FBI Director Patel Adds Some Clarity to Role of Agents Present on J6, Highlights Remaining Questions

On Friday, we learned of a bombshell revelation regarding the presence of FBI agents at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021: There weren't just a handful of agents on site; there were 274.

These were plainclothes agents. And while it was already known from the report issued by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz in December that there were 26 paid informants among the crowds, some of them specifically assigned by the FBI to be there, this new revelation was rather shocking, both in terms of the number of agents involved — and their reason for being there, which we'll get to momentarily.

One key distinction, which Ward Clark noted in his reporting on this new information, is that the agents were sent to the Capitol after things started to escalate. In other words, these weren't agents embedded in the crowd ahead of time.

FBI Director Kash Patel offered some additional clarification on that point on Saturday:

While the agents were on hand, they were sent in after the riot had begun to try to control the unruly crowd, officials told Fox News Digital. That is not the proper role of FBI agents, and Wray was not forthcoming about what happened when he testified numerous times on Capitol Hill, Director Kash Patel said.
"Agents were sent into a crowd control mission after the riot was declared by Metro Police – something that goes against FBI standards," Patel told Fox News Digital. "This was the failure of a corrupt leadership that lied to Congress and to the American people about what really happened."
He added, "Thanks to agents coming forward, we are now uncovering the truth. We are fully committed to transparency, and justice and accountability continues with this FBI."

The issue, of course, is that there have long been questions regarding the presence of FBI personnel and assets at the Capitol on January 6th, and former FBI Director Christopher Wray seemingly bent over backwards in his congressional testimony to sidestep directly answering such questions.

Wray told a House Committee on Nov. 15, 2023, "If you are asking if the violence at the Capitol was part of some operation orchestrated by FBI sources or agents, the answer is no," but he wouldn’t disclose if any agents or sources were embedded within the crowd.

Moreover, the recently disclosed after-action report, as noted in Ward's article, is replete with criticism of the decision to send in agents as part of a crowd control effort. They were not trained or equipped for such effort, nor were they given coherent guidance as to what they were supposed to be doing once deployed. Here's just a smattering of that criticism:

Investigate credible threats of election fraud so Americans don’t get so upset in the first place. (Look, I know you’re not going to take any this feedback seriously. WFO is a hopelessly broken office that‘s more concerned about wearing masks and recruiting preferred racial/sexual groups than catching actual bad guys. The front office is comprised of a yes-men who’ve never opposed a single thought from the Good Idea Fairy. We had a ADIC retire on a Friday at 4:30 PM with nothing more than email, and a Deputy Director suddenly retire in the midst of largest manhunt in the history of mankind. Yet we’re all supposed to pretend that everything is just fine. Emails from the Director with focus group language aren’t going to cut it anymore. It’s time for someone to admit that WFO has serious problems so that trust can begin to be repaired.)
Management needs to think of their staff in times of crisis. Providing information and reaching out is the bare minimum. This was lacking at the time and continues to this day.
I wish you all would pay more attention to our safety than what type of masks we wear. If you were going to deploy us to a riot situation, then give us the proper, damned safety equipment – helmet, face, shield, protective clothing – and training! This is the second time the whole office has been deployed to handle such a situation and nothing NOTHING was learned from the previous crisis over the summer. The only difference is our new inept leaders who just want to put us out there for a photo OP for the media. It is a miracle no one was seriously hurt or worse. Are you really going to wait until something like Miami happens to one of us at WFO? That’s on your conscience if it does.
The FBI needs to be politically impartial, it needs to treat all crimes with an equal hand, whether from left or right, and it needs to have its final goal come, ultimately, from the integrity of our republic. The very source of that is a transparent electoral system. It is not so now.

For his part, Patel is promising "Transparency. Justice. Accountability."

274 FBI agents were thrown into crowd control on Jan 6 against FBI standards.

That failure was on corrupt leadership.

Thanks to agents stepping up, the truth is coming out.

Transparency. Justice. Accountability. pic.twitter.com/BowkQb1h2E
— FBI Director Kash Patel (@FBIDirectorKash) September 28, 2025

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