One of the biggest lies that former President Trump and his allies have perpetuated about January 6th is that Trump ordered the National Guard to secure the Capitol.
His press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, was the first to unfurl that tale, at 3:36 p.m. on Jan. 6th:
There is no evidence that he gave such an order.
In a video message the next day, Trump claimed “I immediately deployed the National Guard and federal law enforcement to secure the building and expel the intruders.”
But one thing that has become clear as we have learned about the 187 minutes that the Capitol was under siege is that the dithering Trump did not “immediately” do anything.
Trump lied when he said on Jan 5 that Pence was on board with his…
Over time, the lie about Trump sending in the National Guard has taken other forms. For example, Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, has claimed that Trump gave a direct order to have 10,000 National Guard troops “at the ready” on Jan. 6th, but that his request was somehow rejected by Democrats like Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
In February 2021, Meadows told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, “As many as 10,000 National Guard troops were told to be on the ready by the secretary of defense. That was a direct order from President Trump.”
That lie has now been decisively put to rest.
Yesterday, the House January 6th Committee revealed testimony from Christopher Miller, Trump’s acting secretary of defense, rejecting the notion that Trump ordered thousands of Guard troops to be standing by:
In the audio clip, a questioner asks Miller whether there is “any accuracy” to Meadows’s statement. Miller’s reply:
Not from my perspective. I was never given any direction or order or knew of any plans of that nature. So, I was surprised by seeing that publicly . . . we obviously had plans for activating more folks, but that was not anything more than contingency planning. There was no official message traffic or anything of that nature.
The questioner follows up: “Just so we’re clear, you did not have 10,000 troops, quote ‘to be on the ready’ . . . prior to January 6th?”
Miller: “A non-military person probably could have some sort of weird interpretation, but no, to answer your question, that was not part of my plan or the Department of Defense’s plan.”
Questioner: “To be crystal clear, there was no direct order from President Trump to put 10,000 troops ‘to be on the ready’ for January 6th, correct?”
Miller: “That’s correct. There was no direct—there was no order from the president.”
Keep in mind that Miller is no Never Trumper. Within a week of the 2020 election, Trump “terminated” Mark Esper, his defense secretary for the previous year and a half, and handed the job to Miller. Given the chaotic nature of his appointment in the final days of Trump’s presidency, Miller was not subjected to Senate confirmation hearings for the position. (The confirmation hearing for the position he briefly held before that, the director of counterintelligence, was perfunctory.) And during his ten-week tenure running DoD, Miller often proved willing to indulge Trump’s most far-out demands.
For example, as the Jan. 6th Committee previously revealed, Miller heeded requests from Meadows to follow up on a conspiracy theory regarding Italian satellites that were, supposedly, rigged to flip votes from Trump. In his capacity as the highest-ranking defense official, Miller phoned a DoD attaché in Rome about it, who disabused him of the idea.
Meanwhile, in an appearance on Fox News last month, Miller and his former DoD chief of staff, Kash Patel, agreed with Meadows’s claim that Trump had authorized thousands of National Guard to be ready for Jan. 6th. Miller’s statement on Fox seems to contradict his statement given to the Jan. 6th Committee under oath and under the threat of perjury.
The Fox interview was with Sean Hannity, who moonlighted as a secret crisis communications adviser to Trump throughout his presidency and frequently coordinated with his staff. Hannity has repeatedly used his program to promote the idea that Trump’s request to secure the Capitol was stymied by Democrats on Jan. 6th.
Why the disparity? Well, there’s no criminal penalty for lying to the press. If he had lied to someone with journalistic integrity there would be some accountability as he would be exposed as the liar he is but no one who watches Fox news will ever learn of that.
I’m surprised that Carpenter didn’t mention the General Milley testimony to the Committee in which he says that Mark Meadows called him up to say that they needed to challenge the “narrative” that the president wasn’t in charge. I think that may be relevant…
Of course Trump didn’t order the National Guard against his devoted followers. He wanted them to stop the count that day and they were succeeding. Why would he interfere with that?