Did the FBI have 274 plainclothes agents undercover and embedded in January 6 crowds at the US Capitol? No, that's not true: Many of 274 FBI agents documented in a report were part of the law enforcement response after the crowd stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The agents were not undercover nor were they embedded in the crowd. The article making the claim appears to be referencing a report showing FBI agents were responding to the crowds at the Capitol and reports of explosives being found, not that they were in the crowd before the riots began. The words "plainclothes" and "undercover" do not appear in the report.
The claim appeared in a September 25, 2025 article published on The Blaze website titled "FBI had 274 plainclothes agents embedded in Jan. 6 crowds, congressional source says," (archived here) which opened:
Disclosure by the FBI to Congress answers a long-simmering question but does not reveal what the agents did that day.
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FBI had 275 plainclothes agents embedded in Jan. 6 crowds, congressional source says | Blaze Media
The article opened:
The FBI has acknowledged it had 274 plainclothes agents in the massive crowds on Jan. 6, 2021, more than four and a half years after questions were first raised about the level of FBI involvement that day, Blaze News has learned.
The FBI has not acknowledged it had undercover officers embedded in the crowd at the Capitol that day. The Blaze article appears to be using the 274 number cited in an article published on Just the News website (archived here) titled, "FBI Bombshell: 274 agents sent to Capitol for J6, many later complained they were political 'pawns.'" The article opens:
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.
That article claims to have obtained a 50-page after-action report (archived here) that was given to the House Oversight Committee regarding the FBI response to the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The words "plainclothes" and "undercover" do not appear anywhere in the document.
Page 46 in the report is where the 274 agents are listed. The page does not say that the agents were undercover nor that they were embedded in the crowd but that they "responded" to the incident listed as the "1/6 Incident." It says:
The number includes agents that responded to the capital grounds as well as inside the capital, the pipe bombs, and the red truck that was believed to contain explosive devices as well as CDC/ADCS
Here is a screenshot from the report in the article:
(Source: screen of Just the News website by Lead Stories.)
The Blaze article notes that in the Department of Justice report (archived here) titled, "A Review of the Federal Bureau of Investigations Handling of Its Confidential Human Sources and Intelligence Collection Efforts in the Lead Up to the January 6, 2021 Electoral Certification," released in December 2024, the FBI denies having any undercover employees in the protest crowds or at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021:
"We found no evidence in the materials we reviewed or the testimony we received showing or suggesting that the FBI had undercover employees in the various protest crowds, or at the Capitol, on January 6," the DOJ OIG said in an 88-page report released in December 2024.
That statement is made in the report summary on page 8 and on page 50 and reads, "We found no evidence in the materials we reviewed or the testimony we received showing or suggesting that the FBI had undercover employees in the various protest crowds, or at the Capitol, on January 6,":
X. The FBI Did Not Have Any Undercover Employees at the Ellipse, on the National Mall, or at the Capitol on January 6.
We found no evidence in the materials we reviewed or the testimony we received showing or suggesting that the FBI had undercover employees in the various protest crowds, or at the Capitol, on January 6. D'Antuono and the WFO CTD ASAC noted that FBI policy does not permit the FBI to have undercover employees in crowds at First Amendment-protected events absent some investigative authority, and the WFO CTD ASAC told the OIG that he denied a request from an FBI office to have an undercover employee engage in investigative activity on January 6. We found that a field office whose DT subject was traveling to DC for January 6 had agents travel to the Capital Region to conduct surveillance of the subject, but the agents did not come into DC.
Had the FBI acknowledged the agency had 274 undercover agents or plainclothes agents embedded in the crowd during January 6, 2021, the admission would have dominated the news. A Google search (archived here) found no actual news reports that the FBI had made any such acknowledgement.
Similarly, a search of the Yahoo! News index of partner news sites and news services (archived here) showed no legitimate news reports that the FBI acknowledged it had 274 undercover agents at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
