The FBI gamed out a contested presidential election — complete with mass-prosecution strategies and plans to embed informants — months before the January 6 Capitol riot ever happened.

Newly declassified memos show the bureau's Boston Field Office ran a tabletop exercise in the summer of 2020 that anticipated political violence tied to a disputed election and sketched responses the government would later deploy almost to the letter.

As reported by Just The News, FBI Director Kash Patel turned the long-secret documents over to Congress last week, answering a request from Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), chairman of the House Judiciary's Select Subcommittee on January 6. The memos had been buried for more than five years.

What they describe raises a question that no one in the previous administration wanted to ask: If the FBI saw this coming, why didn't it act to protect the Capitol?

The exercise the FBI doesn't want to talk about

The tabletop exercise, led by the FBI's Boston Field Office in the summer of 2020, wasn't a vague brainstorm. It produced concrete operational strategies — building a "robust source base" embedded with potentially violent groups and pursuing aggressive law enforcement responses to even low-level criminal activity.

An August 2020 memo from the exercise concluded:

"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 scope was broad. The same memo defined "election-related threats" to include those against:

• Candidates and campaign events
• Presidential conventions
• Party offices and elected officials
• Voter registration events
• Threats or plots related to electoral outcomes

The Boston office also recommended that even minor violations receive a heavy response:

"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."

That language reads like a blueprint for what came after January 6 — thousands of federal prosecutions, some for offenses that amounted to misdemeanor trespassing.

What Loudermilk found — and what Wray hid

Former FBI Director Christopher Wray briefly referenced the memos during June 2021 testimony before Congress, but the documents themselves were never produced. They remained locked away through the entire Biden presidency, surfacing only after Loudermilk's request in 2025 and Patel's decision to comply.

Loudermilk didn't mince words about what the memos reveal:

"This document is evidence that Wray's FBI predicted, as early as September 2020, that an attack on the Capitol was possible."

He went further:

"It also suggests that the FBI infiltrate online chat forums and build a network of Confidential Human Sources (CHS) prior to January 6."

And the prosecution strategy? That wasn't improvised either. Loudermilk noted that the memos outline how the FBI should pursue heavy-handed prosecutions for minor offenses — a playbook he says Biden's DOJ executed faithfully after the riot.

The core problem isn't that the FBI planned. Planning is what agencies do. The problem is the gap between what the bureau knew and what it did with that knowledge. Loudermilk framed it directly:

"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?"

About two dozen informants were embedded in the crowd on January 6, according to prior reporting citing after-action complaints from FBI agents. More than 250 agents were deployed to deal with the crowds. The bureau had the bodies. It had the intelligence. It had a literal rehearsal. And the Capitol was still breached.

Foreign interference — when it was convenient

Buried in the memos is another detail worth noting. One memo, citing the Foreign Policy Research Institute, flagged that as of July 15, 2020:

"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."

The FBI assessed that China and Iran were motivated by "an interest in undermining US democratic processes." This was the bureau's own conclusion — in its own internal documents — months before a single vote was cast.

The irony is thick. For years, large segments of the media and left-leaning advocacy groups treated concerns about foreign election interference as conspiratorial thinking — when it suited their narrative. The FBI's own memos show the bureau took those threats seriously in private, even as the public conversation turned "foreign interference" into a partisan football depending on who was in office.

January 6 as launchpad

What followed January 6 is now well documented. The Biden White House released its "National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism" in June 2021, declaring that domestic violent extremists posed "an elevated threat to the Homeland." The Intelligence Community assessment leaned on the same DVE framework that the FBI's 2020 memos had already constructed.

The thousands of Jan. 6-related prosecutions — many for conduct that wouldn't have drawn a second look in the context of the 2020 summer riots — became the foundation for an expanded domestic surveillance and enforcement apparatus. The January 6 rioters did not kill a single person, yet the event was treated as a generational national security crisis. The inflated threat metrics that followed swept far beyond anyone who set foot on Capitol grounds, eventually reaching traditional Catholics and parents who spoke up at school board meetings.

The pattern is worth stating plainly: the FBI built the playbook before January 6, failed to prevent January 6, then used January 6 to justify everything the playbook called for.

The question that remains

Five years of secrecy bought the previous administration time. It allowed a narrative to calcify — that January 6 was an unforeseeable eruption, that the government was caught flat-footed, that the only appropriate response was an unprecedented federal crackdown. These memos complicate every piece of that story.

The FBI wasn't caught off guard. It ran the scenario. It identified the threat. It drew up the operational response. Then it watched the Capitol fall and deployed that response afterward — not to prevent a crisis, but to capitalize on one.

Patel's decision to release the memos puts facts on the table that five years of stonewalling kept hidden. Loudermilk's subcommittee now has the receipts. The American public can read what the FBI wrote in the summer of 2020 and measure it against what the FBI did — and didn't do — on January 6, 2021.

The memos don't answer every question. But they make one thing unmistakable: the FBI saw the storm coming, chose not to stop it, and then used the wreckage to build something far bigger than the event itself ever justified.