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Comment by caseysoftware | Hacker News Reader

According to the FBI:

> The after-action responses – 50 pages in all – were located by current FBI Director Kash Patel’s team and recently turned over to the House Judiciary Committee and its special subcommittee investigating security failures and weaponization of law enforcement during the Jan. 6 riot.

> The document has proven a bombshell to lawmakers, revealing for the first time that the FBI had a total of 274 agents deployed to the Capitol in plainclothes and with guns after the violence started but with no clear safety gear of way to be recognized by other law enforcement agencies working in the chaos of the riot.

https://justthenews.com/accountability/fbi-bombshell-274-age...

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You can't believe "just the news dot com" is a reputable source can you?

The documents don't mention or imply the officers were plainclothes, it's a lie, that number is regular agents deployed after violence had occurred.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fbi-275-agents-jan-6/

The claim from the post above was "why were there so many FBI agents at the Jan 6 debacle" and the response asked for a source.

If you consider the response to the violence part of "the Jan 6 debacle", then yes, FBI agents were present.

The documents would NOT specify they were in "plainclothes" because the FBI doesn't wear uniforms, therefore everything would be "plainclothes" by definition. This is both common knowledge but I can personally confirm from my time there. You can dislike the characterization but it is correct.

The more interesting questions:

- Since the FBI primarily an investigative body (in the name) and these were NOT tacteams providing armed support, what was their purpose?

- Further, why did it take almost 5 years for the FBI to identify the man placing the pipebombs? According to reports, no new evidence came to light.

The context of this thread is essentially false flags, or at least some kind of entrapment to make the agency look useful by putting a stop to an attack they had instigated. So when someone asks "what were all the FBI agents doing there", it makes a great deal of difference whether agents were embedded in the crowd as the riot got started or if they arrived later to disperse the crowd.

The intial claim/skepticism is that there were agents there at all. Proven.

Moving on to the implication and my question:

> Since the FBI primarily an investigative body (in the name) and these were NOT tacteams providing armed support, what was their purpose?

We DO deserve an explanation to that one and unfortunately, "they showed up to address the violence" doesn't resolve this because - as noted - they are NOT uniformed. Therefore, a Special Agent drawing their weapon looks like a random civilian which would only increase the chaos and danger for everyone.

They're not even particularly useful for crowd control because a) they're not uniformed and b) as an Executive agency, they don't have authority in the Capital unless US Capital Police authorizes it.. though that may take the Sergeant at Arms or the Speaker specifically, I haven't reviewed that in quite a while.

Finally, since the FBI has a multi-decade history of instigating issues to be able to stop them, we SHOULD be skeptical until we get a complete and documented explanation.

Gosh this article is such a nothingburger. It's an endless litany to hammer that there was "political bias" in the deployment of the FBI.

It's mostly hearsay the only facts are that there were FBI agents deployed and that they were unprepared for riot control. But is riot control their role ? Weren't they supposed to be witnesses to see what was happening and inform other police ?

It was probably messy and you can probably find mismanagement everywhere if you look hard enough (and people to complain about it) but how do you handle a riot organized with the purpose of gaining more time to overturn the result of an election anyways ? (Check out the fake great electors scheme) This is the elephant in the room. To come and whine about political bias after that should be laughed at.

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