[The Soup Nazi]

(cont'd)

The military as a last resort

On Dec. 31, city officials, also wary of a repeat of June, submitted a narrow request to the Pentagon for help from the D.C. Guard with traffic and crowd control on Jan. 6, which the D.C. Guard determined would require 340 personnel.

The Army thought the proposal was light on details and didn’t want to authorize it after a first-blush review that resulted in the draft memo, a former senior Pentagon official said, noting that the Army and senior leadership were “scarred by the experiences of June” and that the military has long been hesitant to deploy for domestic matters involving law enforcement.

Senior officials were “very cognizant” that sending in the military “could be misconstrued by so many people as a power grab and play into the narrative that the military was on the cusp of overthrowing duly elected officials to redo an election,” the former official said.

Asked to explain the Army’s position, the other former Pentagon official said: “It is customary practice that law enforcement assets have to be utilized and near exhaustion before DoD will support operations. It is not an official policy but is designed to reinforce that military should be used as a last resort.”

But while top Pentagon leaders have stressed since June that active-duty troops should be used to support domestic law enforcement only as a last resort, the National Guard is used regularly for such missions across the nation.

District officials routinely ask for help from the D.C. Guard for major events, mostly to help with traffic control to free up police officers for other duties.

The D.C. Guard, for example, helped with last year’s July 4 event and aided the city in handling a march on Washington led by the Rev. Al Sharpton in August. The Guard even deployed to prevent large crowds from gathering and spreading the coronavirus during the 2020 cherry blossom festivities.

A District official familiar with the security plans on Jan. 6 couldn’t recall any historical example of the Defense Department rejecting the city’s request to deploy the D.C. Guard.

During a preparatory call ahead of the pro-Trump rally, McCarthy suggested that the city get help from the Justice Department’s Bureau of Prisons, according to the District official. D.C. officials refused, citing concerns they had with federal agents last summer.

City officials thought the D.C. Guard was a better fit, calling the force “a tactical ready unit” that was familiar with the area and had worked with local law enforcement regularly during large-scale events, according to the District official.

According to the former senior Pentagon official, top defense officials discussed the request on calls over the holiday weekend before the Jan. 6 event. Miller had “strong inclinations to support the mayor,” the former senior official said, and eventually Pentagon leaders came to a consensus to grant the request.

The Army approved the request because District officials refused to ask for extra help from federal law enforcement as Army officials had wanted, according to the former Pentagon official.

“It was obvious we didn’t want to find ourselves in a situation where [the D.C. police] needed help and we denied it,” the former Pentagon official said.

After the Pentagon approved the Guard mission, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bower (D) sent a letter on Jan. 5 confirming that the city had not requested additional personnel from federal law enforcement. She said the D.C. police were “well trained and prepared” for the event.

Demand for a lead federal agency

The Army leadership also felt strongly that the military shouldn’t be used unless a federal agency was designated to lead the activities.

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told Miller and acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen that the Justice Department would serve as the “lead” agency, according to people familiar with the arrangement.

As the “federal lead,” the Justice Department essentially was in charge of coordination for the various agencies, a federal law enforcement official familiar with the preparations said.

The designation pertained only to the Justice Department, the FBI, the Defense Department and the Interior Department, the official said, and did not cover the Capitol, where Capitol Police oversee security.

The designation was so vague that officials in the District government and at the D.C. Guard didn’t even know that the Justice Department was functioning as the “lead agency.” The Justice Department declined to comment.

The arrangement fell far short of what happens when the Department of Homeland Security designates a National Special Security Event. On those occasions, such as during the presidential inauguration or the State of the Union address, there is a clear command structure, in which the Secret Service sits atop all the other federal and local agencies. The Jan. 6 event wasn’t declared an NSSE.

The former Pentagon official said the Army leadership wanted to ensure there was a command-and-control architecture for appropriate decision-making and information-sharing before and during the event. The official said the Justice Department fell short of ensuring that.

The D.C. Guard deployment also went ahead, even though federal resources hadn’t been exhausted, as McCarthy had stipulated as a condition in his final memo recommending approval.

Ultimately, the Army leadership approved the Guard mission because it didn’t want to put the District government in a tough place, the former Pentagon official said.