Harold Hutchison
MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann claimed during a Monday MSNBC appearance that the FBI was “all over” Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, but was “asleep at the switch” on Jan. 6.
“When January 6th happened, the FBI really was asleep at the switch and it wasn’t an intelligence failure,” Weissmann, a former FBI general counsel, told “Deadline: White House” host Nicolle Wallace. “It was a failure to act on the intelligence that they had and I find that Chris Wray’s testimony was exactly what you do not want from public officials. It lacked candor and fulsomeness in saying what exactly they knew and where their failures were.”
“What we did not have to my knowledge at least is intelligence indicating that hundreds and hundreds of people were going to breach the Capitol complex,” Wray said in testimony given on June 15, 2021. “That to my knowledge we did not have.”
Hundreds of people stormed the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., during the certification of the electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021. Five people died in the riot, including an Air Force veteran shot by a Capitol police officer.
The summer 2020 riots that erupted after the murder of George Floyd in police custody after he was pinned to the ground in May 2020, causing nearly $1 billion in damage.
Over 91% of 637 riots from May 26, 2020 to Sept. 12, 2020 were linked to Black Lives Matter, according to a 2020 study from Princeton University’s U.S. Crisis Monitor.
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“Chris Wray had a very different response to the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer where they were all over it,” Weissmann, who was joined by fired FBI agent Peter Strzok and former FBI agent Frank Figliuzzi, said. “The deputy director of the FBI said that, ‘This is the most significant domestic terrorism event facing the bureau.’ That was the Black Lives Matter protest.”
The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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