what to think — he’d been receiving a lot of prank calls since he and the other board members voted to certify Biden’s win amid a flood of vitriol and protests. If it really was the White House, he wasn’t eager to speak to Trump. He returned to the table and announced incredulously to the group, “Well, that was the president.”
Three nights later, Hickman’s phone rang again. The Washington Post had just published a recording of a phone call that weekend between Trump and another Republican election official, Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state. On the call, Trump urged Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat.
Now — after midnight in Washington — the president appeared to want to talk to the Maricopa County chairman.
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Hickman again did not respond: “My mom always warned me nothing good happens after midnight.”
6 days to go
In Florida, Paul Hodgkins had made the decision to go to Washington. He found a pro-Trump women’s group offering a package deal for about $300, which included a bus ride from Sarasota, Fla., to D.C. and two nights at the Westin Crystal City Reagan National Airport hotel.
Hodgkins put his blue Trump tights on for a New Year’s Eve party.
“As it got closer to Jan. 6, the people I talked to said it was important,” Hodgkins said. “That it was going to be a historical event, maybe the biggest political turnout ever in Washington.”
Ronald “Ronnie” Sandlin, a 34-year-old living with his parents in Memphis, was equally motivated. Sandlin had never been very political, but he was making plans to drive to D.C. and was calling for others to join him. In a post on Facebook, Sandlin vowed “to do my part to stop the steal and stand behind Trump when he decides to cross the rubicon.”
By New Year’s, Sandlin was in touch with around a dozen other Trump supporters making similar plans, including a 34-year-old Idaho man named Josiah Colt and a 31-year-old Las Vegas resident named Nathaniel DeGrave.
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Theirs was one of numerous plans that coalesced in mostly public view. On Facebook, Sandlin posted what appeared to be an image of him holding a semiautomatic rifle and asking for financial help to pay for the trip. “Every penny is a boot in the a-- against tyranny.”
On the same day, DeGrave asked for help learning how to shoot a gun. Who “can shoot and has excellent aim and can teach me today or tomorrow,” DeGrave wrote on Facebook. “I want somebody special forces or ex fbi to teach me … this is for a very patriotic cause.”
Other ominous messages were posted on Parler, which had recently begun communicating with the FBI after its attorneys had decided some posts were so threatening that they required law enforcement notification.
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On Dec. 22, Parler had sent the FBI three screenshots from a user who threatened to kill politicians. On Jan. 2, the company passed along more, including a series of posts by a user making threats about Jan. 6. “This is the final stand where we are drawing the red line at Capitol Hill. I trust the American people will take back the USA with force and many are ready to die,” the user wrote, adding: “don’t be surprised if we take the #capital building.”
By early January, larger social media companies in Silicon Valley were also flagging scores of posts daily to the fusion center in Northern California. For companies to reach the threshold to report its users to law enforcement, such posts typically imply violence or the use of a weapon. Sena, the fusion center director, told the companies his office couldn’t keep up with the surge and asked them to start sending the concerning posts directly to the FBI’s analysis center in West Virginia.
On Jan. 1, an amateur historian of architecture in Washington who maintains a website on tunnels, including those under the Capitol, filed a report on the FBI’s website about an unusual spike in hits to his site from outside the D.C. area, including from the domains TheDonald.win, AR15.com and MyMilitia.com. He traced some of the traffic back to posts about Jan. 6.
In another batch of messages to the FBI, a bureau informant in the Midwest characterized the talk among members of self-proclaimed militias as heavy on planning to travel to D.C., and said the tone had become significantly more “anti-law enforcement.”
In defending their decisions, FBI officials said the bureau makes a key distinction between “aspirational” speech about violence and what they called “a specific intent to commit violence.” Aspirational talk is protected by the First Amendment, said a senior FBI official.
“Broad claims and online chatter often lack specificity or detail about concrete plans and participants and, therefore, are not susceptible to disruption,” said an FBI official.
