FBI Director Christopher Wray has shown a “failure of leadership” with his handling of events surrounding the Capitol riot, a top prosecutor for special counsel Robert Mueller argued on Monday.
Andrew Weissmann, a former Justice Department official and FBI general counsel who was known as Mueller’s “pit bull,” said it therefore falls to Attorney General Merrick Garland to step up after NBC News reported a top official at the FBI was warned after Jan. 6 that some people in the bureau were “sympathetic” to the Capitol rioters. That official, Paul Abbate, has since been elevated to the No. 2 spot at the FBI. This comes with other revelations about documents showing the FBI did have intelligence about the potential for violence leading up to that day.
After accusing the FBI of being “asleep at the switch” on Jan. 6, as compared to the bureau’s response to Black Lives Matter protests starting in the summer of 2020, Weissmann raised the question of how the Justice Department, which is the parent agency of the FBI, can ensure the bureau will learn from its mistakes. And, he argued, Wray “lacked candor” when he testified to Congress that the FBI did not have intelligence indicating that hundreds of people would breach the Capitol while stressing a balance with respecting First Amendment rights. “It wasn’t an intelligence failure. It was a failure to act,” Weissmann said during a panel on MSNBC with other former FBI officials.
“I do think that it is a huge problem that Chris Wray is, I think, really not showing the correct leadership, and that means that it really falls to the attorney general and the deputy attorney general to hold them to account for that failure,” Weissmann said. Another panelist, fired FBI agent Peter Strzok, said he would expect the Justice Department inspector general to look into the FBI and its actions relating to Jan. 6.
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Despite Weissmann’s complaints and the emergence of whistleblowers who have informed Republican lawmakers of what they view as politicization in the bureau with too much focus on Jan. 6, the FBI at large has been the critical law enforcement arm of the Justice Department in its sprawling Capitol riot investigation. More than 850 people have been arrested and charged with Jan. 6 crimes.
