Jan. 6 Attack Resonates in Smaller-Scale Acts of Political Violence

WASHINGTON—The Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol ushered in a new wave of politically charged violence and threats against elected officials, judges and government buildings that is shaking the democratic process this presidential-election year.

“The country is a tinderbox,” said Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago. “More and more of the public is becoming more radicalized and becoming more supportive of political violence in general, and this effect was likely encouraged by Jan. 6.”

Three years after thousands of then-President Donald Trump’s supporters streamed onto the Capitol grounds and disrupted the certification of President Biden’s election win, the prospect of a riot in the same place with the same aim is unlikely. A federal law passed in 2022 made it much more difficult for partisans to upend the certification of presidential election results, and public-safety officials have sought to patch security holes revealed by the riot.

Yet new threats are emerging as elected officials and law enforcement are seeing attacks by small groups or people acting alone and driven by a range of political reproaches. The year ahead is studded with occasions that could stoke such grievances, as criminal proceedings against Trump advance and both parties ramp up campaigns that cast 2024 as a year of reckoning for American democracy.

The Department of Homeland Security recently warned that the “threat of violence from individuals radicalized in the United States will remain high” in 2024, marked by lone-wolf or small-group attacks that occur with little warning.

“These threats of violence are unacceptable. They threaten the fabric of our democracy,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said Friday, promising the Justice Department would double down on its efforts to thwart them.

This week alone, bomb scares prompted evacuations of at least nine state capitol buildings. Public officials in Maine and Colorado have recently received death threats after barring Trump from their states’ primary ballots, and there were false reports of shootings at the homes of at least three members of Congress, including House Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.).

Also in recent weeks, prosecutors charged a New Hampshire man with sending threatening text messages to Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy and two other presidential candidates; authorities arrested an Arizona man after he allegedly posted on a pro-Trump message board that he wanted to “execute every single FBI agent and employee, including the maintenance staff”; and investigators said a Florida man left voice mails threatening to kill Rep. Eric Swalwell (D., Calif.) and his children. Another Florida man pleaded guilty to calling the Supreme Court to say he wanted to kill Chief Justice John Roberts. And a Montana man on Friday pleaded guilty to threatening to kill Democratic Sen. Jon Tester and saying he would “personally kill Joe Biden.”

“This is just a small snapshot of a larger trend,” Garland said Friday, when he also called the probe of the Capitol riot “the largest and most complex and resource-intensive investigations in our history.”

The Justice Department has pursued charges against more than 1,200 people in connection with the assault, securing more than 100 convictions at trial and more than 700 guilty pleas, including for assaults on law-enforcement officers. Fourteen right-wing militia members have been convicted of seditious conspiracy.

Special counsel Jack Smith in August charged Trump with conspiring to overturn his election loss through false claims of voter fraud and other actions that culminated in the Jan. 6 attack. Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges, as he has in the other three criminal cases he faces as he runs again for the White House.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said the number of its probes into domestic violent extremism has risen since the Capitol attack, with about 2,700 open cases in September 2023.

The threatening behavior extends to partisans on both sides of the political spectrum. Nicholas Roske, charged with attempting to murder Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022 after the jurist joined the five-vote majority in eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion, is in plea talks with prosecutors after pleading not guilty.

“I’ve never seen a time where all the threats or so many of the threats are all elevated all at exactly the same time,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers at a hearing in December, stressing that the domestically generated challenges had been compounded by rising threats of international terrorism and against Jews and Muslims in the U.S. since Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault on Israeli civilians and Israel’s invasion of Gaza.

The tense threat landscape could well intensify as politicians on both sides of the political spectrum are increasingly talking about the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack in divergent and dire ways.

“MAGA voices who know the truth about Trump and January 6th have abandoned the truth and abandoned our democracy. They’ve made their choice,” President Biden said in a speech Friday in Valley Forge, Pa.

Meanwhile, Trump continues to cast doubt on the 2020 election and play down the significance of the Jan. 6 attack, recasting himself and that day’s rioters as martyrs whom he would pardon. In sometimes incendiary terms, he has pledged if elected in 2024 to carry out “retribution” on behalf of those who have been “wrong and betrayed.”

While the former president has avoided explicit calls for violence—he often inserts the word “peacefully” in fundraising emails outlining his expanding list of grievances—law-enforcement officials have warned that some of Trump’s most passionate supporters might read between the lines.

While most threats don’t lead to violence, law enforcement faces a challenge discerning which ones will. An FBI agent in August fatally shot a man in Provo, Utah, who officials said was armed and had threatened to assassinate President Biden shortly before he was scheduled to speak in Salt Lake City.

Court staff and prosecutors involved in the cases against Trump have also been targets of threats. A Texas woman is set to stand trial next month on a charge she threatened to kill Washington-based Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over Trump’s federal election-interference case. Federal prosecutors have said Abigail Jo Shry left a voicemail with Chutkan’s chambers in early August in which she threatened to kill the judge and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat, along with anyone who went after Trump. Her lawyer didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Officials stress that they have made improvements to security and information-sharing after the Jan. 6 attack, which led to a series of watchdog reports that found failures by law-enforcement agencies on all levels to predict the riot and protect the complex.

The mass political protests that authorities had prepared for didn’t materialize at key points in Trump’s legal travails in 2023, such as his April trial appearance in New York, his June arraignment in Miami and his August booking in Atlanta.

But experts say large-scale political violence can’t be ruled out. A survey by Pape’s Chicago Project on Security and Threats in July 2023 found as many as 18 million adults agree that the “use of force is justified” to return Trump to office.

“Worry more about the lone wolf now, but recognize the ingredients exist for another riotous protest in support of political violence to occur,” Pape said.

C. Ryan Barber, Jan Wolfe and Alex Leary contributed to this article.

Write to Sadie Gurman at [email protected]