3 days to go
On Jan. 3, leaders at the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as Robert C. O’Brien, Trump’s national security adviser, joined one in a series of conference calls to go over security concerns about Jan. 6. The group discussed the possibility of protesters targeting federal buildings. Most officials saw the biggest risk to be what one called the “same old” fighting between pro-Trump protesters and liberal demonstrators that had occurred at earlier rallies, particularly after sunset. O’Brien thought the biggest danger would be the counterprotesters — what the president referred to as antifa.
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Miller, the acting defense secretary, couldn’t believe the Justice Department wasn’t more concerned.
Unknown to him, Rosen was consumed with a separate but related crisis. The pressure campaign against the acting attorney general had reached a boiling point. Minutes before the call, Rosen learned that Trump intended to replace him with Jeffrey Clark, a mid-level department attorney who had just made clear he would do Trump’s election bidding.
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Clark had drafted a letter to officials in Georgia, falsely declaring that the Justice Department had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple states” and recommending state legislatures convene in special session to consider appointing new presidential electors.
In the hours that followed, Rosen and the upper tier of the Justice Department would vow to resign should the president push forward with installing Clark.
“Jeff Clark will be leading a graveyard,” Justice official Steve Engel told the president in the Oval Office. White House Counsel Pat Cipollone warned Trump that Clark’s letter was “a murder-suicide pact” that would “damage anyone and anything that it touches.” Cipollone said he, too, would resign.
Still, Clark encouraged Trump. “Mr. President, we can do this,” he told Trump. “We can get it done. History is calling.”
After a three-hour standoff, Trump dropped the idea as unworkable, leaving only one person left who could help him set aside the election and retain the White House: Pence.
Unaware of the high-stakes moment playing out at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, officials at the Capitol were reaching their own fire-alarm moment.
Donohue and Farnam, of the Capitol Police, were sweating the final intelligence assessment for Jan. 6.
For weeks, their analysts had catalogued comments on TheDonald.win and other sites in which Trump supporters had discussed confronting members of Congress and police.
“Anyone going armed needs to be mentally prepared to draw down on” law enforcement officers, read a post highlighted back in a Dec. 21 internal report.
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It had been a day after that when the FBI told Capitol Police it wasn’t investigating similar threats about overrunning police and arresting lawmakers.
Since then, Capitol Police had been following the lead of the bureau, which did not aggressively pursue many such posts out of First Amendment concerns. But the flow of troubling warnings now felt like a deluge. Since New Year’s Eve, there had been the debrief from Harvin, online chatter flagged by Donohue’s former intel contacts at the NYPD, and something else: The leaders of the two congressional chambers, Pelosi and McConnell, had had their homes vandalized with messages about a stimulus payment that Congress failed to approve, drawing heckles from Trump.
Trump supporters who gathered in front of Sen. Mitch McConnell’s vandalized home protest the then-majority leader’s decision to block the most recent stimulus bill. (Photos by Jon Cherry/Getty Images)
Police found a pig’s head, smeared with fake blood, on Pelosi’s driveway in San Francisco, along with the message “Cancel rent, we want everything” scrawled on the garage door. In Kentucky, officers discovered someone had spray-painted McConnell’s home with the phrases “WERES MY MONEY” and “MITCH KILLS POOR.”
It seemed a menacing signal: Angry people knew where the two leaders lived and were willing to break the law to get their message across. The number of officers assigned to each leader was increased, and the details were issued assault weapons.
Donohue and Farnam made a grim prediction in their final internal report: Jan. 6 would be far more dangerous to the Capitol and its occupants than the pro-Trump rallies in November and December.
Trump supporters had reached a desperate stage, Donohue and Farnam wrote, in which they believed the certification of the election at the joint session was their “last chance” to block Biden from becoming president. “Congress itself is the target,” they concluded, but the key analysis was tucked at the bottom of Page 13 of a 15-page report.
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Separately, Sund, the Capitol Police chief, had begun to question whether his force was prepared. Hotel reservations were soaring and flights to D.C. in the time remaining before Jan. 6 were filling up. The chief took an unprecedented step. On Jan. 3, he asked his bosses to declare an emergency so he could request the National Guard to station troops around the Capitol as a show of force.
