The newly released FBI memos show a summer 2020 Boston Field Office tabletop exercise that anticipated election unrest, outlined informant use and mass-prosecution tactics, and sat locked away until turned over to Congress in 2025.
The declassified documents reveal a detailed plan the FBI ran months before January 6, 2021, including strategies to embed sources and pursue aggressive enforcement for even low-level offenses. Kash Patel handed the long-secret memos to Congress after Rep. Barry Loudermilk requested them, exposing material that had been buried for years.
The Boston-led tabletop wasn’t hypothetical hand-waving. It produced actionable recommendations about cultivating a “robust source base” inside potentially violent groups and pursuing prosecutions that could stretch to misdemeanor conduct. That planning language maps closely to the tactics federal prosecutors and investigators used after the Capitol breach.
“The FBI assesses domestic violent extremist (DVE) threats related to the 2020 elections likely will increase as the election approaches, despite the current focus of many DVEs on the COVID-19 pandemic and civil unrest.”
The exercise treated the election as a national security problem and defined the target set broadly, listing several types of “election-related threats” the bureau expected to encounter. Those categories read like a manual for surveillance and disruption across political activity from rallies to party infrastructure.
- Candidates and campaign events
- Presidential conventions
- Party offices and elected officials
- Voter registration events
- Threats or plots related to electoral outcomes
Boston’s team also pushed a hard-line posture toward even small infractions, arguing that visible, forceful law enforcement responses could deter escalation. That exact phrasing appears in the memos and sounds eerily similar to how post-Jan. 6 prosecutions prioritized deterrence over proportionality.
“A strong and effective law enforcement response to even minimal criminal activity, along with community messaging that violence will not be tolerated, may dissuade those looking to take the next step to violent action.”
Former Director Christopher Wray mentioned the memos in passing during June 2021 testimony, but the underlying documents were not produced and stayed sealed through the Biden administration. The records surfaced only after Loudermilk forced their release in 2025, at which point Patel complied.
“This document is evidence that Wray’s FBI predicted, as early as September 2020, that an attack on the Capitol was possible.”
Loudermilk highlighted how the memos also urged online infiltration and developing a network of confidential human sources before January 6. That suggestion lines up with later revelations about informants, agent deployments, and post-riot prosecutions that leaned on CHS reporting.
“It also suggests that the FBI infiltrate online chat forums and build a network of Confidential Human Sources (CHS) prior to January 6.”
The memos laid out a prosecution playbook, and the playbook looks like what the Justice Department executed after the breach. Heavy charges for conduct that in other contexts might have been treated as low-level trespass or disorderly behavior became the norm, raising real questions about selective enforcement and political targeting.
“We now know, through CHS reports and other intelligence, that the FBI had enough information to not only predict an attack on the Capitol, but to prepare for one. So why did the FBI not take steps to protect the U.S. Capitol?”
Reporting and internal complaints indicate roughly two dozen informants were in the crowd on January 6, and more than 250 agents were deployed to manage the events that day. The bureau had people, intelligence, and a prior rehearsal; the hard question is why those elements did not translate into a prevention outcome.
The memos also flagged foreign meddling as a plausible accelerant, citing outside analysis that China, Iran, and especially Russia “appear to have broadly encouraged illegal activity and violence” in the event of a disputed result. That internal assessment ran counter to public political narratives that downplayed foreign influence depending on timing and convenience.
“The Governments of the People’s Republic of China, Iran, and especially Russia appear to have broadly encouraged illegal activity and violence in the hypothetical event that 2020 Presidential election results are disputed, especially via the use of opportunistic, social media-enabled influence operations.”
In June 2021 the White House rolled out a National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism and the intelligence community adopted the DVE framework the FBI had already sketched. The post-Jan. 6 enforcement and surveillance expansion flowed from the same thinking embedded in the 2020 memos.
Thousands of Jan. 6 prosecutions followed, many for conduct that would not have triggered a major federal response during the summer of 2020 unrest. That shift widened the state’s reach into political and civic spaces and ensnared parents, religious conservatives, and civic activists in ways that alarm civil libertarians across the spectrum.
The central complaint here is not that law enforcement planned, but that planning preceded action and was not used to prevent what the bureau itself warned was likely. The newly released memos let the public compare what the FBI anticipated with what it did and didn’t do when the warning signs materialized.
