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Saying the quiet part out loud

Ron Johnson is just letting it all out:

Froomkin makes the point that the Capitol police were, in fact, warned explicitly days before. (This is not the Norfolk FBI warning of the 5th — this came in on the 3rd.) Here’s the memo:

Due to the tense political environment following the 2020 election, the threat of disruptive actions or violence cannot be ruled out. Supporters of the current president see January 6, 2021, as the last opportunity to overturn the results of the presidential election. This sense of desperation and disappointment may lead to more of an incentive to become violent. Unlike previous post-election protests, the targets of the pro-Trump supporters are not necessarily the counter-protesters as they were previously, but rather Congress itself is the target on the 6th.

As outlined above, there has been a worrisome call for protesters to come to these events armed and there is the possibility that protesters may be inclined to become violent. Further, unlike the events on November 14, 2020, and December 12, 2020, there are several more protests scheduled on January 6, 2021, and the majority of them will be on Capitol grounds.

The two protests expected to be the largest of the day – the Women for American First protest on the Ellipse and the Stop the Steal protest in Areas 8 and 9 —  may draw thousands of participants and both have been promoted by President Trump himself. The Stop the Steal protest in particular does not have a permit, but several high profile speakers, including Members of Congress are expected to speak at the event. This combined with Stop the Steal’s propensity to attract white supremacists, militia members, and others who actively promote violence, may lead to significantly dangerous situations for law enforcement and the general public alike.

Froomkin writes:

The point is that clearly something else was going on in [then chief of the Capitol Police] Sund’s head to reduce his sense of alarm. And if you think about it for just an instant, you know exactly what it was.

As Rep. Cori Bush – a veteran of many Black Lives Matter protests – put it on MSNBC the very evening of the insurrection: “Had it been people who look like me, had it been the same amount of people, but had they been Black and brown, we wouldn’t have made it up those steps… we would have been shot, we would have been tear gassed.”

The reporting on this element of the story – why Sund and the House and Senate sergeants-at-arms, also older white males, weren’t particularly alarmed by the MAGA horde – has been terrible. Nearly nonexistent.

The one exception has been an article by Joaquin Sapien and Joshua Kaplan for ProPublica, based on interviews with 19 current and former U.S. Capitol Police officers. They reported:

The interviews…  revealed officers’ concerns about disparities in the way the force prepared for Black Lives Matter demonstrations versus the pro-Trump protests on Jan. 6. Officers said the Capitol Police force usually plans intensively for protests, even if they are deemed unlikely to grow violent. Officers said they spent weeks working 12- or 16-hour days, poised to fight off a riot, after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police — even though intelligence suggested there was not much danger from protesters.

“We had intel that nothing was going to happen — literally nothing,” said one former official with direct knowledge of planning for the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. “The response was, ‘We don’t trust the intel.’”

By contrast, for much of the force, Jan. 6 began like any other day.

“We normally have pretty good information regarding where these people are and how far they are from the Capitol,” said Keith McFaden, a former Capitol Police officer and union leader who retired from the force following the riot. “We heard nothing that day.”

But nobody at the Senate hearing even mentioned the issue of race. Not once.

Nobody asked Sund to compare and contrast his preparedness for Jan. 6 with his preparedness for Black Lives Matter protests that weren’t even nearby. Nobody asked why Sund didn’t give front-line officers tear gas. Nobody asked Sund or the two sergeants-at-arms if the white privilege they shared with the mob had made it seem unthreatening to them, unlike the “other”.

Indeed, the only mention of possible complicity came when Trumpist Sen. Josh Hawley lashed out at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s choice of retired Lt. General Russel Honoré to lead a review of Capitol security. A day after the ransacking of the Capitol, Honoré told a TV station what a lot of people were thinking: “We knew they were coming; everybody knew they were coming,” he said. “I’ve just never seen so much incompetence, so they’re either that stupid, or ignorant or complicit. I think they were complicit.”

BuzzFeed’s Sarah Mimms tweeted:

Hawley ended by asking each of them, “Were you complicit in the attacks on Jan. 6?” They, obviously, each say no. Sund is offended. Hawley: “Of course none of you were.” So that takes care of that.

Reporters from alternative media expressed some skepticism about the hearing and the senator’s questions. Daily Beast reporter Spencer Ackerman noted:

HuffPost reporter Igor Bobcic tweeted:

It’s worth noting no senator has brought up yet in this hearing fact that some Capitol Police officers are under investigation for their roles aiding rioters on Jan 6

And veteran military reporter Sig Christensen complained:

The hearings are going just as I thought they would. Before long, the principal players in this saga will have disinfected the crime scene and declared themselves blameless, and the competing narratives out there will so muddy the waters that no one will know what to believe.

But the mainstream media coverage was awful.

The lack of intelligent, appropriately skeptical reporting on the Capitol Police’s failure of preparedness has been absolutely shocking from the beginning. It was shocking to me on Jan. 13. It’s still shocking six weeks later.

And now, reporters, like the senators, are focusing on that one, one-source FBI report — and on Sund’s excuse that he didn’t have specific intelligence of a coordinated attack. […]

The AP reported:

Faulty intelligence was to blame for the outmanned Capitol defenders’ failure to anticipate the violent mob that invaded the iconic building and halted certification of the presidential election on Jan. 6, the officials who were in charge of security declared Tuesday in their first public testimony on the insurrection.

The Washington Post reported:

An FBI warning of potential violence reached the U.S. Capitol Police on the eve of the Jan. 6 attack, but top leaders testified during a Senate hearing Tuesday that they did not see it.

But everyone paying attention at the time realized the Capitol was going to be the target on Jan. 6. And while in retrospect it all seems inevitable, this momentous event in our history could very likely have been nipped in the bud by better preparation.

Many members of the Capitol police, including the leadership, no doubt felt a sort of kinship with the Trump “protesters.” He certainly had the support of many police around the country. They thought these were their people. It turned out that they were violent, destructive, thugs. Imagine that.

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