On Saturday, President Donald Trump claimed in a Truth Social post that the FBI “placed” 274 agents in the crowd to act as “Agitators and Insurrectionists” who then stormed the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021.
“It was just revealed that the FBI had secretly placed, against all Rules, Regulations, Protocols, and Standards, 274 FBI Agents into the Crowd just prior to, and during, the January 6th hoax,” read Trump’s post on September 27. “FBI agents were at, and in, the January 6th Protest, probably acting as Agitators and insurrectionists, but certainly not as ‘Law Enforcement Officials.’”
There is no evidence to support the president’s claim that FBI agents were acting as agitators, and further context is needed to understand the presence of FBI agents at the Capitol on January 6.
Two days before Trump’s post, right-leaning news site Just the News reported on and linked to a 50-page after-action report it said FBI Director Kash Patel located and turned over to the House Judiciary Committee. The Dispatch Fact Check could not independently verify the authenticity of the document, and the Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.
The report logs 274 agents who “responded to the Capitol grounds as well as inside the Capitol” after rioting broke out and the Capitol building was breached on January 6. The report features anonymous observations and complaints from agents and other employees about the FBI’s execution of the mission, some concerned with the apparent lack of “training and equipment” needed to keep agents safe.
In a Fox News appearance the same day that Trump posted about the report, Patel described the deployment of FBI agents as a “crowd control mission.”
Neither the September 25 report from Just the News nor Patel’s comments suggested that FBI agents provoked or participated in the rioting, nor that they were “placed” there to serve as agitators. The article from Just the News stated that “plainclothes agents” were “secretly deployed” but nothing in the article suggests that they were there to incite violence. There are multiple references in the article describing the FBI agents responding to the events and it notes (emphasis added), “the FBI had a total of 274 agents deployed to the Capitol in plainclothes and with guns after the violence started but with no clear safety gear [or] way to be recognized by other law enforcement agencies working in the chaos of the riot.”
While the after-action report does not support Trump’s claim that 274 agents were placed in the crowd to agitate on January 6, it does call into question a December 2024 report from the Department of Justice that the FBI had no agents at the Capitol. That report, previously reported on by The Dispatch Fact Check, has apparently been removed from the DOJ website.
When asked about the president’s remarks, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told The Dispatch Fact Check via email, “President Trump is right to highlight this important issue that many Americans are still looking for answers on and that Democrats have spent years lying about and obstructing. The President is committed to justice and transparency for all Americans.”
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