S4E9: Julie Farnam Capitol Insurrection Report

This episode's guest is Julie Farnam, who was a witness before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack, in which she testified regarding intelligence she had obtained before January 6th that attendees intended to come to the event armed, that white supremacists planned to attend, that participants were sharing maps of the Capitol tunnels, and many other data points that ought to have been sufficient for the USCP to adequately prepare. This interview is occasioned by the publication of her forthcoming book, “Domestic Darkness: An Insider’s Account of the January 6 Insurrection and the Future of Right-Wing-Extremism,” which is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold, with a publication date of January 2nd, 2024. Farnam had served as the Assistant Director of the Intelligence and Interagency Coordination Division (IICD) for the USCP during the run-up to, and then in the aftermath of, the January 6th, 2021 attack on the Capitol. Following the resignation of her immediate superior, Jack Donohue, in the Spring of 2021, Farnam assumed the position of Acting Director of the Intelligence and Interagency Coordination Division for the USCP. Then, when she was passed over for Donohue’s job in March of 2022, Farnam returned to her Assistant Director position, which she later left.



We discuss Farnam's experiences in her government career, and the "culture of mediocrity" that was evident in the failure of USCP leadership to act on the intelligence IICD had provided in the assessment she wrote and submitted on January 3rd, 2021. We also discuss how it was that she came to be interviewed by the FBI regarding an MPD officer who allegedly gave sensitive law enforcement information regarding investigations and pending arrests with the Chairman of the Proud Boys. Also discussed: a pressure campaign by USCP intended to force Farnam not to submit her manuscript for publication, in incident involving Russian nationals behaving suspiciously on January 6th, an interview she conducted with a DOD source who told her that Charles Flynn and Bradley Gericke were concerned that an as-yet not public
intelligence report was too focused on the danger to the Capitol from the crowd that would attend Trump's Ellipse speech, and insufficiently concerned with Antifa and BLM.

https://www.igpub.com/tag/julie-farnam/ https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/GPO-J6-TRANSCRIPT-CTRL0000034626/ https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21174477/uscp-jan6-intelreports-cnn.pdf https://www.rules.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Jan%206%20HSGAC%20Rules%20Report.pdf https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/30/capitol-police-trump-insurrection-485138