As Kamala Harris and Democrats continue to use January 6 as a campaign issue, it is important to recall those responsible for preventing the National Guard from protecting the Capitol.
Thanks to the surgeon-like precision of my researcher Haley McLean, this timeline (we believe) represents the most exhaustive one to date showing the requests and denials related to the deployment of the D.C. National Guard before and on January 6, 2021. Events have been curated from a number of resources including congressional testimony, internal agency investigations, media coverage, videos, and book excerpts.
We preface the timeline with critical context and information about the lead-up to January 6 involving key political operatives and known foes of President Trump.
Summer 2020
Jamie Fleet, then-Democratic staffer for Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and the Committee on House Administration (chaired, at the time, by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who was later appointed to Pelosi’s January 6 Select Committee) had a team of counselors working in anticipation of coming debates and objections from states—including Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia—about the certification of the electoral college vote. Knowing that objections would likely be raised on January 6, Fleet’s team began contingency planning to prepare for the possibility that the proceedings would “not [be] traditional.”
June 2020
- Following the June 1 photo op at Lafayette Square during the BLM riots in Washington, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley contemplated resigning. Sitting in his Pentagon office, Milley wrote several drafts of a letter of resignation. Milley sought advice from a wide circle of confidants, including Joseph Dunford, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs under the Obama administration; retired Army General James Dubik; members of Congress; former officials with the George W. Bush and Obama administrations; and Robert Gates, former secretary of Defense and CIA chief. Most agreed with Gates’s advice: “Make them fire you. Don’t resign.”
- After Lafayette Square, Gates told both Gen. Milley and then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper that, “given Trump’s increasingly erratic and dangerous behavior, they needed to stay in the Pentagon as long as they could.”
- By June 10, 2020 Gen. Milley had decided not to resign. “Fuck that shit,” he reportedly told his staff. “I’ll just fight him.” Milley assured his confidants that he would never openly defy the president—a move he considered illegal—but he was “determined to plant flags.” He told his staff, “If they want to court-martial me or put me in prison, have at it, but I will fight from the inside.” Milley saw himself as “tasked” with safeguarding “against Trump and his people” from potentially misusing the military, something he confided in a “trusted confidant” to ensure he remained true to this plan. “I have four tasks from now until the twentieth of January,” he affirmed, “and I’m going to accomplish my mission.”
- Milley “sought to get the message to Democrats that he would not go along with any further efforts by the president to deploy the machinery of war for domestic political ends. He called both Pelosi and Schumer.”
- Gen. Milley stood up a crisis management team that was “dedicated to monitoring domestic unrest.” He outlined his and his staff’s efforts in four phases: “So I said—and this is from June—so I said: Phase one is now through the election, and phase two is the election out through the certification, which was known, it was a known date, the 6th. So from the election to the certification. Phase three, I said, was certification to inauguration. And phase four was inauguration plus 100 days.”
- Every morning at Gen. Milley’s direction, he and his staff began tracking civil disturbances in the United States, focusing on events and incidents involving groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. Milley explained, “when I say ‘tracking’ I had the Joint Staff report, set up a system of reporting in the morning at our normal 7:30 meeting” and “the reports from every morning and it’s June, July, August, September, October, all the way through.”
- Milley and his team “had LNOs [Liaison Officers] with the FBI, in the FBI building … I think we called it domestic unrest as a general thing,” and “we just worked with the FBI and local police, and we made sure that we kept track of it. And we stood up a team to make sure that we, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and I, had situational awareness just like we have overseas.”
- Milley had his Joint Staff historian “conduct an in-depth research on the use of the Insurrection Act, what it’s all about, going all the way back to 1807 or whatever year it started, all the historical examples, laid out every single one of them in detail. The historian would walk me through it.”
(Read much more: Declassified/Julie Kelly/Substack, 10/15/2024) (Archive)