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Tag: national guard
Pentagon Officials Feared Trump Would Order U.S. Troops To Enforce Coup

Pentagon Officials Feared Trump Would Order U.S. Troops To Enforce Coup

During its final January 6 hearing Monday, the House Select Committee found that leading up to the insurrection, Department of Defense officials worried that Donald Trump would impose an ‘illegal order’ on U.S. troops to support his attempted coup, HuffPost reports.

“The select committee recognizes that some at the [Defense] department had genuine concerns, counseling caution, that President Trump might give an illegal order to use the military in support of his efforts to overturn the election,” the committee stated in the 161-page executive summary of the report.

The committee did not find any evidence that the Department of Defense supported Trump’s coup attempt in any way. However, the report says “President Trump had authority and responsibility to direct deployment of the National Guard in the District of Columbia, but never gave any order to deploy the National Guard on January 6th or on any other day.”

The report continues, “Nor did he instruct any federal law enforcement agency to assist. Because the authority to deploy the National Guard had been delegated to the Department of Defense, the secretary of defense could, and ultimately did deploy the Guard.”

Trump has blamed Nancy Pelosi for not calling on troops to immediately intervene.

HuffPost reports that the executive summary of the report also includes an explanation of the committee’s “recommendations of criminal prosecution against Trump and several of his allies on charges that include making false statements, obstructing an official proceeding and seditious conspiracy.”

The committee wrote, “The underlying and fundamental feature of that planning was the effort to get one man, Vice President Mike Pence, to assert and then exercise unprecedented and lawless powers to unilaterally alter the actual election outcome on January 6.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Trump Never Issued Order Deploying National Guard To Defend Capitol

Trump Never Issued Order Deploying National Guard To Defend Capitol

A former top Defense Department official has taken a sledgehammer to one of the biggest lies disseminated by Donald Trump and his allies in the aftermath of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol as they sought to deflect blame for the riot onto Democrats.

Chris Miller, who served as acting defense secretary, told the House Select Committee on January 6 that the former president had never issued a formal directive to deploy 10,000 National Guard troops to secure the Capitol.

The select committee released taped testimony Tuesday evening on Twitter -- and slammed Trump for perpetuating a lie to dodge responsibility for a deadly attack he incited.

“To remove any doubt: Not only did Donald Trump fail to contact his Secretary of Defense on January 6th (as shown in our hearing), Trump also failed to give any order prior to January 6 to deploy the military to protect the Capitol,” the select committee stated in its post.

In the video, investigators questioned Miller on an assertion former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows made on Fox News last February. Meadows said the Defense Secretary had asked “as many as 10,000 National Guard troops” to be “on the ready.”

“Not from my perspective,” Miller replied. "I was never given any direction or order or knew of any plans of that nature," he added. "There was no direct, there was no order from the President," Miller later said in the video.

The video went viral, garnering over one million views since it was posted on Tuesday.

The lie at issue was first uttered one month after the Capitol attack by Meadows, an indefatigable Trumplican, who sought to shift the blame onto House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democrats in some form for the attack Trump incited.

“As many as 10,000 National Guard troops were told to be on the ready by the secretary of defense. That was a direct order from President Trump,” Meadows said on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures last February.

Trump echoed the lie in an interview with Fox News later that month. “I definitely gave the number of 10,000 National Guardsmen and [said] ‘I think you should have 10,000 of the National Guard ready,’” Trump said. “

“They took that number. From what I understand, they gave it to the people at the Capitol, which is controlled by [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi. And I heard they rejected it because they didn’t think it would look good,” the former President added.

However, Miller rejected this claim in his testimony. “Obviously, we had plans for activating more folks, but that was not anything more than contingency planning,” the ex-Defense Secretary said. “There was no official message traffic or anything of that nature.”

Miller’s answers echo the reporting of a Vanity Fair journalist who chronicled his experiences tailing the Defense Secretary and his top allies in the period leading up to the insurrection.

However, Fox News hosts, denizens of a world untethered by the truth, and Republican lawmakers — including those who blamed Trump for the insurrection but voted not to convict him for it — have continued to peddle the lie.

“The American people deserve to know the truth that Nancy Pelosi bears responsibility as speaker of the House for the tragedy that occurred on January 6,” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), the party’s No. 3 leader, said last July.

The audacious effort to rewrite the reality of the worst Capitol attack in history — which resulted in four deaths and nearly 900 criminal charges — has been debunked multiple times. Still, prominent Republicans and Trump have continued to tout the false tally to downplay the gravity of the attack.

National Guard January 6th

Why Top Defense Officials Held Back National Guard On January 6

Almost a year after that the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building, the events of that day continues to inspire a great deal of analysis and discussion — including the fact that the National Guard didn’t get to the Capitol sooner when it was under attack. Writers Ryan Goodman and Justin Hendrix, in an article published by Just Security this week, argue that the National Guard was “restrained” by the Pentagon because of fears that then-President Donald Trump would “invoke the Insurrection Act.”

One of the most vexing 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,” Goodman and Hendrix explain. “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.”

