J6 BOMBSHELL — FORMER CAPITOL POLICE CHIEF MAKES STUNNING CLAIM ABOUT NANCY PELOSI
Former Capitol Police Chief Makes New Revelation About Jan. 6
Former U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund has renewed questions about how federal law-enforcement agencies coordinated with Capitol security before and during the January 6, 2021 attack.
In a September 2025 interview with host John Fawcett on “The Great America Show,” Sund said he had not been told in advance about a large FBI presence connected to the events of January 6.
That statement quickly became part of a much broader claim.
Some reports described the FBI as having 274 “plainclothes” or “undercover” agents embedded inside the crowds around the Capitol.
That description is more dramatic than the documents currently support.
An internal FBI after-action document that became public in 2025 does include the number 274.
But the document describes 274 agents as having “responded” to the January 6 incident.
It does not say that 274 undercover agents were secretly planted inside the crowd.
It does not say that all 274 were present before the Capitol was breached.
And it does not say they were deployed to infiltrate protesters.
That distinction is the central issue in evaluating Sund’s latest comments.
The FBI document says the count included agents who responded to the Capitol grounds and inside the Capitol, as well as personnel dealing with the pipe bombs discovered near the Republican and Democratic national committee headquarters and a vehicle believed to contain explosive devices.
In other words, the figure appears to describe a broad operational response to an unfolding security emergency.
That is different from saying 274 FBI employees had been embedded in the crowd before the riot began.
The Justice Department’s inspector general drew the same distinction in a separate review released in December 2024.
The Office of Inspector General said it found no evidence that undercover FBI employees were present in the protest crowds or at the Capitol on January 6.
The OIG did, however, identify 26 FBI confidential human sources who were in Washington in connection with January 6 events.
Those sources were not FBI employees.
Three had been tasked by FBI field offices to report on specific domestic-terrorism subjects who might attend the events.
Twenty-three others attended on their own initiative rather than at the FBI’s direction.
Four of the 26 entered the Capitol, according to the inspector general.
Others entered the restricted area around the building.
But the OIG found that none of the confidential sources had been authorized by the FBI to enter the Capitol, break the law or encourage other people to commit crimes.
That makes terminology especially important.
An undercover FBI employee is an FBI agent or employee concealing his or her official identity as part of an authorized investigative operation.
A confidential human source is generally a person outside the FBI who supplies information to the bureau.
An agent who responds to a riot in ordinary clothes is yet another category.
Those terms are not interchangeable.
The 274 figure concerns agents involved in the FBI response.
The 26 figure concerns confidential human sources.
And the Justice Department inspector general said it found no evidence of undercover FBI employees embedded in the January 6 protest crowds.
That does not make Sund’s concern meaningless.
His argument is fundamentally about coordination.
Sund has said that on January 5, one day before the attack, he held a virtual meeting involving senior Capitol security officials and representatives from major federal law-enforcement and military agencies.
His 2021 Senate testimony confirms that meeting.
According to Sund, participants included the FBI, Secret Service and National Guard.
Sund said in his later interview that if a federal agency planned to deploy a significant number of personnel into another agency’s jurisdiction, he would normally expect it to place a liaison in the Capitol Police command center.
“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,” Sund told Fawcett.
The significance of that statement depends on when and why those FBI agents were deployed.
If hundreds of agents had been secretly positioned in the crowd before the attack, Sund’s lack of notice would raise one kind of question.
If the bulk of those agents were mobilized after the security situation deteriorated, it raises a different question about emergency coordination rather than covert infiltration.
The publicly available after-action material points more strongly toward the second interpretation.
That is why the 274-agent disclosure should not be treated as proof that the FBI secretly inserted hundreds of operatives among Trump supporters before the riot.
The document itself does not establish that.
Still, Sund’s broader frustration with federal intelligence sharing is not new.
He raised it almost immediately after January 6.
In testimony before the Senate Rules Committee and the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in February 2021, Sund described serious failures in the way threat information reached Capitol Police leadership.
One of the most important examples involved an FBI report produced by the bureau’s Norfolk, Virginia, field office on January 5.
The report contained online discussions suggesting the potential for violence in Washington.
It included language from people talking about traveling to the capital prepared for conflict.
The report was real.
The problem was how it was distributed.
Sund testified that he did not see it before the attack.
A Capitol Police officer assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force received the report and forwarded it to an official in the Capitol Police Intelligence Division.
According to Sund, it did not move farther up the chain to his office.
That meant the chief responsible for protecting the Capitol did not personally receive a piece of intelligence that later became central to the debate over whether law enforcement should have anticipated violence.
A bipartisan Senate investigation later confirmed the existence of the Norfolk Situational Information Report.
The report was not a formal FBI intelligence bulletin.
It was a field-office product containing raw and relatively unvetted information.
Even so, it warned of violent online rhetoric associated with the January 6 demonstrations.
The Senate review concluded that failures across multiple agencies contributed to an incomplete picture of the threat.
Sund’s testimony also emphasized that the January 5 interagency meeting did not produce a warning that thousands of people would launch a coordinated violent attack on the Capitol.
That statement is consistent with his long-running criticism of the intelligence process.
He has argued that law-enforcement agencies possessed fragments of alarming information but failed to assemble and communicate them effectively enough for Capitol Police to prepare for what actually happened.
The Justice Department inspector general reached a related conclusion in 2024.
The OIG said the FBI took significant steps to prepare for a supporting role on January 6.
But it also found that the bureau failed to conduct a formal nationwide canvass of its field offices for relevant information from confidential human sources before the event.
Then-FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate described that omission to investigators as a “basic step that was missed.”
