Two top officials in the DC National Guard last month told House Administration Committee staffers that former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley could have stopped the January 6th, 2021 MAGA insurrection sooner if she had just picked up the phone and called, Politico reports, citing closed-door testimony to Georgia MAGA Congressman Barry Loudermilk’s investigation of the investigation.
Oh wait, shit. We got Nikki Haley mixed up with Nancy Pelosi. Anyway the… Heyyy… The Politico article says it was actually Donald Trump who should have called the DC National Guard to stop his fanboys from rampaging in the United States Capitol. They have this exchange from the transcript:
“Could the president have picked up the phone, called the secretary of defense, and said, you know, ‘What’s going on here?’ Our law enforcement is getting overrun, make this happen!'” a committee staffer asked DCNG senior enlisted man Michael Brooks, who answered with “I assume he could expedite an approval through the Secretary of Defense, through the Secretary of the Army.”
The word “Pelosi” doesn’t even show up in the article and… Ahem, in all seriousness the rest of the report paints a larger picture of inaction by Pentagon leadership and that they could have responded independently of Trump, which in turn tracks with a theory printed in detail by JustSecurity in December 2021: That it was a tactical decision to avoid putting troops there that Trump could have immediately taken command of and then used to subjugate Congress to prevent the transfer of power from taking place at all. And even though holding back allowed cops to have the shit beaten out of them by crazed Trump fans and created space for Trump to continue lying about who’s call it was not to have the National Guard at the Capitol, not deploying them was the least bad option.
Mark Milley and the other brass are never going to say this publicly that they purposely committed such an act of purposeful dereliction. They’ll probably take it to the grave. Still the right call.