On Wednesday, Arkansas GOP Senator Tom Cotton penned an op-ed for Fox News stating that the National Guard troops still in Washington should leave the Capitol grounds as soon as possible, despite Defense Department and local law enforcement plans.
“I’m aware of no specific, credible threat reporting … that justifies this continued troop presence,” wrote Cotton, a former soldier who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Thus, I believe the rest of these soldiers should also go home to their families and civilian jobs.”
Cotton went on to say, “The lesson of the Capitol riot is not that we should quarter a standing army at the Capitol just in case, but rather that our security measures should be calibrated to the actual threats.”
Cotton’s op/ed came on the same day that 11 GOP House members requested a briefing from acting Army Secretary John Whitley on any ongoing threats to the Capitol as well as an explanation for why the National Guard troops were still in Washington, according to Defense News.
“The Guard has endured unprecedented stress on the force in the last year given COVID-19, social unrest, natural disasters, and ongoing overseas requirements,” the group wrote. “The National Guard should be used as an option of absolute last resort.”
Rep. Waltz sent a letter to Acting @SecArmy requesting a briefing on the threat assessments and requirements for 7k National Guard presence at the U.S. Capitol until March.
⬇️ Read more: pic.twitter.com/3ikm85ADD6
— Congressman Waltz Press (@RepMichaelWaltz) January 27, 2021
Guardsmen began pouring into Washington D.C. on January 6 after supporters of Trump, incited to a murderous rage, stormed the Capitol Building. The Capitol Police and D.C. police were on their own with just a few hundred National Guard troops, brought in days before. At the height of the deployment, about 26,000 Guardsmen were on hand patrolling Capitol Hill.
Whitley told reporters there are “several upcoming events” the FBI is concerned about but deferred to the bureau for specifics. The biggest “upcoming event” is Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, set to start on February 9. Followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory are also pushing bogus claims Trump will be sworn in again on March 4, the original date of presidential inaugurations before the 20th Amendment moved it to January 20.
As it turned out, with the military presence, the Inauguration ceremony went off without a hitch. The Guard has now drawn down to about 7,000 members, according to Wayne Hall, a spokesperson for the National Guard Bureau. By mid-March, the number of activated troops will draw down to about 5,000, said Hall in an email to Military Times. The Guard will “continue supporting federal law enforcement agencies.”
Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman this week recommended that security measures, including the fencing and unspecified “back-up” security forces stationed in “close proximity” to the building, become permanent. The suggestion was roundly rebuked by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle as well as D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.
Here’s what most of us did not know about the riot
It would be an understatement to say the D.C. and Capitol police departments – as well as other law enforcement agencies – were totally unprepared for what happened on January 6. And that is the big question – How come they weren’t informed about the threat?
Believe it or not, but there is an explanation. A few months before the insurrection on January 6, the Trump administration began gutting The Department of Homeland Security threat assessment group.
This agency is part of the DHS and is responsible for funneling intelligence and threat assessments to law enforcement partners across the country, according to ABC News.
By creating an information vacuum, the Trump administration may have deprived law enforcement in Washington, D.C., of a key avenue for actionable warnings that could have helped them to be better prepared.
“I was surprised that we didn’t receive any information” about Jan. 6, Mike Sena, president of the National Fusion Center Association, told NPR. “We received a number of reports, but they were all regarding events all around the election cycle, you know, information sharing.”
There are 80 fusion centers around the country, and one of their key responsibilities is to disseminate all kinds of threat and intelligence bulletins. The bulletins are considered a finished product — a synthesis of validated and analyzed intelligence that helps local law enforcement make informed decisions, according to NPR.org.
At the time, it struck Sena and other law enforcement officials as strange that the DHS and FBI hadn’t put out a report on what was going to happen on January 6. And this is not because DHS and the FBI didn’t know anything, either.
The FBI’s Norfolk, Virginia field office revealed to reporters about two weeks ago that they had uncovered intelligence that might have helped the U.S. Capitol Police decide how to deploy its forces.
“Norfolk FBI officials had found specific threats against members of Congress, an exchange of maps of the tunnel system under the Capitol complex, and gathering places in Kentucky, Pennsylvania and South Carolina where extremists were meeting before convoying up to Washington,” reported the Washington Post,
The head of the U.S. Capitol Police said that they had no intelligence that suggested there would be a storming of the Capitol. And other law enforcement agencies hadn’t seen a specific threat assessment report or intelligence bulletin from DHS and the FBI.
Known as the I&A Office, the Office of Intelligence and Analysis at DHS is responsible for producing these threat assessments, and it often works in concert with the FBI. The office began having staffing and operations problems in August 2020, after the former FBI agent who ran the division, Brian Murphy, was removed from the job.
Murphy was replaced in the fall by a longtime member of the department’s general counsel’s office and a Trump loyalist. He was a lawyer and didn’t have an analysis background – effectively curtailing the disseminating of actionable threat information out to local law enforcement.
However, former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff says everything was pretty obvious. “It didn’t take rocket science to see if there was a realistic foreseeable risk to the Capitol and you would enhance the security.”
“It was perfectly obvious, if you read the newspaper, that there was going to be a big rally, that the president was talking about … be ‘wild,’ and that the focus was going to be the Capitol, where they were having a certification vote.” The threat was so out in the open, Chertoff said, you didn’t need the threat analysis to know what was going to happen.
