"Concrete Evidence" That January 6 Was a "Planned Disaster"

Was the "Murder" of Officer Brian Sicknick Part of the Plan?

On April 6, a “senior law enforcement official” sent a signed letter to five relevant Republican members of Congress alleging that incompetence alone does not begin to explain the poor performance of the US Capitol Police (USCP) on January 6, 2021. As reporters Joseph Hanneman and Steve Baker observe, “The whistleblower report references the first concrete evidence that January 6 was—on some levels—a planned disaster.”

The breakdown in order, wrote the whistleblower, “may have stemmed from intentional acts by insiders seeking to remove then-Chief of Police Steven Sund and consolidate control over the USCP and its intelligence functions.”

The new evidence the whistleblower cited was a message “allegedly” sent on the morning of January 6 by then USCP Sergeant Larry Cook to Deputy Chief Sean Gallagher. Cook stated that Yogananda Pittman, then USCP assistant chief for intelligence, was “excited about taking over for [USCP Chief Steve] Sund today.”

Sean Gallagher was later named Acting Chief

“In my view,” wrote the whistleblower, “[the message] suggests a plan and foreknowledge by members of the USCP and staff, that January 6th was going to be so tragic that it would justify the democratic leadership terminating Chief Sund and promoting Pittman and Gallagher.”

The whistleblower further inferred “that certain USCP officials and congressional staff had to conspire in advance to allow or create the catastrophic security failures on January 6, severe enough to justify Chief Sund’s termination.” In his 4-page letter, the whistleblower detailed several instances in which Gallagher, in particular, willfully misled Sund and other security officials into believing that January 6 would be no more troublesome than the November and December Trump rallies in DC.

“I assert,” concluded the whistleblower, “that Sergeant Cook’s January 6th message fundamentally alters the understanding of responsibility for January 6, presenting what I believe is direct evidence of a conspiracy involving USCP personnel and Democratic staff.”

USCP assistant chief for intelligence Yogananda Pittman, excited to be taking over?

The conspirators may not have needed to include USCP assistant chief for intelligence Yogananda Pittman in the plot. Knowing her history, they might have just counted on her to screw things up. According to the House J6 committee report, she was the rare intelligence chief who would admit, “I am not an intelligence analyst, and that takes specific training and usually years of training.” Such were the wonders of DEI.

At this stage, it is hard to confirm the reliability of the whistleblower’s account, but his predictions proved true. Although Sund performed admirably on January 6, on January 7, according to Roll Call, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi publicly demanded his resignation.

Nancy Pelosi busily mismanaging the protection of the Capitol

Rather than discipline the head of intelligence, Pelosi promoted Pittman to acting USCP chief. To get a sense of Pittman’s perceived competence, a staggering 92 percent of her colleagues voted no confidence in her leadership. Once forced out, Pelosi—I suspect—secured a cozy gig for her as chief of the University of California Berkeley’s police department.

As to Gallagher, despite the tragic failures of that day, he continued in good standing and was named acting USCP chief on June 2, 2025. The appointment drew instant backlash from the USCP union, largely because of his mismanagement of the January 6 event. He was replaced by an outsider before the end of June.

Of note, the Roll Call article cited above was posted at 2:25 p.m. on Thursday, July 7. Wrote its three reporters, “Wednesday’s events resulted in four deaths and extensive damage to the Capitol complex and exposed a clear failure of the Capitol Police to execute its mission, which is to protect and secure Congress.”

At this time, the four known dead were all protestors. Neither the Roll Call reporters, nor Nancy Pelosi, had any idea that, as the New York Times would headline the next day, “Capitol Police Officer Dies From Injuries in Pro-Trump Rampage.” The Times has since modified the online body copy, but in the original “two law enforcement officials” told its readers that {Brian] Sicknick died “with mobs rampaging through the halls of Congress” after he "was struck with a fire extinguisher."

In a later edition on January 8, the Times added this chillingly fraudulent detail, “With a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support.” Despite this dramatic attack on January 6, no media reported any account of it on January 7.

By January 8, the Times had no excuse for not knowing the fire extinguisher story was grotesquely false. On the afternoon of that same January 8, ProPublica reported that it had spoken to Sicknick's family members who said that “Sicknick had texted them Wednesday night [January 6] to say that while he had been pepper-sprayed, he was in good spirits.“

This all brings us back to the “two law enforcement officials” who fed the Times the fire extinguisher story. This was no miscommunication, but a deliberate attempt by politically wired operatives to advance the Democratic party line. As Glenn Greenwald observed six weeks after January 6, “This horrifying story about a pro-Trump mob beating a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher was repeated over and over, by multiple journalists on television, in print, and on social media. It became arguably the single most emphasized and known story of this event.”

The whistleblower letter suggests, if nothing else, the willingness of “law enforcement officials” within the Capitol Police to identify their own interests with that of the Democratic Party. If so, they hit pay dirt with their fire extinguisher fable.

“The problem with this story,” concluded Greenwald, “is that it is false in all respects. From the start, there was almost no evidence to substantiate it. The only basis were the two original New York Times articles asserting that this happened based on the claim of anonymous law enforcement officials.” Would that we knew who those officials are.