Officials trade blame over Capitol failures
Missed intelligence was to blame for the outmanned US Capitol defenders’ failure to anticipate the violent mob that invaded the iconic building and halted certification of the presidential election on January 6, the officials who were in charge of security that day have said in their first public testimony on the insurrection.
The officials, including the former chief of the Capitol Police, pointed fingers at various federal agencies – and each other – for their failure to defend the building as supporters of thenpresident Donald Trump overwhelmed security barriers, broke windows and doors, and sent lawmakers fleeing from the House and Senate chambers. Five people died.
Former Capitol Police chief Steven Sund, who resigned immediately after the attack, and other officials testified at a joint hearing yesterday that they had expected the protests to be similar to two pro-Trump events in late 2020 that were far less violent.
Sund said he had not seen an FBI field office report that warned of potential violence, citing online posts about a ‘‘war’’.
Sund said the scene as the mob arrived at the perimeter was ‘‘like nothing’’ he had seen in his 30 years of policing, and argued that the insurrection was not the result of poor planning by Capitol Police but of failures across the board.
‘‘No single civilian law enforcement agency ... is trained and equipped to repel, without significant military or other law enforcement assistance, an insurrection of thousands of armed, violent, and coordinated individuals focused on breaching a building at all costs,’’ he testified.
The hearing, part of an investigation by two Senate committees, is the first of many examinations of what happened that day, coming almost seven weeks after the attack, and over a week after the Senate voted to acquit Trump of inciting the insurrection by telling his supporters to ‘‘fight like hell’’ to overturn his election defeat.
Fencing and National Guard troops still surround the Capitol in a wide perimeter.
Former Senate sergeant-atarms Michael Stenger, former House sergeant-at-arms Paul Irving, and Robert Contee, the acting chief of police for the Metropolitan Police Department, also testified. Irving and Stenger also resigned immediately after the deadly attack. They were Sund’s supervisors and in charge of security for the House and Senate.
Even without the intelligence, there were clear signs that violence was a possibility on January 6. Far-right social media users openly hinted for weeks that chaos would erupt at the Capitol as Congress convened to certify the election results.
Sund said he did see an intelligence report created within his own department warning that Congress could be targeted on January 6. But he said the report assessed the probability of civil disobedience or arrests, based on the information available, as ‘‘remote’’ to ‘‘improbable’’ for the groups expected to demonstrate.
Sund and Irving disagreed on when the National Guard was called, and on requests for the guard beforehand. Sund said he spoke to both Stenger and Irving about requesting the National Guard in the days before the riot – a claim Irving said was ‘‘categorically false’’.