Former U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund said in an interview Friday that the FBI never informed him that hundreds of its agents had been deployed inside the crowds during the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Sund’s remarks to host John Fawcett of “The Great America Show” came on the heels of a Thursday revelation that the FBI, then under Christopher Wray, had 274 plainclothes agents inside the massive Trump crowds on January 6, 2021 — hundreds more than previously reported.
A senior congressional source said the number of FBI personnel at the Capitol on Jan. 6 is not necessarily surprising, noting that the bureau routinely embeds countersurveillance staff at large public events. Still, the source acknowledged that, given the FBI’s longstanding refusal to detail the scope of its presence that day, the figure is likely to draw skepticism in some quarters, The Blaze reported.
The disclosure follows earlier claims by the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General that the FBI had no undercover personnel embedded in the Jan. 6 crowds. It also follows a false claim by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that neither then-President Trump nor anyone else requested National Guard support.
“We found no evidence in the materials we reviewed or the testimony we received showing or suggesting that the FBI had undercover employees in the various protest crowds, or at the Capitol, on January 6,” the DOJ OIG said in an 88-page report released in December 2024.
Wray testified before Congress in July 2023 that he “does not believe” undercover FBI agents were present at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
“I’m not sure there were undercover agents on scene,” Wray responded to a question from a GOP lawmaker. “As I sit here right now, I do not believe there were undercover agents on.”
Sund said that on January 5, one day before the Capitol protests, he met with representatives from major federal agencies and specifically asked whether any liaison would be assigned from agencies planning to have personnel on the ground. According to Sund, no agency disclosed such plans.
“If they were saying that they were going to have that group in the crowd already, most likely what they’d do is they’d put a liaison up in my command center,” Sund told Fawcett. “I mean, if you’re going to have that type of assets and resources deployed onto someone’s jurisdiction, you’re going to put somebody in their command center. That’s key.
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“The only problem with the Capitol is the bureaucracy. Even though, as the Chief of Police, there was a chief law enforcement officer for the House and a chief law enforcement officer for the Senate that sat over top of me. That created the big bureaucracy that I ran into. You’d like to think the chief could call the shots, especially with my experience? Not the case on January 6th,” he added.
“It’s like no other jurisdiction in the world. They really need to fix that,” he said.
In February 2021 testimony before the Senate Rules and Homeland Security committees, Sund said he never received an FBI report that warned of potential violence on January 6. The report, issued on January 5, outlined specific calls for violence ahead of the protest at the Capitol.
According to Sund, while the U.S. Capitol Police did receive the report, it never made its way to his office.
Instead, he testified, a Capitol Police officer assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force received the document and passed it to an official within the department’s Intelligence Division, where it never made it further up the chain of command.