At his rally in Las Vegas yesterday,
Donald Trump once again suggested he would pardon
the January 6th insurrectionists in a second term,
whom he called hostages and victims and warriors.
He also accused the Capitol Police,
who were brutalized during the attack,
of setting up the rioters to be arrested.
We're going to do a lot of things.
We're going to look very strongly at J6,
those people. There's never been people treated
more horrifically than J6 hostages.
Those J6 warriors, they were warriors,
but they were really more than anything else,
they're victims of what happened.
All they were doing is protesting a rigged election.
That's what we're doing.
And then the police say go in,
go in, go in, go on,
in, everybody, go on in.
What a setup that was.
What a horrible, horrible thing.
As for what actually happened on January 6th,
unaired footage we just obtained from congressional sources
shows top Democratic lawmakers questioning the whereabouts of the National
Guard during the January 6th Capitol attack.
As the Capitol was being overrun.
Then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi grilled her chief of staff
about the situation as they were evacuated for their safety.
Take a look.
You're going to ask me in the middle of the
thing when they've already breached the,
the, the inaugural stuff that that
should we call the Capitol Police?
I mean, the National Guard.
Why weren't the National Guard there to be?
The footage also shows Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck
Schumer at Fort McNair speaking on the phone with then
Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy
and later Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser about the status of
their request for help from the National Guard.
Secretary McCarthy and Senator Schumer,
we're at 4. McMahon, do you know what's going on?
They have. OK, well, DC has requested the National Guard
and it's been denied by DoD.
I'd like to know a good God damn reason why
it's been denied.
We need them fast. We've all had to have never
seen anything like this.
We're like a third world country here.
We had to run and evacuate the capital.
There's they have not denied it.
I spoke to the secretary of the Army.
He's given a full OK to give the National already
said it was not denied.
I'm going to call up the ethnic secretary of DoD.
We have had some mixed messages about
thank you National
of your request or our request as well for the
National Guard to move in.
OK,
Madam Speaker, let me just give you
a a rundown. Your chief,
the United States Council, please
send a request to for National Guard for
property. More than an hour ago
there was I thought there was some resistance from
the Secretary of the Army folks to deploy the
warm
bar personnel on the grounds of the county Capitol.
It took more than three hours,
3 hours, for the National Guard to arrive to that
chaotic scene,
to that riot, to the attack on the Capitol.
According to Politico. Four former members of the Guard described
a frustrating experience of being prevented for hours from being
able to respond and recounted senior Army officials expressing concern
about the optics of deploying the Guard.
But they saved their fiercest criticism for McCarthy,
Kevin McCarthy,
who they described as
I'm sorry for the for
the Army,
a totally different McCarthy. I apologize.
The person that they were trying to reach there on
the phone,
who they described as unresponsive to their outreach in the
midst of the chaos.
Republicans have spent years accusing Pelosi of neglecting her duty
to defend the capital,
despite evidence that it was a shared responsibility among congressional
leaders,
who in turn relied on the assessments of police and
security officials.
But as Politico reports, the new footage does not bolster
GOP claims of Pelosi being at fault.
Instead, it largely aligns with and adds depth to previous
snippets of Alexandra
Pelosi's footage released by the January 6th Select Committee and
in an HBO documentary that was released in
2022. The unaired footage also shows Democratic leaders demanding that
then President Donald Trump tell his supporters to leave the
Capitol on January 6th.
Here is Pelosi and Schumer speaking by phone with then
acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen.
Why don't you get the president to tell them to
leave the Capitol,
Mr. Attorney General and your law enforcement responsibility,
a public statement. They should all leave.
He is saying. His tweet said we are for peace.
We're not law and order.
Law and order. Yeah. Why don't you get him to
make that statement?
Would you do that?
Would you ask the president to make a statement to
ask them to leave the Capitol?
So. So as
you might guess, we're coordinating
this
quickly. No, no, no. Please answer my question.
Answer my question, Senator. I'm going to do everything I
can do. Does that include asking the president to get
these people who are followers of Earth to leave the
Capitol?
Joining the conversation, we have the host of the podcast
on brand with Donny Deutsch.
Donny Deutsch, former supreme allied commander of NATO,
retired four-star Navy Admiral James Stavridis.
He is chief international analyst for NBC News and staff
writer at The Atlantic
and Applebaum. What a great panel.
Hardly know where to start here.
There are so many great voices.
I do want to back up and just rephrase what
I said because I mentioned the wrong McCarthy.
According to Politico, four former members of the Guard described
a frustrating experience of being prevented for hours from being
able to respond to the attacks on the Capitol and
recounted senior Army officials expressing concerns about the optics of
deploying the Guard.
And they saved their fiercest criticism for McCarthy,
who they described as unresponsive to their outreach in the
midst of the chaos.
That's Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy and not having the National
Guard respond.
I mean, in so many ways,
I think I need to start with Anne Applebaum and
go backwards.
But Anne, what does this say to you when you
see these details and this friction at all levels in
terms of how to respond to this and lives hanging
in the balance as it appears that they don't want
to actually stop the chaos that's from the president on
down.
I have to tell you,
my first reaction is to ask why we didn't talk
about this 3 1/2 years ago,
why it's taken so long for all of our courts
really to come to terms with what happened on January
the 6th
and why we haven't as a society dealt with it
yet.
I mean, some of these details are new and some
of them are more shocking and they come in a
slightly different version.
But actually we've known this story for a long time
and we haven't acted.
And I think that's, you know,
that's a part of the explanation for why the perpetrators
are getting away with it.
Stratos Trevitas, let's talk about chain of command and other
issues here.
I mean, this was clearly botched on just about every
level that day.
We saw it in real time that the National Guard
needed to be there and wasn't.
As someone who's worked in the Pentagon for so long,
what happened
First you you kind of have to see what happens
on the Capitol that day through the filter of Lafayette
Park previous protests,
the Pentagon did not take the lessons learned that they
should have out of that series of events
.2. I just want to draw a line under how
every active duty Reserve Guard retired,
like me, veterans, all of us watched the Capitol that
day and felt
we needed to be there.
We needed to be there.
And that is the ultimate responsibility
of the military is to back up
law enforcement when it simply becomes overwhelmed as it did
here.
And finally, in terms of the
chain of command that day and the exact sequence of
events,
to me, this entire episode screams
for a 9/11 level Commission
where we pull it apart,
read every statement made by every leader,
put it all back together again and draw the lessons.
And the correct lessons pretty obviously are not that these
people were hostages.
Look, I, I know what a hostage looks like.
I've I've tried to rescue them over the years in
the military.
These are hardly hostages. They're clearly rioters,
criminals, many of them now convicted felons.
We need to reverse engineer this and understand how it
got so far out of hand that work has yet
to be done.