Secret Service canine teams on the morning of January 6, 2021, failed to detect a pipe bomb placed outside the Democratic National Committee building in Washington, D.C., ahead of then–vice president-elect Kamala Harris’s visit, according to a new watchdog report.
An unidentified person placed the pipe bomb outside the building on the night of January 5, 20 feet from where Harris would later enter, in a bush that was not included in the Secret Service’s security sweeps, the Department of Homeland Security’s office of the inspector general (OIG) said in a report released last week.
The pipe bomb was “viable” and could have wounded or killed innocent people had it gone off, the report states.
The apparent failure by the Secret Service to detect the bomb is notable, given the scrutiny the agency is facing for the security failures leading up to the assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump last month during a campaign rally in Butler, Pa.
Between 8:30 and 10:30 a.m. on the morning of January 6, two Secret Service canine teams swept the DNC building to prepare for Harris’s visit. Although the site agent for the DNC visit did not order the canine teams to sweep the exterior, one of the teams swept the exterior, and the other swept the interior. The exterior team’s check included the garage-entrance ramp to the building and other areas near the garage entrance, but not the bush where the bomb was hidden.
The Homeland Security OIG report noted that other Secret Service officials said the bomb’s location should have been part of the sweep because of its proximity to the garage. Harris’s motorcade passed the bomb at 11:25 a.m., entering the building through the garage ramp.
The failure to detect the bomb appears to have been due to logistical and coordination problems surrounding Harris’s visit to the DNC building, the report notes.
The Secret Service did not request that a site coordinator be present for Harris’s visit, meaning the canine teams did not have instructions on where to search outside the building. The site agent was responsible for supervising the canine teams because there was no site coordinator. An explosives team was not present to support the canine teams’ searches in and around the building, which was a surprise to the site agent, according to the report.
An operations unit within the Secret Service’s vice-presidential protective division requested the canine support but not an explosives team. The agent who made the request claimed it did not include the explosives team because of a 72-hour advance-notice requirement; the OIG did not find evidence for such a requirement.
At 1:05 p.m. two plainclothes Capitol Police agents discovered the bomb and took a picture of it during a patrol of the area after police found a pipe bomb at the Republican National Committee building. Capitol Police officers notified the Secret Service of the pipe bomb’s existence outside the DNC building, and subsequently the Secret Service agents confirmed its location. Then, Harris’s detail was notified of the bomb, and she was safely evacuated from the building after being inside for nearly two hours.
After the event, the Secret Service failed to catalogue it as an “unusual protective event,” a designation for incidents that disrupt normal Secret Service activities. The designation requires agents to submit reports on the incident and an after-action memo containing additional details.
A year after the failure to detect the pipe bomb, the Secret Service updated its explosives-detection coordination policy to ensure that a failure of that magnitude does not happen again.
The Homeland Security inspector general’s office released a report last week extensively detailing the Secret Service’s preparation for January 6 events in Washington and response when the events at the Capitol became much more violent than anticipated. The report is based on more than 100 interviews with Secret Service personnel involved with the preparation and with the response to the Capitol riot, 183,000 relevant emails and attachments, and Secret Service video, Capitol Police footage, and video from other cameras.
Much of the report focuses on how the Secret Service prepared for January 6 and responded when the pro-Trump rally descended into mob violence and a riot inside the Capitol building. Secret Service agents protected then–vice president Mike Pence and lawmakers from the rioters after Capitol Police struggled to hold off the mob without receiving backup.
In the process of creating the report, the DHS inspector general’s office was delayed seven months by the Secret Service’s initial refusal to fully comply with requests for documents. Moreover, the Secret Service had deleted thousands of relevant text messages during a software update to its agents’ and employees’ phones that took place soon after the Capitol riot unfolded. The Secret Service insisted the update was planned ahead of time.
The Secret Service agreed with four of the six recommendations from the OIG’s report to improve its coordination, personnel requests, canine sweeps, and after-action reviews.