By Harold Pease, Ph. D.
Kash Patel, as FBI Director, recently declassified and turned over to Congress a set of internal FBI memos from 2020 that detail the bureau’s preparations for potential violence surrounding a contested presidential election. These documents, obtained by Just the News and provided to Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), who chairs the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight, reveal that the FBI’s Boston Field Office conducted a “tabletop exercise” in August 2020—months before the election and the January 6 Capitol events. The exercise simulated scenarios where “domestic violent extremists (DVEs)” might escalate violence if election results were disputed, including plans to embed informants in crowds, and pursue mass prosecutions for even minor offenses (“FBI secretly prepared for disputed election and political violence in 2020, bombshell J6 memos show,” Just the News, Feb. 9, 2026).
In short, “Newly Declassified FBI Memos Reveal Bureau Ran SECRET ‘J6 Tabletop Exercise’ in Summer 2020 — Planned ‘Mass Prosecutions’ and ‘Embedded Informants’ MONTHS Before Capitol Event.” (By Jim Hoft, Gateway Pundit, Feb. 14, 2026) Virtually everything that happened January 6, 2021 and beyond targeted only the right side of the political spectrum with all the vehemence that the Left could muster, was in essence mapped out months before. Consequently an insurrection that denied completion of the vote challenge of the Electoral College, thus seating Biden without it, was a stolen election (“Former VP Mike Pence Stopped Nancy Pelosi’s J6 Trap to Get Trump,” LibertyUnderFire, March 13, 2024).
Notably, the documents indicate this planning occurred under the Trump administration (pre-Biden inauguration), under the Christopher Wray’s FBI, but critics have pointed out that similar rigorous tactics were not applied to left-wing protests earlier in 2020, such as the “Summer of Love” occupation in Seattle, and the burning of Washington DC during the summer 2020 riots. One memo explicitly discussed “mass arrests” for violations like trespassing or disorderly conduct to deter escalation, framing it as a way to manage “political violence” in a disputed election context.
These showed selective enforcement or foreshadowing of the heavy focus on January 6 prosecutions (over 1,200 charged). Patel’s decision to declassify these secret and classified memos came at congressional request, amid ongoing scrutiny of the FBI’s then role in 2020 election-related matters. The memos are now part of congressional records, and summaries of it exist in the citations above.
The words “civil war” per se are not used in the memos but the scenarios simulated high levels of civil unrest, given the mirror replication of just that, making it a reasonable conclusion that proponents likely intended such an outcome as actual civil war. Trump’s speech went too long and the walk to the Capitol was also too long resulting in just a handful initially there. The Deep State couldn’t get the bloodshed they wanted even with the flash grenades used on the crowd to incite them to violence against the Capitol police. Even with six months preparation for civil war the Deep State could not get a war off the ground (X22 Report, Feb. 9, 2023, 51:55).
Bill Mitchell said what most attempting to attend the Electoral College vote January 6, 2021, felt respecting the election. “We knew it was stolen! We all knew! …[This] was the biggest crime in American history…They stole the election in plain sight, then censored, arrested, indicted anyone who dared speak up—pure tyranny” (Ibid. 55:11)! And, FBI assets went scot-free.
Are there copies of these secret memos? Yes, redacted copies including the Executive Analytical Report, dated August 21, 2020. The memos outline the FBI’s assessment of rising threats from domestic violent extremists (DVEs) tied to the 2020 election, including scenarios of disputed results leading to violence against candidates, events, or government buildings like the Capitol. They recommended strategies such as embedding confidential human sources in potentially violent groups, monitoring online forums, and pursuing aggressive prosecutions for minor offenses to deter escalation. Consequently, 274 agents were at the Capitol January 6, ensuring the event went as planned months previous (“FBI Bombshell: 274 agents sent to Capitol for J6, many later complained they were political ‘pawns’”, Just the News, Sept. 25, 2025). The FBI’s Boston Field Office “envisioned a strong law enforcement response to even ‘minimal criminal activity’ as a way to deter any group’s plans for future violent action.”
From here “Biden’s agencies used J6 as a platform to increase spying and actions against U.S. citizens” on other matters. “The thousands of Jan. 6-related prosecutions pursued by the federal government in the aftermath of the riot, with some offenses only amounting to misdemeanor trespassing, were later used by the FBI to inflate the Domestic Violent Extremism threat metrics, used to justify a sweeping expansion of federal law enforcement–later catching up traditional Catholics and parents speaking at school board meetings.”
The Biden administration released its “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism” in June 2021, duplicating the conclusions of the August 2020 report,. “The Intelligence Community (IC) assesses that domestic violent extremists (DVEs) who are motivated by a range of ideologies and galvanized by recent political and societal events in the United States pose an elevated threat to the Homeland in 2021,” Still, “Unlike the perpetrators in the previous deadly domestic terrorist attacks, the January 6 rioters did not kill a single person,” (“FBI secretly prepared for disputed election and political violence in 2020,” Just the News, Feb. 9, 2026).
Under Biden, freedom was suffocating and very close to extinction. Virtually anyone advocating free speech, assembly, the Constitution, and honest elections was now defined, and subsequently treated by the Biden administration, as a domestic terrorist thus expendable.
Dr. Harold Pease is an expert on the United States Constitution and a syndicated columnist on current events. Read his weekly columns at www.LibertyUnderFire.org Column #860.
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