Christopher Miller, who was serving as acting secretary of defense on January 6, told the U.S. Defense Department Inspector General’s office he feared that “if we put U.S. military personnel on the Capitol, I would have created the greatest constitutional crisis probably since the Civil War.”

Miller, Goodman and Hendrix note, “does not specify who held the fears that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act.” They also point out that Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and former Secretary of State Mike 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’s Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker reported.”

Goodman and Hendrix write, “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 January 6.”

In other words, their report suggests that the National Guard may have failed to adequately protect Congress because top military officials feared Trump could turn around and use the troops to undermine the Constitution itself. Presumably, the January 6 select committee is examining this and other lines of inquiry in their largely behind-the-scenes investigation.

Article reprinted with permission from Alternet

Phil Waldron

The Plot Against Democracy, In A Sickening Slide Show

It is easy to understand why Mark Meadows fears testifying before the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack about his role in former President Donald Trump's attempted coup against the United States. The former White House chief of staff played a central role in that seditious conspiracy. Would he perjure himself to protect Trump?

Unfortunately for Meadows, who clearly isn't the brightest bulb, he surrendered a truckload of evidence implicating himself and others in the plot before he decided suddenly to stop cooperating with the select committee. After incriminating himself, perhaps he'll take the Fifth. Too late.

Even before the committee subpoenaed Meadows, copious evidence of his participation in Trump's plot had emerged, — notably his fraudulent efforts to alter the election outcome in Georgia, where, along with Trump, he personally sought to coerce the state's lead elections investigator and pressured the secretary of state to "find" an additional 11,780 Trump votes.

What they tried to do in Georgia, however, was only a single episode in a much broader set of schemes, now disclosed in a 34-page PowerPoint document that Meadows turned over to the committee. That presentation, heavily decorated with cartoonish "Trump Wins!" graphics, outlines the bogus conspiracy theories advanced after the election by Trump lawyers Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell: for example, that the Chinese Communist Party, through voting machine firms it supposedly controlled, manipulated electronic ballots to ensure a victory for its "ally" President Joe Biden.

No shred of proof exists to support any of these fevered fantasies, nor for the far-fetched legal corollary theories that Giuliani, Powell and other Trump lawyers promoted in courts around the country. They were shot down by judges, everywhere, and both Powell and Giuliani face bar disciplinary action for those ethical offenses, as well as lawsuits filed by the voting-machine firms they smeared. Worse, Meadows and Trump had been informed by Attorney General William Barr that there was no evidence of significant fraud in the election. Can Meadows be certain Barr hasn't already testified to the committee about what he did?

Every citizen who cherishes democracy should read those PowerPoint slides, which illustrate how close we came to losing everything that "makes America great." The presentation confirms the elements of the conspiracy known already and reveals even more sinister aspects that involved the potential use of military force in a planned coup.

Meadows says he received the memo from outside the White House -- presumably via a retired military officer and "information warfare" specialist named Phil Waldron, who apparently met and spoke repeatedly with the then-chief of staff, briefed other top Republicans on Capitol Hill, and advised Giuliani. The memo's justifications and proposals to overthrow the election were reflected in real events that occurred, notably the efforts to suborn then-Vice President Mike Pence.

Indeed, the presentation outlines how Pence was expected to exceed his ceremonial role on January 6 by rejecting electoral votes from states where "fraud occurred," thereby awarding a false victory to Trump. Alternatively, Pence would delay the election certification to permit a "vetting and subsequent counting" of paper ballots only after authorities could "weed out" allegedly "counterfeit" votes, both electronic and paper.

The PowerPoint memo describes the specifics of the military coup advocated by Powell and her former client Mike Flynn, the disgraced national security adviser, pardoned by Trump for his corruption. The document states: "A Trusted Lead Counter will be appointed with authority from POTUS to direct the actions of select federalized National Guard units and support from (Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security) and other US government agencies as needed to complete a recount of the legal paper ballots for the federal elections in all 50 states."

Marshalls would seize the voting machines and ballots from state and local governments and commence a militarized recount under Trump's control. This would all occur within five to 10 days after January 6 — and would, at least in the absurd imagination of the PowerPoint's authors, allow "any US citizen" to "view them and count the ballots themselves." (Nobody seems to have considered how long it would take for anyone watching this spectacle to actually count the 159 million votes cast by eligible voters in 2020, although Trump plainly aimed to disqualify most of them.)

About this plan we need to know much more, which is why the select committee aims to prosecute Meadows and any other conspirators who resist testifying for contempt. Whatever privilege he seeks to claim, the former chief of staff voided that by giving this document and many others to the committee as well as publishing a memoir. He is still withholding thousands of pages of text messages and other evidence from the committee.

More importantly, Meadows undoubtedly knows more about who devised these schemes, who was supposed to execute them — and whether anyone presented them to Trump, for whom a slide presentation was undoubtedly the only means to command his attention for a few dozen pages.

The plot to overturn the 2020 election, in all its dimensions, represents the most serious transgression against the United States since the Civil War. That enormous crime must be fully exposed and its perpetrators prosecuted if the rule of law is to have any meaning.