The OIG also found that the FBI later inaccurately told Congress it had conducted such a pre-January 6 canvass.
The inspector general did not conclude that the inaccurate statement was intentional.
Instead, it attributed the problem to confusion and poor coordination.
Those findings matter because they show that there were real FBI preparation and communication failures without establishing the much larger claim that the bureau orchestrated or infiltrated the riot.
That distinction has repeatedly been lost in political debate.
Former FBI Director Christopher Wray was questioned about the issue during a House Judiciary Committee hearing in July 2023.
Rep. Andy Biggs asked how many undercover FBI agents had been at the Capitol or in the surrounding crowd.
Wray said he was not sure there were undercover agents on scene and added that, as he sat there, he did not believe there were undercover agents present.
The 2024 inspector general report later supported the substance of that answer by stating that investigators found no evidence of undercover FBI employees in the protest crowds or at the Capitol.
The existence of hundreds of agents who responded during the emergency does not by itself contradict Wray’s testimony.
Again, the categories are different.
An agent sent to respond after violence breaks out is not automatically an undercover operative.
A confidential source is not an FBI employee.
And an officer wearing ordinary clothes is not necessarily working undercover.
The new disclosure therefore changes the public understanding of the scale of the FBI’s operational response more than it changes the inspector general’s conclusion about undercover activity.
That is still significant.
Until the internal after-action material surfaced, the public had little detailed information about how many FBI agents were involved in the response.
A total of 274 agents is substantial.
It naturally raises questions about command structure, communication and what the FBI was doing at different stages of the day.
Those questions are legitimate.
But answering them requires a timeline.
How many agents were present before the first barriers were breached?
How many arrived after Capitol Police requested help?
How many were assigned to the pipe bombs?
How many entered the Capitol to assist with security or evidence work?
How many were involved in the investigation after the building had been cleared?
The 274 figure alone does not answer those questions.
Without that breakdown, describing all 274 as embedded in the crowd creates a picture the available document does not establish.
There is another controversial issue in the original account: National Guard support.
Claims about who requested or rejected the Guard before January 6 have been the subject of years of political argument.
Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly said he offered or authorized thousands of National Guard troops and that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected them.
Multiple investigations have found no evidence of a formal Trump order or request for 10,000 troops to protect the Capitol that Pelosi then denied.
The House speaker also did not have unilateral authority to activate the D.C. National Guard.
The Guard reports through the executive branch, and decisions about deployment involve the president and Defense Department.
That does not mean Capitol security planning was adequate.
It clearly was not.
Sund himself sought National Guard support as the attack unfolded and has described delays and bureaucratic obstacles in obtaining it.
But the specific claim that Pelosi personally rejected a formal Trump request for 10,000 Guard troops has not been substantiated by the available record.
That is important because the January 6 security failure involved multiple institutions.
Reducing the problem to a single actor obscures how complicated the command structure actually was.
Sund has repeatedly criticized that structure.
As Capitol Police chief, he did not operate with the same unilateral authority that a city police chief might have.
The Capitol Police Board sat above the department and included the House and Senate sergeants at arms and the Architect of the Capitol, along with the chief as an ex officio member.
Sund has argued that this arrangement slowed critical decision-making.
In his 2025 interview, he again described the system as unusually bureaucratic.
That criticism has a factual basis.
Investigations after January 6 identified delays, unclear authority and communication failures involving Capitol Police, the Capitol Police Board, the Defense Department and other agencies.
Those failures help explain why Sund’s latest remarks resonate even when the most sensational version of the 274-agent claim does not hold up.
He is describing a system in which the chief responsible for the Capitol did not always have complete information about federal resources or intelligence.
The FBI’s own record supports part of that concern.
The Norfolk report did not reach Sund.
The FBI failed to conduct a full pre-event source canvass.
The bureau later gave Congress inaccurate information about whether that canvass had occurred.
And an internal after-action review shows a much larger FBI response on January 6 than many members of the public previously understood.
But none of those facts proves that hundreds of FBI agents were secretly embedded among protesters to provoke the attack.
That is where the evidence stops.
The Justice Department inspector general specifically rejected the undercover-agent claim.
It found 26 confidential human sources in Washington.
Some entered restricted areas or the Capitol.
But none had been authorized to break the law or incite others.
The 274 agents identified in the later after-action document were described as responders to the January 6 incident and associated threats.
Those two sets of facts can exist at the same time.
The FBI had sources in Washington.
The FBI also deployed hundreds of agents in response to the emergency.
And the OIG found no undercover FBI employees embedded in the protest crowds.
Understanding January 6 requires keeping those categories separate.
The same is true of Sund’s new revelation.
His statement that he was not told about the scale of FBI personnel involvement adds another piece to the long-running debate over interagency coordination.
It deserves scrutiny.
But it does not, by itself, establish that the FBI secretly populated the crowd with 274 undercover agents.
The more defensible conclusion is narrower.
Federal agencies had more personnel involved in the January 6 response than was publicly understood for years.
Capitol Police leadership experienced serious intelligence and coordination failures.
Steven Sund says he was not informed in advance about the scale of FBI resources that would ultimately be deployed.
And newly surfaced documents give investigators and Congress more reason to ask exactly when those agents arrived, what missions they were assigned and how their activities were coordinated with Capitol Police.
Those are substantial questions.
They do not need an unsupported claim of hundreds of undercover operatives to make them important.
The unanswered issue is not whether the number 274 appears in an FBI document.
It does.
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The unanswered issue is what those 274 agents were doing, when they were deployed and how much Capitol Police leadership knew about the response as the crisis unfolded.
That is where the next round of scrutiny should remain.
