The United States Secret Service Failed To Prepare for Insurrection Day

This volume reprints 850 pages of threat analysis and evaluation documents prepared by the United States Secret Service Protective Intelligence & Assessment Division prior to the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol. The documents were requested by Bloomberg News under the Freedom of Information Act. This contemporaneous work product provides a direct view into one of the most consequential crowd control failures ever.

Even to a naive reader, certain patterns emerge. Analysts relied heavily, and likely excessively, on Facebook for bottom-up estimates of attendance. The analysis protocol was often focused on whether particular demonstrators and demonstrations had the potential for civil disobedience, rather than on assessing the overall potential for large-scale violence of the event as a whole. Ah, for the days when mere civil disobedience was the threshold of concern!

An AI-created page-by-page summary is provided in the front matter as an aid to the reader. If you want to understand what happened on January 6, 2021, this is an essential reference.