The Washington Post found that senior Justice Department and FBI officials rejected or rebuffed early proposals to investigate actions taken by President Donald Trump and his close allies leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Those decisions were born out of wariness about appearing partisan, institutional caution and clashes over how much evidence would be sufficient to probe whether those actions constituted a crime, reporting shows. As a result, more than a year passed before federal prosecutors and FBI agents embarked on a formal investigation into nonviolent efforts within Trump’s orbit to steal the 2020 election. The delayed start all but assured that the question of whether the former president could face criminal exposure for seeking to thwart an election would remain open when he launched his campaign to retake the White House.
- During the first nine months after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the Justice Department chose to primarily pursue cases against rioters and repeatedly overruled prosecutors who argued that the department should also investigate the role of figures in Trump’s orbit. Key Justice Department officials ultimately pivoted after concluding they had sufficient evidence and that prosecuting rioters provided no clear path to examining the nonviolent efforts by the former president and his allies.
- The decision to charge militia members who were at the Capitol with seditious conspiracy — a step prosecutors thought could pressure them to implicate architects of the attack — was slowed as the Biden Justice Department waited months for Senate confirmation of senior leaders.
- In early 2021, the Justice Department rejected a federal watchdog’s proposal to investigate evidence its office had found suggesting a coordinated effort to swing the election for Trump using slates of alternate electors.
- The FBI’s Washington Field Office twice in 2021 rebuffed federal prosecutors’ requests for agents — in February for the probe of whether Trump associates were linked to the riot, and then in November to investigate how Trump associates tried to overturn the election results.
- By the first anniversary of the attack, the team probing whether the former president and his allies sought to illegally block the certification of the election consisted of just four prosecutors working with agents with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the National Archives and Records Administration. The FBI did not join that probe until April 2022.