One of the unanswered questions about January 6 is why the National Guard took more than three hours to arrive at the Capitol after D.C. authorities and Capitol Police called for immediate assistance.
Ryan Goodman and Justin Hendrix report a disturbing answer at Just Security. Crisis of Command: The Pentagon, The President, and January 6:
The Pentagon’s restraint in allowing the Guard to get to the Capitol was not simply a reflection of officials’ misgivings about the deployment of military force during the summer 2020 protests, nor was it simply a concern about “optics” of having military personnel at the Capitol. Instead, evidence is mounting that the most senior defense officials did not want to send troops to the Capitol because they harbored concerns that President Donald Trump might utilize the forces’ presence in an attempt to hold onto power.
According to a report released last month, Christopher Miller, who served as acting Secretary of the Defense on Jan. 6, told the Department’s inspector general that he feared “if we put U.S. military personnel on the Capitol, I would have created the greatest Constitutional crisis probably since the Civil War.” In congressional testimony, he said he was also cognizant of “fears that the President would invoke the Insurrection Act to politicize the military in an anti-democratic manner” and that “factored into my decisions regarding the appropriate and limited use of our Armed Forces to support civilian law enforcement during the Electoral College certification.”
Miller does not specify who held the fears that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act, and he wasn’t asked by Congress. However, it’s now clear that such concerns were shared by General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as former CIA Director and at the time Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Before Nov. 3, Milley and Pompeo confided in one another that they had a persistent worry Trump would try to use the military in an attempt to hold onto power if he lost the election, the Washington Post’sCarol Leonnig and Philip Rucker reported. “This military’s not going to be used,” Milley assured Pompeo.
After Trump issued a Dec. 19, 2020 call to action to his supporters to come to DC to protest the certification of the electoral college vote on Jan. 6 (“Be there, will be wild!”), “Milley told his staff that he believed Trump was stoking unrest, possibly in hopes of an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and call out the military,” and that he sought to stay ahead of any effort by the President to use the military in a bid to stay in office, Leonnig and Rucker write.
Milley, according to multiple reports, “feared it was Trump’s ‘Reichstag moment,’ in which, like Adolf Hitler in 1933, he would manufacture a crisis in order to swoop in and rescue the nation from it.”
The top officials’ fears were warranted: Donald Trump, his close aides and a segment of Republican political figures had openly discussed the possibility of invoking the Insurrection Act or using the military to prevent the transfer of power on the basis of false claims that the election was “stolen.” But the Pentagon’s actions with respect to the National Guard suggest a scenario in which, on the basis of such concerns, a potentially profound crisis of command may have played out on Jan. 6.
Close observers of the events of Jan. 6 have mainly posited two reasons for the delay in mobilizing the Guard. The first explanation is one of bureaucratic failures or managerial weaknesses in the military’s procedures that day. A second explanation is that the military was deliberately serving Trump’s effort to interfere with the election by withholding assistance.
We identify a third explanation: that senior military officials constrained the mobilization and deployment of the National Guard to avoid injecting federal troops that could have been re-missioned by the President to advance his attempt to hold onto power.
With respect to planning for Jan. 6, the publicly available evidence to date very strongly suggests that the senior defense officials’ concerns led them to impose unprecedented constraints on the authorizations and substantive conditions for use of the Guard – Miller admitted as much. Those constraints help explain the substantial delay in sending a first group of Guardsmen to the Capitol. What’s more, the evidence also indicates that the same concerns potentially explain why the Pentagon did not approve deployment of the National Guard in sufficient time – and, indeed, authorized the deployment only after President Trump eventually made a public announcement (at 4:17 pm) that he was not in favor of continued occupation of the Capitol.
This third scenario, if true, raises fundamental constitutional questions about the transfer of power:
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- Under what conditions might the U.S. military try to subvert the will of the President (even if one ethically agrees with the difficult choices the Pentagon made before and on Jan. 6)?
- What information did senior officials have concerning President Trump’s potential use of the military to hold onto power and who else did they believe was participating in such a scheme?
In reply to a request for comment, a Defense Department spokesman stated, “The Department has been transparent with regard to the planning and execution timeline for its response to the events of Jan 6,” and pointed to “the complete timeline” published on Jan. 8. “Given that the events leading up to and including the incident at the Capitol are still under investigation by Congress, it is not appropriate for the Department to comment further at this time,” he added.
What was at stake was the prospect of an illegal order from the President and thwarting a potential scheme to undermine the peaceful transfer of power. Ultimately, the outcome of the Pentagon’s decisions may have been best for the nation, even if it extended the period of time during which Congress was in harm’s way.
Ryan Goodman and Justin Hendrix then go into a detailed analysis from the Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, D.C. in June 2020 to the violent MAGA/QAnon seditious insurrection on January 6, and the subsequent DoD Inspector General reports.
They conclude:
It is important for many reasons to get to the truth of what happened inside the Department of Defense in the runup to and on Jan. 6. One reason is to ensure accountability of those most responsible for the attempt to interfere with the transfer of power.
In the absence of such clarity, Trump recently highlighted his having told Miller to prepare 10,000 troops for Jan. 6 – as though such an account would be exculpatory for the former president. In his “History Tour” with conservative media personality Bill O’Reilly earlier this month, Trump said, “I asked the Secretary of Defense, I said, I think you should recommend to Nancy Pelosi and to Congress, because they are the ones that control it, I would like to recommend 10,000 National Guardsmen.” (The side reference to Pelosi has been well and repeatedly debunked.) “That undercuts the entire premise that Donald Trump instigated the Capitol attacks,” said O’Reilly in a subsequent video production.
It would be a cruel and strange twist if the mystery about actions taken by senior Pentagon officials to avoid Trump’s use of the military in his bid to hang onto power became a cornerstone of Trump’s defense for his actions that day.
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