The former assistant director of intelligence for the U.S. Capitol Police, who issued a stark warning about the threat of extremist violence days before the Jan. 6 attack, expects to be called to testify before a House subcommittee led by Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) that is focused on shifting blame away from former President Donald Trump.
Julie Farnam told Raw Story she expects “to get a subpoena any day now,” and anticipates that she will be called to testify behind closed doors before Republican members of the House Administration Oversight Subcommittee on June 21.
Farnam said she received an email from subcommittee staff today telling her to expect a subpoena following discussions with her lawyer about scheduling her deposition.
Farnam said she believes the subcommittee is compelling her to testify as a ploy to distract attention from Loudermilk’s actions in the lead-up to the attack.
Loudermilk led a group of would-be J6ers on a tour of the U.S. House buildings complex — including security checkpoints and the entrance to the tunnels leading to the Capitol — on Jan. 5, 2021. Loudermilk ignored requests from the now-decommissioned House Select January 6 Committee to explain why he gave the tour.
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“I think he does have some involvement in January 6th,” Farnam told Raw Story, “and these hearings are designed to distract from the truth.”
Farnam told Raw Story she expects to be deposed behind closed doors, but that she would prefer to testify publicly. She said she is working with her attorney to try to get her own court transcriber so she can keep a transcript of her testimony. She wants to publicly release the transcript.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they’re not having me testify publicly,” Farnam said. “They can take what I say and construe it however they want.”
Following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Farnam was promoted to acting director of intelligence for the Capitol Police, but resigned in June 2023. Farnam is currently running as a Democrat for a seat on the Arlington County Board in Virginia.
Mary Beth Burns, a spokesperson for the House Administration Oversight Subcommittee, which is chaired by Loudermilk, declined to comment when reached by Raw Story earlier today.
Loudermilk’s committee is relitigating Jan. 6 at a time when Trump faces multiple criminal charges, including indictments brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis that accuse the former president of conspiracy to subvert the 2020 election.
And it comes at a time when Trump, who is presently on trial in Manhattan for allegedly falsifying business records to cover up a sexual affair that could have damaged his 2016 presidential campaign, is again expected to be the Republican nominee for president.
Farnam has been an implicit target of the Loudermilk committee’s investigation for months.
An interim report released in March by the committee includes a three-page section rejecting any notion that Loudermilk’s tour was connected to the events of Jan. 6.
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Meanwhile, the report alleged that the Capitol Police’s intelligence division, under Farnam’s leadership, “failed to fully process and disseminate actionable intelligence which directly contributed to the overall security failures at the Capitol.”
The House Select January 6 Committee released video of the Loudermilk tour during the second year of its work. At the time, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), who chaired the January 6 committee, said in a public letter that some of the individuals in the tour group sponsored by Loudermilk were seen at the rally held by Trump at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021.
Thompson cited video showing one of the individuals on the tour. On Jan. 6, 2021, the man carried a sharpened flagpole and made threats against Democratic members of Congress, including then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Majority Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
“They got it surrounded,” the man can be heard saying in the video. “It’s all the way up there on the hill, and it’s all the way around, and they’re coming in, coming in like white on rice for Pelosi, Nadler, even you, AOC. We’re coming to take you out and pull you out by your hairs.”
A report issued by the Capitol Police intelligence division roughly two weeks before the attack, warned about a thread on a pro-Trump message board discussing “tunnels on US Capitol grounds used by members of Congress.” Among the user comments cited in the report, one wrote, “Maybe millions of protesters could simply block all the Dems from showing up to Congress. Block all the tunnel entrance [sic].”
The Capitol Police subsequently reviewed footage of Loudermilk’s tour, and Chief J. Thomas Manger appeared to clear the congressman of wrongdoing in a letter to former Rep. Rodney Davis (R-IL), then the ranking member of the House Administration Committee.
“We train our officers on being alert for people conducting surveillance or reconnaissance, and we do not consider any of the activities we observed as suspicious,” Manger wrote.
Farnam, who was serving as acting director of intelligence for the Capitol Police at the time, signaled she doesn’t share the chief’s assessment.
“I don’t buy his excuse for why,” Farnam told Raw Story. “Members of Congress very rarely give tours themselves. That was odd that he was giving a tour, and it’s less likely that a member would give a tour to people that they don’t know. The day that he gave the tour, there weren’t any tours being given. What was he doing and why was he doing it?"
Loudermilk’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
“He needs to be questioned,” Farnam told Raw Story. “He needs to be on record about what he was doing.”
The interim report issued by Loudermilk’s committee on March 11 took critical aim at an intelligence assessment written by Farnam on Jan. 3, 2021, three days before the attack on the Capitol.
Loudermilk’s report contends that “significant questions remain about the emphasis of actual intelligence” in Farnam’s assessment “and its distribution to [Capitol Police] prior to January 6.”
The committee has assigned a star role to former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, who testified in an open hearing last September that “no intel agencies or units sounded the alarm” despite having significant intelligence about threats against Congress.
“We were blindsided,” he said. “Intelligence failed operations.”
Farnam has vigorously disputed that claim.
Much of Sund’s testimony focused on his requests for National Guard assistance. The interim report dedicates 10 pages to resistance from the two sergeants at arms for Congress. Former House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving, who at the time reported to Pelosi, told Sund he was concerned about “optics,” according to the former chief.
