STRING OF FAILURES LED TO DEADLY SIEGE

Poor planning among government agencies, restive crowd set stage

Huddled in a command center on Wednesday afternoon, District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser and her aides saw a photograph of bloodstains on the temporary grandstands at the Capitol, a makeshift structure built for the inauguration of a new president in two weeks.

The enormity of the deadly failure sank in.

Rioters had broken through the thin police line on the Capitol steps and were descending on hundreds of lawmakers conducting the ceremonial act of certifying the presidential vote — and the mayor and her aides were not able to stop the attack.

Bowser and her police chief called the Pentagon, asking for additional D.C. National Guard troops to be mobilized to support what officials were realizing was inadequate protection at the Cap

itol. But they were told that the request would first have to come from the Capitol Police.

In a call to Chief Steven Sund of the Capitol Police, they learned that his force was under siege, lawmakers were being rushed to safety, and rioters were overrunning anyone in authority. He kept repeating the same phrase: “The situation is dire.”

Cutting through the cross talk, one person on the call posed a blunt question: “Chief Sund, are you requesting National Guard troops on the grounds of the Capitol?”

There was a pause. “Yes,” Sund replied, “I am.” Yet Capitol Police and the city’s Metropolitan Police had rebuffed offers days before for more help from the National Guard beyond a modest contingent to provide traffic control, so no additional troops had been placed on

standby. It took hours for them to arrive.

It was just one failure in a dizzying list that day — and during the weeks leading up to it — that resulted in the first occupation of the U.S. Capitol since British troops set the building ablaze during the War of 1812.

The death and destruction this time was caused by Americans, rallying behind an American president who refused to accept the will of more than 81 million other Americans who had voted him out of office.

The deadly riots left five dead, injured dozens of others and damaged the country's reputation for carrying out peaceful transfers of power.

An anatomy of the siege by The New York Times revealed numerous failures. The chaos showed that government agencies have no coordinated plan to defend against an attack on the Capitol though law enforcement agencies have for years raised alarms about the growing threat of domestic terrorism groups. QAnon, an online conspiracy group well represented among the crowd, has been labeled a domestic terrorist threat by the FBI.

Federal agencies and Capitol Police appeared to issue no serious warnings in the days leading up to the riots that the gathering could turn violent, despite countless posts on right-wing social media sites pledging confrontation and even bloodshed.

The Department of Homeland Security invited local law enforcement agencies to its situation room the day before the riots, which some security experts said was too late.

Poor planning and communication among a constellation of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies hamstrung the response. Once the Capitol was breached, a patchwork group of reinforcements was forced to try to navigate a labyrinthine complex of unfamiliar passages and byways that would prove dangerous.

The Capitol Police and the Metropolitan Police Department did not respond to requests for com

ment. Bowser's chief of staff, John Falcicchio, said that defense officials determined the number of personnel deployed. But Pentagon officials said they made those decisions based on the specific requests they received.

Federal law enforcement officials conveyed to lawmakers that they were prepared. Before the protest, David L. Bowdich, the FBI deputy director, assured Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, that the bureau had the resources to handle the rally.

Urgent calls for help

Within minutes of the mob breaching the Capitol complex, rioters were pounding on the doors of the House gallery, where a group of nearly two dozen lawmakers were trapped. The sounds of shattering glass echoed through the chamber.

An outnumbered force of Capitol Police had tried numerous tactics to keep the riot at bay, setting up barricades, using pepper spray and trying to push back against the mob at the building's doors and windows. All of these measures failed.

Throughout the Capitol, urgent voices crackled across police radios giving details about the unfolding siege.

Bowser and her staff members had begun making urgent calls to mobilize larger numbers of D.C. National Guard troops and move those already in the city to the Capitol. In the days before, Bowser had requested only a relatively small contingent of 340 D.C. National Guard troops, and only to control traffic and help protect public transportation stops, an effort to avoid the militarized federal presence that had been a major factor in the June protest response.

One of the calls was to Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, asking him to dispatch Maryland National Guard troops to the city. Because Washington, D.C., is not a state, the new request needed to be approved by the acting secretary of defense, Christopher Miller.

Hogan's phone rang again. It was Ryan McCarthy, the secretary of the Army and the de facto head of the D.C. National Guard. He asked whether Maryland troops could come immediately.

“I said, ‘Yes, we've been waiting,'” Hogan recalled.

Bowser was having similar problems. Even during the phone call when Sund said he needed National Guard troops to beat back the rioters — a request the mayor and her staff members figured would immediately prompt an order of reinforcements — Pentagon officials would not commit to sending them.

Lt. Gen. Walter E. Piatt, the director of the Army staff who was on that call, reacted to Sund's request with caution. He said that he did not have the authority to send the troops, that the request would have to go through his chain of command, and that the group needed a plan for how the National Guard would be deployed.

Chief Robert J. Contee of the Metropolitan Police was livid. “Are you denying the request?” he asked Piatt three times.

“We are not denying the request,” the general insisted. But he added that he would have to seek approval first. The phone call ended.

Inside the mayor's command center, where officials recalled the debacle in June when the military sent a helicopter to buzz Black Lives Matter protesters, frustration turned to anger.

“The Capitol Police were requesting the guard, they were not getting the request fulfilled, and we are seeing blood on the ground of the United States Capitol. That was the moment for me,” said Falcicchio, the mayor's chief of staff.

In an interview, Piatt defended his caution.

“The last thing you want to do is throw forces at it where you have no idea where they're going and all of a sudden it gets a lot worse,” he said.

Inside the besieged Capitol, lawmakers were making their own urgent requests to the Pentagon. Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., a former defense official, called Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to plead for help from the National Guard.

Finally, at about 3 p.m., Milley decided that all available D.C. National Guard soldiers — 1,100 troops in all — would be deployed.