New risk to Capitol
Police guarding it down by 400 officers
As the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol approaches, the police force charged with protecting the seat of American democracy is severely understaffed, its chief warned Sunday.
The Capitol Police force was hit with a double whammy of attrition and no training classes when the pandemic forced the national federal law enforcement training academy to shut down for 10 months, Chief Thomas Manger told “Fox News Sunday.”
“We’re now really about 400 officers short of where we need to be, and that’s a pretty critical issue for us,” Manger said.
The force is turning to private contractors to bolster security, he said.
He also noted that President
Biden signed a law aimed at expediting the process for Capitol Police to request backup from the National Guard in the event of an emergency.
That’s “crucial if you have a situation like we had on Jan. 6, where you have an emergency situation and you need to be able to request those resources and get them as quickly as possible,” Manger said.
Last year, former President Donald Trump incited throngs of crazed supporters to riot inside the Capitol, where lawmakers were meeting to certify the 2020 presidential election results.
More than 70 people have been sentenced for participating in the deadly mayhem, with hundreds of others charged.
Trump — who was impeached for his role in the Jan. 6 travesty — remains a menace to democracy, Rep. Liz Cheney said Sunday.
“He crossed lines no American president has ever crossed before,” the Wyoming Republican told ABC’s “This Week.”
“We entrust the survival of our Republic into the hands of the chief executive, and when a president refuses to tell the mob to stop, when he refuses to defend any of the coordinate branches of government, he cannot be trusted,” she said.
Cheney’s vote to impeach Trump cost her a leadership role in the House GOP.
Her party is still in thrall to the 45th president, with a significant number of Republicans and independents now saying that violence against the government can at times be justified.
About four in 10 Republicans and independents answered in the affirmative when asked if violent action against the state is sometimes justified, according to Washington Post-ABC News poll results released over the weekend.
Meanwhile, the special House committee probing the Jan. 6 siege is readying to share its results publicly.
Members of the panel plan to reveal their findings — based on interviews with more than 300 witnesses — in the coming months.
“What we have been able to ascertain is that we came perilously close to losing our democracy,” Rep. Bennie Thompson, the committee’s chairman, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“Had those insurrectionists been successful, we are not certain what we would have had, had it not been for the brave men and women who protected the Capitol in spite of being woefully outnumbered,” said Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi.