Biden eating ice cream amid an emergency. /OpenAI

by Worthy News Washington D.C. Bureau Staff

(Worthy News) – Newly declassified intelligence has revealed that the dramatic rise in domestic terrorism cases cited by the Biden administration as justification for expanding federal law enforcement power was overwhelmingly based on a single event: the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

The revelation comes from a “Special Analysis” report jointly produced by the FBI, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), declassified in April 2025 by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. The report, authored initially in early 2022, found that 61 percent of all domestic terrorism investigations in 2021 were related to the Capitol riot. Even more striking, 78 percent of all domestic terrorism arrests that year stemmed from the same incident.

The intelligence findings have confirmed long-standing criticisms from civil liberties advocates and Republican lawmakers who argued that the Biden administration exaggerated the domestic terrorism threat in order to justify sweeping new powers and policies. Critics say the administration deliberately obscured how much its statistics relied on January 6 data to portray a nationwide surge in extremist threats.

“If not for January 6, the number of terrorism cases would have declined,” said one congressional investigator. “Instead, they were artificially inflated to support a political narrative.”

One Event, Thousands of Cases

The report shows that FBI domestic terrorism cases doubled in 2021 — from 1,400 to 2,950 — due primarily to January 6. That surge, authorities had claimed, demonstrated an urgent and escalating national security threat.

But the new data tells a different story. Excluding Capitol riot-related cases, domestic terrorism investigations would have decreased in 2021. The declassified charts further reveal that without January 6, arrests for domestic terrorism would have fallen below 2020 levels.

Despite this, top Biden administration officials repeatedly cited the rise in cases to push through new enforcement priorities. In June 2021, the White House unveiled a “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism,” which prominently referenced the Capitol riot while comparing it to deadly historical attacks like the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 1921 Tulsa massacre — events that claimed dozens, even hundreds, of lives. January 6, by contrast, resulted in no deaths directly attributable to rioters.

DOJ, FBI Leaders Repeatedly Cited Inflated Figures

The Biden DOJ, led by Attorney General Merrick Garland, prioritized the January 6 investigation as the department’s “most resource-intensive” in history. Assistant Attorney General Matt Olsen announced the formation of a new “domestic terrorism unit” in January 2022, citing an “elevated threat” tied to ideologically driven violence.

FBI Director Christopher Wray and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas echoed this justification in multiple congressional hearings. “The number of FBI domestic terrorism investigations has more than doubled,” Wray said in testimony repeated in 2022 and 2023 — without revealing that most of those cases stemmed from a single day.

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report in 2023 failed to distinguish how many cases were tied to January 6, citing data limitations imposed by DOJ and the FBI. Internal reports would later admit that a “significant portion” of the increase in 2021 investigations stemmed from the Capitol riot — a phrase now seen as a severe understatement.

Whistleblowers: ‘We Were Told to Inflate the Numbers’

FBI whistleblowers who came forward in 2022 and 2023 have now been vindicated. They claimed that agents were pressured to label January 6-related cases as domestic terrorism and to spread those cases across field offices nationwide — giving the false impression that DVE (domestic violent extremism) was surging in cities across the country.

According to a 2023 House Judiciary report, the FBI avoided its usual protocol of assigning cases to their originating field office — in this case, Washington, D.C. — and instead opened thousands of individual cases across multiple jurisdictions. This created the illusion of a widespread domestic terrorism problem rather than a concentrated investigation stemming from one event.

“By opening a separate case for each individual,” said whistleblower Stephen Friend, “they’ve turned one case into a thousand cases.”

Former FBI intelligence analyst George Hill and Special Agent Garret O’Boyle both testified that every January 6 case was labeled as domestic terrorism, regardless of the individual’s actual behavior or threat level.

Trump Pardons, Pressure on Biden Agencies

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump issued sweeping pardons and commutations to hundreds of January 6 defendants, arguing that the Biden DOJ had politicized the prosecutions. In response, FBI Director Kash Patel, recently confirmed under the Trump administration, criticized the Biden-era approach, saying it had eroded public trust in federal law enforcement.

“There is no excuse,” Patel said, “for misleading the American people about the nature of a threat in order to gain power.”

The revelations come amid renewed scrutiny over federal handling of both the Capitol riot and the nationwide unrest that followed the 2020 death of George Floyd. While the DOJ opened over 800 domestic terrorism cases tied to 2020’s violent riots, that number was still dwarfed by the thousands of cases opened due to January 6 alone.

Critics say the government pursued Capitol riot defendants with far more aggression than those involved in the 2020 violence — a claim FBI leadership has repeatedly denied despite internal discrepancies.

Conclusion: A Manufactured Crisis?

The newly released documents and whistleblower testimony have triggered calls for congressional oversight and accountability, particularly concerning how federal agencies define and categorize domestic terrorism.

What was once labeled the most urgent terror threat to the homeland now appears to have been built on a foundation of manipulated data — all revolving around one day, one event, and one politically useful narrative.

As House Republicans put it in their 2023 report: “January 6 was the black swan that the Biden administration turned into a nationwide domestic terror campaign — on paper.”

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