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He met resistance from his superiors, the sergeants-at-arms for the House and the Senate — both former Secret Service agents who reported to Pelosi and McConnell. Paul Irving, of the House side, said the optics of bringing in the Guard probably wouldn’t be welcomed by leadership. Mike Stenger, on the Senate side, suggested Sund ask the D.C. National Guard to informally “lean forward” instead, so it could be ready to be summoned in case of an emergency.
Sund agreed not to press for a deployment — unaware of the new threat assessment being prepared by his own intelligence unit that very day.
2 days to go
On Jan. 4, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, reached out to the FBI. He was alarmed after hearing reports from his staff of widespread online chatter of violence surrounding the Jan. 6 ceremony. He wanted to make sure the bureau was seeing the threat, and to learn what it was doing to counter the danger.
David Bowdich, the No. 2 official at the FBI, heard him out but did not sound concerned. Don’t worry, he told the senator, the FBI was on top of it.
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That day, the National Park Service allowed the number of people expected under a permit filed for the rally at the Ellipse to balloon from 5,000 to 30,000.
On Twitter, Trump kept hyping the event.
That same day, Sena held the call for fusion centers from around the country. No one from the FBI spoke, and Sena couldn’t tell whether anyone from the bureau had even joined. Kurt Reuther, a senior Department of Homeland Security official, piped up at one point, saying the department was standing by to help. It struck several as a hollow offer. There was already plenty to do. Officials from several fusion centers said on the call that they knew of groups mobilizing. “MAGA Drag the Interstates” rallies were planned, and analysts had picked up chatter of an “Occupy the Capital” movement.
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There was so much material now bubbling up about Jan. 6 that bureau analysts running the FBI’s online portal where social media companies were reporting suspected criminal behavior had begun using a hashtag to track and organize incoming threats: #CERTUNREST2021.
In short, Sena wrote in an email to all 80 fusion centers, “a significant number of individuals plan to or are advocating for others to travel to Washington, DC to engage in civil unrest and violence.”
At the very same time as the fusion center call that day, a deputy chief for the Capitol Police scheduled a briefing for commanders and supervisors to discuss Donohue’s threat assessment that “Congress itself” was the target. Sund, the chief, was left off the invitation. Donohue gave his presentation, surprised that the chief wasn’t on the call. But even for those on the call, many didn’t hear a major shift in Donohue’s risk forecast or fresh cause for alarm.
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It was part of a pattern of miscommunication, poor planning and sloppiness inside the department that left Capitol Police completely ill-equipped for what was to come.
Officers had left polycarbonate riot shields used to combat violent protesters in a hot trailer over the summer, making them more brittle and easier to crack. Smoke grenades and other crowd-control munitions had expired in a storage room. Of the 10 officers assigned to fire such less-lethal rounds, none had current certification to do so. The department didn’t even have an up-to-date list of officers who were in the voluntary riot-control units in order to call for backup if necessary. And they would be short-staffed. One in five officers wouldn’t be at the Capitol on Jan. 6 — scores were at home quarantined for covid or on previously scheduled leave or shift work.
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For those who would be there, the department did not clearly communicate the threat they would face. A Capitol Police analyst had been researching the applicants approved for six different protests that would encircle the Capitol, and had grown suspicious that many, if not all, were front groups for the Stop the Steal campaign. But the possibility that one like-minded mass was going to descend on the Capitol was not shared with rank-and-file officers. In fact, some said they were told the groups were different, possibly adversarial, and to be on the lookout for counterprotesters. To keep them away, Capitol Police ringed the building with bike racks as a leading line of defense, but in many places no one tied them together or weighed them down.
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Over at the Pentagon, officials remained worried about the level of preparedness.
On a Jan. 4 call with Cabinet members and top security officials, Milley questioned why protesters were being allowed on Capitol grounds at all, given the threats against Pelosi and McConnell, and noted that extremists had begun boasting on social media that they planned to come armed and attack lawmakers.
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“Why are we granting permits to groups that have already indicated their intent to commit violence?” he asked. “Is there a process for going back and revoking these permits?” Some on the call cited free-speech concerns and the challenge of revoking permits for properly registered protests.
