As a senior official at the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration, Brian Murphy got a close look at the failures ahead of the insurrection at the Capitol.
His 26-year career at DHS and at the FBI focused on violent extremism and he watched, he said Thursday in a Yahoo Finance Live interview, as those departments failed in 2020 as an early warning system to the emerging threat from then-President Trump’s radicalized supporters.
Officials, he says, “were intimidated and were not looking at the obvious” planning that was taking place online.
Capitol police were caught largely flatfooted on Jan. 6, 2021 when thousands of Trump’s supporters stormed Capitol barricades after a rally near the White House. The barricades were quickly toppled before the rioters broke into the building at around 2 p.m. ET., as Congress was getting ready to certify Joe Biden's victory over Donald Trump.
Media investigations quickly uncovered — some within hours and others within days — the extent of how Trump’s supporters had been openly planning the attack online on social media sites like Facebook (FB) and Reddit.
“It was a colossal failure,” Murphy said. “We as a country spent billions and billions investing in what we call the domestic intelligence architecture.”
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