During hearings last week, the former head of the Capitol police, as well as the former Sergeant of the Senate House, who all resigned after the riot, accused law enforcement agencies of proving bad intelligence and blamed the Department of Defense. that he does not respond quickly enough to their requests for help.
But military leaders insisted there was no delay in their end and that it took time to respond to what they said was a vague but urgent request from city officials and the Capitol police. and to organize.
In talks over the past few weeks, defense officials have reiterated that the National Guard is not a first response unit that can send armed troops into a hostile situation with minimal planning. There is also a sense of frustration and annoyance among some former officials that police in the Capitol and others in Washington, DC, expected Guardsmen to show up immediately.
Pentagon officials repeatedly offered more national guards before January 6 and were turned down, also the day before the riot. Meanwhile, some Department of Defense officials questioned why the Secret Service and Park Police did not sound the alarm earlier in the day of the riot when they saw large crowds gather and make their way to the Capitol.
McCarthy will not testify at the Senate hearing on Wednesday. Instead, DC National Guard commander General William Walker and Robert Salesses, a civilian official acting as assistant secretary of defense for the country’s defense and global security, are expected to testify.
Command Chain Confusion
At a joint hearing last Tuesday, the former Sergeant of Arms, the former Sergeant of the Arms, and Sund all said they needed help from the National Guard. But the three, although they blamed the Pentagon for delaying aid, did not agree when they knew they needed the help and seemed unaware of the process or the command chain for requesting and activating the National Guard.
Sund said he first noticed the need for more help on January 4, two days before the riot. But former Arms Sergeant Paul Irving said he did not interpret Sund’s call as a request, and that Sund, Irving and former Senate Sergeant Michael Stenger agree that intelligence does not support calling in more troops.
The final decision was to mobilize 340 soldiers from the DC National Guard, along with a rapid reaction force of 40 people and a team for chemically-biological hazardous materials. The guards had the specific task, agreed upon between the Pentagon, Washington officials and others, to assist with traffic control.
An important call
Sund told the trial last week that he had 125 national guards on standby from Walker, the commander of the DC National Guard.
‘If we need an answer, a quick answer, [Walker] could, what he called, plan them again and bring them to the armor, “Sund testified,” at what point we could get someone there to swear them in and try to get them to us as quickly as possible . “
But Walker did not have the authority to change the mission of the National Guard, nor could he activate Guards on his own.
Sund was apparently unaware of the process of activating the DC National Guard, which is run by the President, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Army. Because DC is not a state, the process does not go through the mayor’s office or the DC National Guard.
Sund said during his testimony last week that he reached out to Walker at the DC Guard at 1:49 p.m., only to learn that Walker could not activate the Guard on his own.
“I was very surprised at the amount of time and the setback I got when I made an urgent request for their systems,” Sund said.
Not a first response unit
In the weeks following the riots, defense officials returned to the goal of the Guard: it is not a first-response organization designed to quickly arm the streets with full riot gear, but a last resort in ‘ an emergency, and one that requires close coordination and specific tasks to deploy. Moving the guards from traffic control to safety support re-appointed the mission, part of a bureaucratic process that took time.
Defense officials acknowledged their DC counterparts, and also pointed to the failure of intelligence before the riot.
Officials in DC have already begun to improve the flow and sharing of information. Acting Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman, who replaced Sund after his resignation, said during the in-house hearing on Thursday that Capitol Police are now conducting ‘routine intelligence calls’ with the FBI and the National Capital Region Threat Intelligence Consortium . These intelligence updates are shared with Congress.
Pittman insisted that the Capitol police succeed in protecting their leaders and members of Congress. It was also a point that struck Sund, insisting that the failure to secure the building at the heart of American democracy lay elsewhere.
Ellie Kaufman of CNN contributed to this report.