That same day, Trump met with Pence and John Eastman in the Oval Office. Eastman, then a professor and former law school dean at Chapman University, had written that Pence could exercise unprecedented powers over the certification process. In what he later said was one early draft, he argued the vice president could set aside the electoral college votes and gavel Trump in as the next president. In a second memo, he suggested several options, including that Pence could delay the count so lawmakers could further assess fraud claims, potentially also upending Biden’s electoral lead and allowing Trump to win.
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Eastman’s allies, including Giuliani and former White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, were huddled blocks away in a makeshift war room at the Willard Hotel, conferring about how to put the plan into motion.
Yet even the professor himself did not think the gambit was likely to work. When Cipollone pressed Eastman after one meeting on whether he truly believed his legal theory would clear a path for Pence to overturn the election results, Eastman admitted that he thought it probably wouldn’t work. Furious, Cipollone exploded, berating the lawyer.
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On the afternoon of Jan. 4, the vice president quizzed the professor on his plan to disrupt the electoral college count. Eastman said that it was an “open question” whether Pence had the ability to unilaterally decide which votes to count.
“You heard him say that, right?” Pence said to the president. Trump did not seem to be paying attention.
The vice president said the law seemed to leave him no choice but to preside over the formalization of Biden’s victory. But, Pence assured the president, he was still willing to read any materials on the topic that Trump wanted him to see.
38 hours to go
On Jan. 5, Hodgkins got off work in Tampa around 12:30 a.m. He’d slept only a couple of hours when he got up, collected his bag and a red Trump flag on a pole, and left for the bus terminal in Sarasota.
The flag wouldn’t fit in his bag, so he carried it in the car and, when he got to the bus, stowed it in the luggage compartment underneath. The mood inside among the mostly older, unmasked women was festive. Hodgkins was the youngest person and one of the few men. He had brought trail mix and beef jerky, and bought his favorite grilled chicken nuggets and a Blizzard milkshake at a Dairy Queen later that day.
His spirits were tempered by a text from his mother, accusing him of being blind to reality.
Also traveling north were DeGrave and Sandlin, and along the way, they were making good on a pledge made on Facebook to financial supporters to document their journey. They posted pictures and videos, including an eight-second clip of the two coughing when a can of bear spray accidentally discharged in DeGrave’s pocket.
“Nate’s bear mace was going off in his pocket and it started filling the van (with) bear spray,” Colt wrote in a caption posted with the picture. In another video, the two and others are heard debating carrying guns the next day. “For the camera’s sake,” DeGrave said, “we’re not going to carry.”
Late in the afternoon, in Des Moines, Douglas Jensen prepared to go, too.
The father of three, who had slipped deep into the QAnon extremist ideology over the previous four years, had become convinced that Trump would deliver big news to his supporters — possibly fulfilling the “Q” prophesy that corrupt politicians would someday be arrested en masse. After finishing a full shift at his construction job, Jensen and a friend embarked on a 16-hour overnight drive, estimating they would get to D.C. just in time for Trump’s speech.
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As Trump’s supporters converged on Washington, his allies anticipated the unrest that would follow. “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow,” Bannon told listeners of his podcast on Jan. 5.
Across the city, officials charged with the nation’s security had wildly different expectations about what the next day would bring.
The lead attorney on the Senate’s Homeland Security Committee, which had convened several hearings on domestic extremism over the previous two years, told his committee staff to stay home. He packed snacks and clothes, unsure of whether it would be safe to leave the building the next night.
Miller also packed a gym bag with an extra set of clothes to bring to the Pentagon, on the off chance the situation spiraled out of control.
At Justice, Rosen told much of his staff they could work from home, reflecting a general sense of unease about possible traffic disruptions and disorder, but no serious concern that democracy itself could be at risk.
All day, a crowd kept growing blocks from the White House, where Trump surrogates took turns at a microphone declaring the election results were about to be overturned.
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell urged Trump supporters to pray for Pence to “make the right decision for our country.” On Jan. 6, the country would experience a “miracle” and “great cleansing of evil,” Lindell said to applause.
