The Senate will grill Defense Department officials about allegations they resisted a call to help defend the Capitol against a violent mob on Jan. 6.
Pentagon officials “are coming next week,” Senate Rules and Administration Committee Chairwoman Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, told reporters Tuesday during a joint oversight hearing examining the events leading to the Capitol attack. Klobuchar said next week’s hearing will also include witnesses from Homeland Security and the FBI.
The hearing Tuesday featured a trio of Capitol law enforcement officials who were in charge of building security on Jan. 6 but were forced out of their jobs by House and Senate leaders following the attack, which was carried out by pro-Trump protesters and left five people dead and dozens injured.
Former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, the day’s top witness, has repeatedly accused top Pentagon officials of resisting a request that day to send the D.C. National Guard to the scene to help overwhelmed officers.
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According to Sund, top military brass hesitated because they were concerned about the sight of troops at the Capitol, even as the building was under attack.
In a Feb. 1 letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sund said the Defense Department waited three hours to approve his urgent request for help from the D.C. National Guard.
Army Staff Director Lt. Gen. Walter Piatt has denied the claim and said the request to send help was approved in about 40 minutes, allowing time to formulate a response plan.
Sund, however, said during Tuesday’s hearing that he was surprised at the “pushback” and “resistance” from the military when he made the urgent request for the National Guard on Jan. 6.
Sund said he first called Piatt at 2:30 p.m. to make an urgent request for help but that troops did not arrive for several hours.
Law enforcement and Defense Department officials have traded blame for the delayed response.
Rep. Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat, said in the days following the attack that Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy told him the delays in sending the National Guard were due to “the lack of a preplanned requirement by the Pentagon as a result of deficient law enforcement threat reporting.”
At the hearing, Sund accused ousted House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving of initially resisting his request on Jan. 5 to employ the National Guard for the protest. Sund said Irving was concerned about the “optics” of utilizing the military at the Capitol.
Irving denied Sund’s claim and said Sund never conveyed information that showed a threat serious enough to call in the Guard.
Irving said Sund told him he had received “an offer” to use 125 unarmed National Guard troops, to be positioned around the Capitol, mainly for traffic management.
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Irving told the Senate panel Tuesday that prior to the Jan. 6 rally and subsequent Capitol attack, “the intelligence did not support using the National Guard.”
