On January 6, 2021, nearly five hours passed between the breach of the Capitol perimeter and the arrival of a National Guard contingent ready and waiting to deploy just ten minutes away. Had the National Guard arrived within that first hour, “January 6” would have no more historical resonance than any other day on the calendar.

Any number of people bear the blame for this calamitous security failure, but that list does not include the two most frequently cited scapegoats, the D.C. National Guard or President Donald Trump.

Of the thousands of words of sworn testimony, some of the most revealing came from Colonel Earl Matthews. In rebutting the questions asked by Rep. Norma Torres, a California Democrat, at a congressional hearing on April 17, 2024, the intrepid Matthews shared some inconvenient truths.

“Do you know if ideas like the President seizing ballot boxes was something [Army] Secretary [Ryan] McCarthy was considering when making decisions about deploying the Guard on January 6?” asked Torres.

“I think it was, but I think it was not a rational belief,” said the African-American Matthews, the Chief Legal Advisor for the D.C. National Guard on January 6. Not liking the answer, Torres promptly cut him off.

“Was there widespread fear within the Department of Defense about the President using the military or other levers of the State to impact the election around the time of the 2020 election,” Torres continued, hoping to get an answer more to her liking. This question backfired as well.

“No. It was not a widespread fear,” said Matthews. “It was a fear among a clique of officers led by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who talked about a so-called Reichstag moment.” Not wanting to hear any more of the truth, Torres cut Matthews off again.

In the movies -- Seven Days in May, Dr. Strangelove, White House Down -- that “clique” of coup-minded generals inevitably emerge from some right-wing fever swamp. In Washington circa 2020, that clique was headed by the proudly woke Gen. Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and a hero on the Left.

January 6, of course, proved to be a Reichstag moment, but in precisely the opposite way Milley suggested. Democratic Party leadership responded to the riot much the way the Nazi leadership responded to the Reichstag fire, namely using an event of ambiguous origin as pretext to suppress speech and imprison its political opponents.

For the Democrats, Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans served the role that Jews and communists did for the Nazis. With the perpetrators identified, all investigations for the next two years would be tailored to defame the accused and exculpate the complicit.

By the evening of January 6, the Reichstag narrative had been set. Said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to her filmmaker daughter Alexandra, “I just feel sick with what he did to the Capitol and to the country today. He’s got to pay a price for that.” The “he,” of course, was Donald Trump.

For the following two years, the left controlled the White House, Congress, the media, and the D.C. courts. That control enabled them to shoehorn all evidence into their pre-set narrative. In her recently released book, The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House, Pelosi ignored all the facts that have emerged since Republicans won the House and doubled down on her scandalously fake thesis:

Watching the insurrection, which Trump had instigated, begging him to provide the National Guard -- as he did and which he refused to send -- and taking into account my own worries about the basic security of Vice President Mike Pence, hiding inside the Capitol complex, and the important role he had to play, I knew we had to prevail.

Thanks to the underreported efforts of the House Administration's Subcommittee on Oversight and its chairman Barry Loudermilk, we are beginning to see just how crudely false was Pelosi’s interpretation of that day’s events.

To be clear, there was no “insurrection.” Even the media have moved beyond this silliness. Whatever did occur, Trump did not instigate it. The Capitol Police started lobbing munitions into a rowdy but peaceful crowd ten minutes before Trump finished speaking on the Ellipse, a 45-minute walk away. None of these protestors heard his speech.

Contrary to Pelosi’s claims, Trump repeatedly asked for the assistance of the National Guard. In March 2024, Loudermilk released a transcribed interview conducted with Trump's former White House deputy chief of staff Anthony Ornato, which confirmed the separate testimony of Trump chief-of-staff Mark Meadows.

“Mr. Ornato's testimony proves what Meadows has said all along,” attested Loudermilk. “President Trump did in fact offer 10,000 National Guard troops to secure the U.S. Capitol, which was turned down.” Added Loudermilk, “The former J6 Select Committee apparently withheld Mr. Ornato’s critical witness testimony from the American people because it contradicted their pre-determined narrative.”

In a September 20, 2024 press release, Loudermilk added further proof of Trump’s request for support: “The transcripts released [from the DoD IG report] show Trump gave senior Pentagon leadership directives to keep January 6 peaceful -- including using the National Guard -- which the Pentagon leaders ignored.” The release then quotes Loudermilk directly as saying, “Pentagon leadership prioritized concerns of optics over their duty to protect lives.”

To make his case, Loudermilk shared some direct quotes from Milley and others. When interviewed by the Department of Defense’s inspector general in 2021, Milley quoted Trump as saying, “Hey, look at this. There’s going to be a large amount of protesters here on the 6th, make sure that you have sufficient National Guard or Soldiers to make sure it’s a safe event.” Again according to Milley, Trump added, “Hey, I don’t care if you use Guard, or Soldiers, active duty Soldiers, do whatever you have to do. Just make sure it’s safe.”

Acting U.S. Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller also heard Trump’s say “that they were going to need 10,000 troops.” As Miller admitted in May 2021 at a Democrat-led House hearing, he did not check with President Trump after the riot started because he did not need to.

Testified Miller, “I had all the authority I needed and I knew what had to happen." The D.C. National Guard reported directly to the Pentagon.

Although not part of his clique, Miller was well aware of Milley’s flirtation with treason. “I want to remind you and the American public that during that time, there was irresponsible commentary by the media about a possible military coup or that advisors to the president were advocating the declaration of martial law,” Miller testified at the May 2021 House hearing.

The rumors of a Trump-led military coup and the “hysteria about them,” said Miller, “factored into my decisions regarding the appropriate and limited use of our armed forces to support civilian law enforcement during the electoral college certification.” Appointed just two months prior, Miller lacked the confidence to silence a subordinate of Milley’s stature.

Milley and his clique wanted Trump to fail. They so poisoned the media environment that Miller dared not feed their paranoia by calling up the Guard when he should have. Loudermilk’s suggestion that worry about “optics” caused the delay is too generous by half.

Pelosi complicated matters through sheer incompetence. “I was sitting at my desk in the Pentagon holding a phone six inches away from my ear, trying my best to make sense of the incoherent shrieking blasting out of the receiver,” Miller writes on the first page of his book, Soldier Secretary. “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was on the line, and she was in a state of total nuclear meltdown.”

In an otherwise helpful March 2024 article in the Intercept, Peter Maass goes to some length to discredit Miller’s account of this call, but the Maass article appeared before a video surfaced of Pelosi’s hysterical flight from the Capitol on the afternoon of January 6.

"We take responsibility, Terri. We did not have any accountability for what was going on there, and we should have. This is ridiculous," Pelosi snaps at her chief of staff Terri McCullough. “I mean the National Guard," Pelosi scolds her. "Why weren't the National Guard there to begin with?"

As Pelosi understood, the House speaker is responsible for the security of the Capitol. The claim that she begged Trump for help during the riot and that he turned her down is pure fiction. As Loudermilk observed, “Once the Capitol was breached, the Trump White House pushed for immediate help from Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller and grew frustrated at the slow deployment of that help.” 

The Pentagon’s betrayal of Trump should not surprise. The FBI and the intelligence community had sabotaged his presidency as well as the campaigns of 2016 and 2020, the latter fatally.

“Let me tell you,” Senate leader Chuck Schumer warned the president-elect days before his 2017 inauguration, “you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you.” As President Trump learned, the Pentagon has its ways too.

Jack Cashill’s newest book, Ashli: the Untold Story of the Women of  January 6, is available in all formats.

Image: Tyler Merbler