Guard commander details what delayed Capitol riot response
Military and federal security officials detailed Wednesday further security breakdowns that failed to stop the Jan. 6 pro-trump mob attack on the Capitol, including that the head of the D.C. National Guard did not receive approval to mobilize troops until more than three hours after he requested it, outlining a longer delay than previously known and emphasizing bureaucratic restrictions that hindered efforts to quell the violence.
The Guard commander, Maj. Gen. William Walker, got word that Pentagon officials had authorized his request at 5:08 p.m. — more than three hours after he received a desperate plea for help from the then-chief of the Capitol Police, Walker said.
“We already had Guardsmen on buses ready to move to the Capitol,” he said, testifying alongside officials from the FBI and Departments of Homeland Security and Defense about security and intelligence failures ahead of the deadly rampage.
The Pentagon had removed his own authority to quickly deploy his troops, which also slowed the response to the riot, he said. He said that he was unable to even move troops from one traffic stop to another without permission from the secretary of the Army. Once he had the approval, the Guard arrived at the building in less than 20 minutes and helped reestablish the security perimeter on the east side of the Capitol.
Military officials had authorized Guard troop deployment at 3:04 p.m., according to the Pentagon, an approval that was itself delayed as officials there debated concerns about the optics of sending troops into the Capitol.
The reason for the delay in conveying the message of eventual approval to Walker was not immediately clear. But during those hours, video and interviews have shown, the Capitol Police and supporting forces were overwhelmed in trying to fight off the mob of supporters of former President Donald Trump.
“That number could have made a difference,” Walker said of the possibility of deploying his troops earlier. He said he could have had 150 troops at the Capitol in 20 minutes.
He also said he believed that Pentagon officials’ concerns about optics were misguided and that forces needed to be quickly sent to the Capitol to help repel the rioters.
“Seconds mattered,” Walker added. “Minutes mattered. They made a difference.”
Walker said that Pentagon
officials placed restrictions before Jan. 6 on his ability to deploy troops and called it “unusual.” He noted that military officials had not raised concerns about optics in the summer when the National Guard was deployed in Washington to help quell violence that erupted as racial justice protests were underway across the country.
The restrictions on the Guard on Jan. 6 were put in place because of aggressive tactics by the Guard during the June deployment that drew criticism, said Robert Salesses, a senior Defense Department official testifying at the hearing. He said that the secretary of the Army, Ryan Mccarthy, and other military officials delayed making a decision Jan. 6 about whether to deploy forces because they wanted to know more about what they would be doing.
Their testimony came at the latest bipartisan investigative hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and the Rules and Administration Committee.
“We must get to the bottom of why that very day it took the Defense Department so long to deploy the guard,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-minn., chairwoman of the rules committee. Klobuchar added that the insurrectionists “came prepared for war.”
After hearing Walker’s testimony, Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, the top Republican on the committee, told reporters he wanted to hear from higher-ranking officials in the military.
“Certainly we’ll have questions for Secretary Mccarthy and for acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller,” Blunt said. “It’s definitely going to require an opportunity to ask them questions about their view from their perspective of why this decision-making process went so horribly wrong.”
At the first joint oversight meeting of the two committees last week, three former top Capitol security officials deflected responsibility for security failures that contributed to the riot, blaming the other agencies, each other and at one point even a subordinate for the breakdowns that allowed hundreds of Trump supporters to storm the Capitol.
The officials testified that the FBI and the intelligence community had failed to provide adequate warnings that rioters planned to seize the Capitol and that the Pentagon was too slow to authorize Guard troops to help overwhelmed police after the attack began.