They hid this for five years. They were asked dozens of times and always claimed they didn't know or couldn't answer.

And suddenly the answer is given. All it took was an FBI Director who had learned to count when he was in kindergarten.

FBI Bombshell: 274 agents sent to Capitol for J6, many later complained they were political 'pawns'

Hidden for four years, an after-action report on FBI's involvement in Jan. 6 riot found by Director Patel shows dozens of agents feared that the FBI had become "woke" and "liberally biased."

The FBI secretly deployed more than 250 plainclothes agents to the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021 riot, an operation so disorganized it unleashed searing frustrations among many of the FBI's rank-and-file that the bureau had lost its core competencies to "wokeness" and allowed its employees to become "pawns in a political war," according to an after-action report kept from the public for more than four years.

Scores of FBI agents and personnel -- many from the bureau's premier Washington field office (WFO) -- sent anonymous complaints to the after-action team detailing how agents were sent into an unsafe scenario without proper safety equipment or the ability to identify themselves readily as armed officers to other police agencies, the report obtained by Just the News shows.

The most persistent complaint was that the bureau during the James Comey and Chris Wray era had become infected with political biases and liberal ideology that treated the protesters from the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter riots far differently than those arrested in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 episode.

"The FBI should make clear to its personnel and the public that, despite its obvious political bias, it ultimately still takes its mission and priorities seriously," one employee wrote in a stinging review. "It should equally and aggressively investigate criminal activity regardless of the offenders' perceived race, political affiliations, or motivations; and it should equally and aggressively protect all Americans regardless of perceived race, political affiliations, or motivations."

That agent urged FBI leaders "to identify viable exit options for FBI personnel who no longer feel it is legally or morally acceptable to support a federal law enforcement and intelligence agency motivated by political bias."

One agent suggested the problem extended beyond the bureau to D.C. U.S. Attorney's office, indicating a more widespread problem with political bias.

"Currently, the US Attorneys office is dictating what it is that gets investigated. This is a dangerous precedent because we can barely get them to prosecute investigations that clearly meet thresholds needed for Federal prosecutions," the agent wrote. "However, their willingness to conduct a search warrant on someone's life for a misdemeanor seems ridiculous. It is unreasonable for the FBI to conduct investigations involving misdemeanor violations at a federal level... it is not our role."

Many of the agents' feedback focused on the Washington Field Office and its culture. "WFO is a hopelessly broken office that's more concerned about wearing masks and recruiting preferred racial/sexual groups than catching actual bad guys," one worker wrote.

...

Wray, Patel's predecessor, steadfastly refused to tell Congress how many if any agents went to the Capitol that day. And a prior DOJ Inspector General Report did not divulge the number, referring only to a SWAT team the bureau sent into the Capitol and having more than two dozen informants in the crowd.

The existence of mass FBI agents at the Capitol on Jan. 6 could also be a problem in many of the cases that were subsequently brought in court. If agents were witnesses at the Capitol and did not disclose it in the subsequent affidavits during prosecutions it could create grounds for defendants to appeal.

The document also reveals for the first time that there were widespread concerns for years inside the bureau -- sentiments that boiled over after the FBI began sending SWAT teams to arrest Jan. 6 participants on misdemeanor charges -- that the FBI had become biased in favor of liberals and against conservatives.

The leftwing antifa crusader Wray denied any wokeness:

"I have found almost invariably, the people screaming the loudest about the politicization of the FBI are themselves the most political, and more often than not, making claims of politicization to advance their own views or goals, and they often don't know the facts or are choosing to ignore them," Wray added in an episode of the podcast "FBI Retired Case File Review" that aired the same year.

But frontline agents repeatedly raised issues of liberal bias and wokeness in their after-action assessments. The words "politics" or "bias" were mentioned more than a dozen times in responses, and similar sentiments scores of times in the 50 pages.

"Our response to the Capitol Riot reeks of political bias," one wrote.

Another added: "I wonder if our biases affected our preparedness."

A third suggested the agents and analysts had become engrossed in the main business of Washington -- politics -- rather than crime fighting and blamed the bureau's leadership for the slide.

"We have been used as pawns in a political war, and FBI leadership fell into the trap and has allowed it to happen," that employee wrote. "We are supposed to call balls and strikes, regardless of political pressure, now we can't even be trusted to be on the field," another agent commented."

Happy Friday!