If the FBI knew weeks and months ahead of time about the planned violence that was to unfold at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, why didn’t the bureau do anything to stop it?

It’s a great question. And the increasingly unavoidable answer is that the bureau wanted to tattoo this awful episode to Donald Trump and those who supported him as president.

If anyone out there has another explanation for the FBI’s bizarre inaction, we’re all ears. But as for whether the bureau knew in advance, that matter is no longer open to dispute. As The New York Times — of all sources — finally reports:

An F.B.I. informant who was embedded for months in the inner circle of Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, is likely to testify as a defense witness at the seditious conspiracy trial of Mr. Rhodes in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The informant, Greg McWhirter, served as the Oath Keepers’ vice president but was secretly reporting to the F.B.I. about the group’s activities in the weeks and months leading up to the Capitol attack, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Better last than never, we suppose. According to recent court filings, the FBI had up to eight informants embedded within the Proud Boys in the months leading up to the January 6 riot.

The Times also reports that during an impromptu hearing last Tuesday morning during the Oath Keepers’ trial, “Lawyers said that Mr. McWhirter had been taken off a plane while traveling to Washington to testify after suffering a heart attack.” That unfortunate event kept McWhirter from taking the stand as a defense witness, and it’s unclear when he might be able to do so. We suspect the defense wishes him a speedy recovery.

We smelled a January 6 rat more than a year ago. That was when we wrote about the mysterious Ray Epps, who kept telling crowds in advance of the riot, “We need to go in to the Capitol!” Since then, we’ve been following the dogged reporting of Julie Kelly, who literally wrote the book on how the Democrats weaponized the J6 riot against Donald Trump and his supporters. As we wrote back in February:

The Capitol violence had already begun before Trump’s speech had ended. How could that be? Weren’t these rabble-rousers supposed to be Trump supporters? Weren’t they supposed to be heeding the president’s call to march to the Capitol and “peacefully and patriotically” make their voices heard? Instead, by the time those who had listened to Trump’s speech had made the walk to the Capitol, “a lot of whoever the instigators were, the provocateurs, the undercover agents, the informants, the rabble-rousers, they had already started a lot of the chaos that we saw,” Kelly said. “So people who were coming from Trump’s speech really didn’t know what was going on.”

The FBI has pretty much taken the Fifth ever since. As Kelly was prompted to ask, “If January 6 was so bad, why do they have to lie about it?”

Just how eager was the FBI to let the looming J6 riot play itself out? As Kelly reports, “Another Oath Keeper turned informant called the FBI tip line in November 2020 over fears the group planned to go ‘to war with the United States government,’ but investigators didn’t contact him until March 2021.”

This sounds like a serious threat, no? How odd, then, that at the same time the FBI was failing to act on credible information regarding plots of violence on January 6, that very same FBI was working with its informants and taking preemptive action to arrest the plotters in the “kidnapping” case against Michigan Democrat Governor Gretchen Whitmer — even though the plotters hadn’t yet sprung into action.

In one case, the FBI acts preemptively. In another case, it didn’t. Why?

Now that Republicans have officially won back the House of Representatives, the FBI might soon undergo some much-needed congressional oversight. And we might soon begin to get some long-overdue answers about the FBI’s rank politicization.