The Army was initially reluctant to grant the D.C. city government’s request to deploy the National Guard in anticipation of the pro-Trump rally that took place hours before the deadly Capitol insurrection, according to a previously undisclosed internal draft memo obtained by the Washington Post.
A lot of balls dropped that day.
The story of exactly how the National Guard was kept out of doing anything before or through several hours of the Jan 6th insurrection will eventually come out. The fact that it’s slowly being dragged out, through minor information releases like this, makes it appear that the reason why there was such a failure is very damaging to how the military is supposed to offer its support. It wouldn’t be surprising to learn that there was major political interference in military operations…having the military turn to support a white supremacist mob through inaction is a very, very bad look.
We need to know why it happened, and how to make sure it will never happen again. It’s a very short step from the military being abused by not taking action to defend an attack on Congress to the military actively supporting an attack on Congress.
The “not unless 100K show up” makes this look a helluva lot worse than just balls dropping. That looks like they just threw out a number they knew would be impossible to achieve, so they’d get a total block on deployments.
Let alone LTG Flynn, not even in the chain of command, weighing in during the insurrection against sending in troops.
“Would anybody have marched on the Capitol, and tried to overrun the Capitol, without the president’s speech?” Miller told VICE. “I think it’s pretty much definitive that wouldn’t have happened.”
I am pretty sure there were organized groups within the mob that used Trump’s speech as cover. They came prepared for violence.
Fake news. When will TPM do some real reporting and get to the bottom of a real conspiracy, like the pedophilia going on in pizza parlors involving the highest levels of government???
The question I have is why wasn’t intelligence being shared w/ the Pentagon that this wasn’t just a typical “march” requiring your basic crowd control and public safety measures, but a horde of thousands of radical, heavily-armed white nationalist militia-types bent on violently halting the Congressional certification of Biden’s election? Who knew what, and when did they know it?
The request at issue here was not made to protect the Capitol. It was made to supplement D.C.'s own crowd control personnel, and on that basis it seems reasonable for the Army to deny it. The larger problem is that nobody had requested National Guard to protect the Capitol from an expected assault on Congress by a large crowd of crazed Trump supporters determined to stop the Electoral College proceedings.
On the morning of January 6, I honestly didn’t think it was going to be a big deal just because I assumed the relevant authorities had recognized the threat and deployed personnel adequate to neutralize it. Boy, was I wrong about that.
Seems like it should have been the Governor of the State of Columbia’s call. Just throwing that out there.
“A lot of balls dropped that day”.
If you’re trying to set up an Eric Trump puberty joke I’m not going to fall for it. I’m better than that.
Yeah, the Proud Boy/militia set started moving towards the Capitol mid-way through Trump’s speech so they could be at the front of the coming assault. That was premeditated.
You have to take into account that the MAGA crowd is very law abiding and respect law-enforcement officers; had the protesters been a few hundred BLM or Antifas then they would have taken the threat serious and deployed a full division complete with armor and gunship support. The army mistake was they never though of the possibility of Antifas disguised as MAGAs storming the Capitol.
OT
I’m not, but you beat me to the post so nuts to you.
The day has been full of surprises…It would never had occurred to me the Kavanaugh had a free ride.
Given that warnings were literally in the Washington Post in the days leading up to it, and most of the fed agencies had told folks to work remotely if at all possible on the day itself due to the risks, it’s not like there was a lack of intelligence that there was something big and nasty planned.
The only questions really go back to the “why” of being unprepared. Simply that they thought that it was all talk and chatter and would fizzle out?
Or that some folks didn’t want there to be any real stopping of things before they could get started.
Starting to paint the picture that the latter is much more accurate.
This is odd, I cannot place ‘Ford’ in all this What Ford are you talking about?
The traditional questions in these investigations, (1) what did they know - something big and nasty planned, and (2) when did they know it - in the days leading up to it, have already been answered, so when does the fat lady begin to sing.
That they didn’t interview Ford or Barf was well-reported at the time, and it was also quite clear that a lot of potential witnesses had not been interviewed.
Not that I mind if Wray gets fired, but it’s not exactly news.
The FBI Director Wray was unaccounted for on January 6th…not even a phone call to the Capitol Police Chief to check in. Was Wray golfing with Trump?
Balls were NOT dropped…they knew exactly what they were doing!