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And that the new leadership he installed seized direct control over deploying the National Guard that day. And that deployment was delayed for hours.
The main takeaway seems to be that two top Pentagon officials, General Charles Flynn—who happens to be the brother of Trumpist fanatic Mike Flynn, though Matthews' memo does not seem to cast aspersions on this front—and Lieutenant General Walter Piatt, opposed deploying the Guard on conference calls that afternoon. That included a 2:30 p.m. call in which then-Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund "pleaded" for the National Guard to be deployed in order to aid his officers under attack. In Matthews' telling, both Flynn and Piatt said on the call that they opposed the move because "the optics of having uniformed military personnel deployed to the U.S. Capitol would not be good."
These "optics" were not a concern during the George Floyd protests the previous summer, when the Guard was frequently deployed alongside police. It's absurd on its face. What worse "optics" are there in a democracy than people storming your seat of government in pursuit of elected officials, hoping to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power? "Optics" has been the party line throughout, but there's reason to believe this is all a sideshow. Check out what else Politico found.
In addition to Matthews’ memo, POLITICO also obtained a document produced by a D.C. Guard official and dated Jan. 7 that lays out a timeline of Jan. 6. The D.C. Guard timeline, a separate document whose author took notes during the call, also said that Piatt and Flynn at 2:37 p.m. “recommended for DC Guard to standby,” rather than immediately deploying to the Capitol during the riot.
Four minutes later, according to that Guard timeline, Flynn again “advised D.C. National Guard to standby until the request has been routed” to then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy and then-acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller.
The request had to be sent up the food chain to Miller because on January 4, Miller issued a memo in which he ordered that the D.C. National Guard could not be deployed without his personal authorization. "At all times, the DCNG will remain under the operational and administrative command and control of the Commanding General of the DCNG, who reports to the Secretary of Defense through the Secretary of the Army." Matthews, the memo author, also alleges in his memo that the Secretary of the Army, Ryan McCarthy, was "incommunicado or unreachable for most of the afternoon." That is, during an attack on the United States Capitol.
And here is where we arrive at another detail that seems to have been all-too-often written out of the piece. In the days between the election and January 6, President Trump purged the top leadership of the Pentagon, including Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. He replaced those officials with unhinged loyalists like Anthony Tata, who'd called President Obama a "terrorist leader" and missed out on a Pentagon position earlier on because he wouldn't have survived a Senate confirmation process. He was placed in a job that didn't require Senate sign-off until the transition period, when Trump made Tata the acting undersecretary for policy, the third most powerful official at the Department of Defense. A former aide to Trump ally Devin Nunes, Kashyap Patel, was made chief of staff to the Secretary of Defense. McCarthy's nomination for Army Secretary was confirmed by the Senate in September 2019, according to regular order. But on November 9, 2020, two days after it was confirmed he'd lost the election, Trump made Chris Miller the acting Secretary of Defense—the same Chris Miller who took direct control of the D.C. National Guard for the discrete period of January 5th and 6th. And then the National Guard was not deployed for hours the latter afternoon, as a mob battered down the doors of the national legislature in an attempt to stop or delay Congress from confirming that Miller's boss would soon leave office.
Because all the while that Trump was purging the senior levels of the security services, he was yelling that the election had been stolen from him and the result was illegitimate. He drew his superfans to Washington to disrupt the certification of that election result. And the security services were slow to respond to that attack. Oh, and here's a line in a USA Today report on Trump's Pentagon purge, published on November 10, 2020: "White House officials said Trump wanted his own team at the Pentagon should he prevail with his legal challenges to the balloting." What? So Trump connected his purge with his attempts to overturn the election? And he was saying this to aides in the White House, and they told USA Today? Who are these staffers? They seem like people the January 6 committee ought to speak with under oath.
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