WASHINGTON, D.C. –  U.S. Senator Angus King (I-Maine) today stressed the urgent need for the United States Capitol Police (USCP) to be “thinking the unthinkable” on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the Capitol insurrection, and improve their efforts to plan for future threats. King, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, pressed USCP Chief Tom Manger to ensure there is adequate communication, coordination, and intelligence sharing between the USCP and other federal law enforcement agencies. Senator King’s questioning came during a Senate Committee on Rules and Administration oversight hearing focused on the work of the U.S. Capitol Police during and since the January 6th attack.

“It seems to me that one of the things we learned on January 6th is that there is a lack of preplanning, in other words a lack of imagination. We have to have people thinking the unthinkable and saying: ‘ok what happens if… what do we do?’ I hope that is the case,” said Senator King. “Do you feel we have adequate communication and coordination with other agencies that might be important, either from an intelligence point of view such as the FBI or the other intelligence agencies, or with law enforcement [such as] the D.C. Metropolitan Police and National Guard? Are we working on pre-existing coordination and communication plans so that we do not have to make it up on the fly in the case of an emergency?”

“Yes, we are. In fact, it has become a part of our blueprint that we use in terms of our preplanning for these events – to reach out to those partner agencies and ensure that we are sharing information, that if we believe that we will need their help that we plan for that well ahead of time,” replied USCP Chief Manger. “We end up doing tabletop exercises and the getting the commanders to show where we need the folks deployed and what responsibilities that we are going to give to them. So absolutely that is part of our planning process now.”

“I hope that extends to the intelligence side as well,” Senator King concluded. “You mentioned you are developing some of your own intelligence capabilities, we have enormous intelligence capabilities throughout the federal government, but my concern is that we still tend to have silos – they are excellent silos but they are still silos. I hope that the coordination includes intelligence.”

On the day of the January 6th attack, Senator King condemned the violent insurrection at the Capitol, and called for all of his colleagues to “speak the clear and honest facts” and no longer enable President Trump’s attempts to undermine faith in America’s elections. Days before the attack, he called efforts by Congressional leaders to spread President Trump’s dangerous disinformation “one of the most serious assaults upon our country’s democratic system in American history”.

Since the insurrection, through his roles on the Senate’s Rules and Administration Committee, the Intelligence Committee, and the Armed Services Committee, Senator King has pushed for accountability and improvements from U.S. Capitol and military leadership. In a hearing just over a month after January 6th, King questioned former and current top law enforcement officials on their failures. A few weeks later, he questioned National Guard leadership on the specific failures that led to the U.S. Capitol Police being left without the backup of the D.C. National Guard for 3 hours and 19 minutes. Last month, he called the lack of preparation for January 6th a “failure of imagination” and urged steps to better predict and develop responses to worst-case scenarios.