In the crowd, a man thrust a sign in the air that read “Trump Won! Complete the American Revolution.” A woman waved a huge red flag with the numbers “1776 2.0.” As Lindell spoke, D.C. police surrounded a converted school bus that drove past a police line a couple blocks away. After searching the bus and finding firearms, officers cuffed the three occupants. Trump supporters walking nearby booed.
That evening, the multibillion-dollar security apparatus built in the wake of 9/11 to protect the country’s most critical functions produced a single, stark, final warning of the looming danger — much of it echoing the report the FBI received more than two weeks earlier. An intelligence analyst at the FBI office in Norfolk filed a situational information report describing alarming calls for violence circulating on TheDonald.win — it included more talk of the “MAGA Cavalry” and people heading for D.C.
The FBI analyst’s report cited one post that declared: “Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their … slave soldiers being spilled. Get violent. Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal.”
The report noted people had shared maps of tunnels underneath Congress, and planned rendezvous spots in the eastern part of the United States to travel together to Washington.
The memo — like the others before it — was jarringly prescient. But it also betrayed the FBI’s long-running institutional unease with investigating domestic extremism. The document cautioned that the people who had made the threatening posts “have been identified as participating in activities that are protected by the First Amendment. … Their inclusion here is not intended to associate the protected activity with criminality or a threat to national security.”
To some inside the FBI, that cautionary language was a telling example of how the bureau tempered its reaction to threats of violence from White, middle-aged and middle-class Americans.
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The intelligence analyst emailed the document to Washington’s FBI field office at 6:52 p.m., and that office forwarded it to other local law enforcement agencies at 7:37 p.m. Before 8 p.m., a Capitol Police officer embedded with the FBI also emailed it to her superiors at the department’s intelligence operations section.
While the memo was shared widely at low levels of various agencies, it was not flagged to the leadership of law enforcement agencies.
Outside the FBI, the bureau’s handling of the report sent the message that it was not particularly concerned.
18 hours to go
Inside the Oval Office on the evening of Jan. 5, the Colonnade door swung open, filling the room with the frigid night air, but also the sound of the president’s supporters, gathered a couple blocks away.
Earlier that day, Trump had again pressed Pence to forestall Biden’s confirmation: Just delay the vote to certify the election; send it back to the states, the president urged. The vice president felt he’d been clear: he would not do so. He told Trump he would talk to him again in the morning.
Still, the president did not seem deflated after Pence’s departure.
“Stop, can you hear it?” Trump asked when Judd Deere, a press aide, came in. “This is just incredible music,” he said. The president encouraged Deere to round up his team to come listen, and before long, there was a small crowd, all watching Trump gleefully listen along to the ’70s and ’80s rock and pop songs common to his campaign events.
On the Resolute Desk, bills were stacked high that faced a midnight deadline to be signed or vetoed, and in Georgia, polls were still open for runoff races that would decide whether his party would control the Senate. But to anyone in the room, it was clear Trump’s thoughts had cast out to the crowd and the next day. He wanted to communicate with them, and proceeded to dictate a tweet to Dan Scavino, his deputy chief of staff.
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Scavino, perched in a chair by the crackling fireplace, read it back:
Trump was getting warmed up. He and Scavino workshopped a second tweet:
The crowd outside suddenly roared loudly. “They’re fired up. They’re fired up,” Trump said. The president looked at Scavino: He didn’t want violence the next day, he said.
Several in the room took Trump’s comment to mean he didn’t want counterprotesters brawling with his supporters as the two sides had in November and December, sending Trump into a rage at the time against D.C. police for what he claimed was soft handling of protesters.
Soon a third tweet finished his thought:
For nine weeks, the coda to Trump’s presidency had blared like a siren song. His false claims of election fraud had lured followers to act on their worst instincts. A wave of them had come to Washington, and more were on the way.
Trump turned to an aide and asked what he thought the crowd wanted to hear at the next day’s rally. The aide suggested Trump should highlight all of his accomplishments. “I mean, you’ve had an incredible four years,” he said.
“No, no,” Trump interrupted. “These people are upset. They’re angry.”
He issued a final message on Twitter:
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