January 6, 2021 is a day that will live in infamy. And nearly four years after the smoke cleared from the attack on the Capitol building, our election system remains under assault with former President Trump’s continuing, false insistence that he won the presidential race in 2020 becoming a core campaign issue for the Republican Party and a sprawling grassroots movement.
Now, Election Day — and, with it, another electoral certification on Jan. 6, 2025 — is approaching alongside the specter of violence.
To understand what to expect, TPM spoke with an intelligence expert who was on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6 and has continued to monitor the far-right.
Julie Farnam was the assistant director of the Intelligence and Interagency Coordination Division of the U.S. Capitol Police until May 2023. In that capacity, she crafted briefings about the potential for violence ahead of the last electoral certification on Jan. 6, 2021. One of her assessments included an ominous warning: “the target is Congress.” Those words proved prescient when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building that day in an effort to overturn his loss, particularly since others in law enforcement claimed to be shocked by the violence. Four years after her early warnings, Farnam believes the threat looks somewhat different this time around.
“I think a lot of it’s going to depend on what the election outcome is, of course,” Farnam said in a phone conversation last week.
“What happens after the election will manifest itself differently. I don’t think we’re going to see a January 6th like we saw in 2021,” said Farnam, who now tracks the far right from the private sector. “I think the Capitol’s going to be pretty hardcore barricaded. I think there probably will be violence and riots, but I think it’s going to be more at the local level, the state level — particularly in places where they’re contentious, like the battleground states.”
A spate of recent polls have shown that as much as three quarters of Americans are concerned about post-election violence in the coming weeks. Those fears have been fueled by the close presidential race, lingering memories of the violence that accompanied Trump’s last defeat, and the former president’s current campaign rhetoric, which has included false claims about potential voter fraud and unwillingness to accept another negative result. There has also been an unprecedented wave of violent threats targeting election workers in conjunction with the race.
Farnam said she believes “lone wolf” attacks targeting lower-level candidates and election infrastructure pose the “highest risk” in the current climate. She pointed out we have already seen this type of violence during this cycle, Some examples include the assassination attempt on Trump, shootings at a Democratic National Committee office in Arizona, and a series of threats made against campaign and election workers, for which the Department of Justice announced new charges last week.
“The lone wolf is the biggest concern, and I do see there is a vulnerability there, not just at polling locations, but with candidates,” Farnam said. “Even members of Congress, they don’t get protection, for the most part. … Right now, every member of the House, they’re out campaigning … they’re going to these events and they generally don’t have much security at all. I think that’s where the risk is.”
To Farnam, either outcome in this election brings chilling concerns. With his continued promotion of baseless claims that the vote could be rigged against him, Trump has given his supporters obvious motivation to protest once again if he loses. However, with the former president vowing retribution against his enemies and loyalists drawing up lists of potential targets, Farnam said there are also risks for violence if Trump wins. “If Trump is elected, I worry a lot about retribution and vigilantes coming on behalf of Trump to either assassinate or commit violence to political enemies,” said Farnam, adding, “They would also do it with the expectation that Trump would pardon them — and he might.”
Trump has previously expressed a desire to pardon people who were arrested in conjunction with the Capitol attack, many of whom have attained something of a martyr status on the far right. More generally, Farnam said Trump’s militant rhetoric would create a climate that emboldens extremist groups, like the growing network of white nationalist martial arts “active clubs,” if he takes office.
“This is the bigger conversation, but if Trump is elected and we head more towards a dictatorship type of government, do we start seeing these groups like the active clubs … come forward because that hate is going to be acceptable and violence is going to be more acceptable?” Farnam asked. “We won’t have that guardrail anymore. Like, it’s okay to hate people. It’s okay to commit violence against people or races or religions that you don’t agree with.”
