The FBI has not stated how many agents it has assigned to the investigation, but court records show that many working the cases have been pulled away from their normal — and important — areas of focus, such as white-collar crime, sex trafficking, or fraud. Since Jan. 6, agents and officers from more than a dozen federal and local law enforcement agencies have filed some 80,000 reports of witness interviews, reviewed more than 210,000 tips and 15,000 hours of surveillance footage, executed more than 900 search warrants in nearly every state, and extracted data from more than 1,600 phones.
Letting rioters go home also gave them an opportunity to obstruct justice. An analysis by BuzzFeed News found that more than three dozen people charged in the investigation had attempted to destroy evidence or scrub their social media profiles, although not always successfully. In court filings in dozens of cases, prosecutors have described efforts by defendants to scrub social media accounts, erase or destroy other evidence, hide out with family and friends, intimidate potential witnesses, and, in at least two cases, attempt to flee the country. And that’s just for the people who were actually caught.
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