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. 5-Minute Core Exercise... Dzenitis, Tami Brehse Best Price: $3.13 Buy New $6.50 (as of 08:07 UTC - Details)

“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. Facts the Historians L... John S. Tilley Best Price: $5.00 Buy New $4.87 (as of 07:05 UTC - Details)

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.

Read the Whole Article