Former Capitol Police Chief Makes New Revelation About Jan. 6
Former U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund revealed Friday that the FBI never told him about the hundreds of plainclothes agents it had secretly embedded within the crowds during the January 6, 2021, Capitol protests.
Sund made the remarks in an interview with John Fawcett on The Great America Show, reacting to bombshell disclosures that the FBI — under then-Director Christopher Wray — had 274 undercover personnel on the ground that day. That figure is far higher than previously admitted.
A congressional source tried to downplay the revelations by claiming the FBI often places surveillance teams at large events. But even that source admitted the Bureau’s refusal to disclose the size of its presence until now will “draw skepticism,” as reported by The Blaze.
The new details directly contradict the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General, which asserted in a December 2024 report:
“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.”
Wray himself appeared evasive in testimony before Congress in July 2023. When asked by a Republican lawmaker whether undercover agents were present at the Capitol, Wray replied: “I’m not sure there were undercover agents on scene. As I sit here right now, I do not believe there were undercover agents on.”
Sund, however, said he directly asked federal agencies on January 5, 2021 — the day before the protest — whether they would be placing personnel inside the crowd. None disclosed the FBI’s massive undercover deployment.
“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.”
Instead, Sund said his ability to act was hamstrung by Washington’s notorious bureaucracy.
“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 explained.
“It’s like no other jurisdiction in the world. They really need to fix that,” he added.
Sund has also testified that the FBI withheld intelligence that could have changed the outcome of that day. A January 5 field report flagged specific online calls for violence, but according to Sund, it never reached his desk. Instead, it was given to an officer working with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, who passed it to Capitol Police’s Intelligence Division — where it stalled and never made its way up the chain of command.
These revelations raise even more questions about what federal agencies knew, what they concealed, and why transparency has been so aggressively resisted. For years, the American people were told that January 6 was an “intelligence failure.” Now, it looks increasingly like deliberate stonewalling by unelected bureaucrats.