Farnam, who previously spent over a decade at the Department of Homeland Security, left the Capitol Police last year. She went on to launch a firm Pandorus Intelligence, LLC and has tracked extremist groups like the far-right, pro-Trump Proud Boys, a group that has experienced something of a resurgence this year after multiple high profile members faced charges of seditious conspiracy for their role in the Capitol attack. Following the legal crackdown, many people in far-right spaces began to believe intricate and false conspiracies about Jan. 6, including that it was somehow staged to entrap them. As a result of this, Farnam said she expects some extremists to stay away from the certification at the Capitol building itself if Trump loses this time around.
“I do think that some of these groups will see coming to Washington as a honeypot because you still hear those conspiracies about January 6th being a setup,” Farnam said. “So, I just don’t see them coming to DC in large numbers like they did before.”
The “hardcore” barricading that Farnam expects would greet anyone who does come to the Capitol comes after what was widely recognized as a series of operational failures in law enforcement’s handling of the assault on the building nearly four years ago. Farnam, who joined the Capitol Police from DHS just over two months prior to the attack, has been faulted by some former colleagues who have said there were insufficient alarm bells ahead of the chaos that unfolded on Jan. 6. During her start at the department, Farnam authored multiple documents citing the potential for violence. She gave her own account of the finger pointing and “fallout” that occurred within the Capitol Police in the book Domestic Darkness: An Insider’s Account of the January 6th Insurrection, and the Future of Right, which was published earlier this year. In the book, Farnam described her view that it was hard to be taken seriously as a woman inside the department. Farnam described the Capitol Police to TPM as an “unsupportive environment.”
“I had only been on the job for less than three months when I was there. … I just went in, did my job, I wrote the report — the intelligence report — gave it to the leadership, and they … didn’t do anything with it,” Farnam said.
Farnam’s warnings were ultimately highlighted multiple times in the final report published by the House select committee that investigated the attack.
One thing the committee did not detail in its final report was the role played by Republican members of Congress in both spreading the false conspiracies about Trump’s 2020 loss and planning protests for Jan. 6. Farnam said she found this “frustrating.”
“I understand why they didn’t address that, but I think it’s something as a country we should be looking at,” Farnam said.
She specifically pointed to Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), citing tweets she sent on Jan. 6 that detailed the location of House members and an article in Rolling Stone authored by this reporter that revealed allegations the congresswoman’s team participated in calls plotting protests against Trump’s loss. Farnam also cited Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), who led a tour of the Capitol building one day before the attack. The select committee released video of that tour and said at least one of the people Loudermilk showed around subsequently was present outside the building during the attack.
Loudermilk and Boebert did not respond to requests for comment. The select committee requested to interview Loudermilk about the tour. Loudermilk, who declined the request, made a statement after the committee released the videos describing it as a “smear campaign” and declaring there was “nothing there.” Specifically, Loudermilk pointed to a letter from Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger about the footage wherein he said “we do not consider any of the activities we observed as suspicious.”
Farnam evidently doesn’t agree with that assessment.
“Why that tour was unusual and why it should raise or should have raised more suspicion than it did is that at the time, one, they weren’t giving any public tours because it was during the pandemic. So that right there made it strange. Second thing is,members of Congress very, very rarely give tours themselves. It’s always like their 20-something-year-old staff that does the tours. And so for Loudermilk to be giving that tour himself, that’s really unusual.”
Farnam also said the locations Loudermilk visited with the group were odd.
“When you come as a tourist, you want to see the gallery, and you can see the crypt, and you want to see these statues, and this, and that,” Farnam said. “He was showing them the hallways. They’re boring and they’re confusing, so why was he taking them down there?”
With still unanswered questions about the violence that accompanied last election and the concerns about the current one, Farnam has been left with what she described as “mixed feelings” about working in this fraught political landscape.
“I want to keep fighting for what I believe is right and to try to make the community and the country better, but at the same time, it’s pretty exhausting,” Farnam said. “I just wish things were more stable in this country because I do worry about it a lot.”
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