Since at least July 2021, Republican lawmakers have been attempting to shift blame for the attack on the Capitol from Trump to Pelosi. The former House speaker has said through a spokesperson that she and her staff had no discussions with Irving about National Guard deployment prior to Jan. 6.
The interim report issued by Loudermilk’s committee deflects responsibility from Trump by painting the House Select January 6 Committee as “a political weapon with a singular focus on promoting the narrative that Trump was responsible for the violence on January 6.”
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Trump summoned his supporters to Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021, with a tweet that read, “Be there, will be wild.” During his speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, he told them to march down to the Capitol and “fight like hell” because if they didn’t, they “were not going to have a country anymore.” Once Trump learned the Capitol was under attack, it took him two hours and 56 minutes to tweet out a video telling the rioters to go home.
Loudermilk told the Christian nationalist podcaster Lance Wallnau that Trump has privately praised him as a “hero.” Loudermilk said Trump specifically praised him for “exposing all these lies” when the congressman joined him backstage at a rally in Georgia before the state’s primary in March.
Farnam said she expects Loudermilk’s committee to ask her about the intelligence she received concerning threats against the Capitol in the run-up to Jan. 6 and how it was distributed.
“I think it’s going to be related to the intel,” she said. “What did we have? They’re going to accuse me of not doing more.”
While the subcommittee is not commenting publicly on Farnam, her 2021 interview with the House Select January 6 Committee and recent comments to Raw Story provide a preview of what she is likely to tell the Republican lawmakers when she testifies next month.
As the lead author of an intelligence assessment issued on Jan. 3, Farnam noted that the finality of the Congress’ decision to certify the election during the joint session on Jan. 6 would likely raise the stakes for the protestors coming to Washington, D.C. that day.
“This sense of desperation and disappointment may lead to more of an incentive to become violent,” the assessment warned. “Unlike previous post-election protests, the targets of the pro-Trump supporters are not necessarily the counter-protestors, as they were previously, but, rather, Congress itself is the target on the 6th.”
Sean P. Gallagher, deputy chief of the protective services bureau, emailed a copy of the intelligence assessment to the chiefs at U.S. Capitol Police on Jan. 3 at 10:40 p.m., while noting that Farnam and her colleague John Donahue at the intelligence division would update commanders during a conference call the following day.
An email provided to Raw Story by Farnam shows that Sund replied at 11:18 p.m. on Jan. 3: “Copy thank you Sean.”
Despite evidence to the contrary, Sund testified before Loudermilk’s committee last September: “We now know that significant intelligence existed that individuals were plotting to storm the Capitol building, target lawmakers and discussing shooting officers. And yet no intel agencies or units sounded the alarm. We were blindsided. Intelligence failed operations.”
Farnam told the House Select January 6th Committee that during the Jan. 4, 2021 conference call, she conveyed the substance of the written assessment, and then added: “Stop the Steal has a propensity for attracting white supremacists, militia groups, groups like the Proud Boys. There are multiple social media posts saying that people are going to be coming armed, and it’s potentially a very dangerous situation.”
Farnam said that at the end of her presentation she received no questions.
Gallagher told the House Select January 6th Committee in January 2022 that he didn’t recall the “specifics” of Farnam’s presentation, but told the committee it was fair to say that her warning didn’t prompt the Capitol Police to make any operational changes.
Farnam told Raw Story she believes Yogananda Pittman, then assistant chief of protective and intelligence operations, briefed Sund on the conference call, but said there’s no paper trail to prove it.
Pittman could not be reached for comment for this story.
“Chief Sund did NOTHING with the intel — no ops plan, no distro to officers, no canceling leave, no staging equipment — that’s on him, not me,” Farnam wrote in an X post on May 23. “Also EVERYONE knew something was going to happen on #J6. It was planned in plain sight.”
Sund could not be reached for comment for this story.
Farnam said when she testifies before Loudermilk’s committee, she expects to be questioned about a romantic relationship she had with Lt. Shane Lamond, her intelligence counterpart at the DC Metropolitan Police Department around the time of Jan. 6.
Lamond was suspended by the police department in early 2022 and subsequently indicted by a federal grand jury for obstruction of justice for allegedly leaking sensitive information to Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio.
Tarrio, in turn, is currently serving a 22-year prison sentence for seditious conspiracy for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The relationship between Farnam and Lamond is detailed in Farnam’s book, Domestic Darkness: An Insider’s Account of the January 6 Insurrection and the Future of Right-Wing Extremism, which was recently released by IG Publishing. Farnam resigned from her position at the U.S. Capitol Police in June 2023, after the agency threatened legal action to prevent her from publishing and threatened to refer the matter to law enforcement.
Farnam told Raw Story she met Lamond at a holiday party in December 2020. They had planned to get together on Jan. 7, but wound up going on their first date after President Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021. The Capitol Police knew about the relationship, she said, adding that Lamond “never said anything that would make me think there was anything unlawful going on.”
The day Lamond was suspended from the Metropolitan Police Department, Farnam said she went to the FBI and turned over all of her emails with him.
Farnam said she expects that Loudermilk’s committee will use the relationship to try to undermine her credibility.
She said she doesn’t know if the Democratic members of the committee will be present for her interview.
Rep. Norma Torres (D-CA), the ranking member, and Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-WA), the only other Democrat on the panel, could not be reached for comment.
Although she plans to cooperate with the committee, Farnam said she intends to “answer them as narrowly as possible.”
“I don’t want to speak to them,” she said. “I’m being forced to speak to them. I’m not going to offer any more information than the specific answer to the question.”
