In April, the House Subcommittee on Oversight held a hearing with National Guard whistleblowers who testified that they were ready to be deployed on January 6, 2021 but were held back by the Pentagon, raising concern about General Milley’s actions.
The whistleblowers aimed to correct the record on January 6 and shed light on the security situation.
Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Mayor Muriel Bowser were warned about the security situation prior to January 6 but turned down National Guard troops for political reasons.
Chris Wray’s FBI also failed to notify the Trump administration about potential violence. Despite warnings, Pelosi, Bowser, and other officials declined National Guard assistance, leading to violence that they later blamed on President Trump.
Capitol Police Chief Steve Sund revealed that he sought approval from House and Senate security officials to request the D.C. National Guard to be placed on standby for swift backup if required. However, both entities rejected his request.
Now there’s more troubling developments regarding the military’s actions on January 6th.
National Guard whistleblowers Command Sgt. Major Michael E. Brooks, Colonel Earl G. Matthews, Aaron Dean – Retired, and Captain Timothy Nick, courageously came forward to testify before Congress, in order to set the record straight about the events of January 6.
Colonel Earl Matthews revealed that US military leaders revoked President Trump’s Commander-in-Chief powers on that day. Furthermore, they hesitated to deploy the National Guard due to concerns about optics.
The Daily Mail reported:
Donald Trump’s authority as commander-in-chief was ignored by senior military leadership on January 6, 2021, claims the chief legal advisor for D.C. National Guard on that day.
Colonel Earl Matthews came forward as a whistleblower to the House subcommittee reviewing the January 6 Select Committee’s investigation.
He sat down with DailyMail.com two weeks after the public hearing to explain what he saw happen that day.
He claims that Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, and then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, were plotting to disobey any orders handed down by Trump because they ‘unreasonably’ assumed the then-president was going to break the law and try to use the D.C. National Guard (DCNG) to stop certification of the 2020 presidential election results.
A lot has been made about the breakdown in military and administration communication when it came to the timeline of deploying DCNG to the Capitol.
But Matthews claims senior military leadership was solely focused on getting the heat off of them and putting it back onto Trump.
The Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, Matthews claims, was more than happy to lean into this narrative and blame the entire ordeal on the then-president.
But Matthews says that senior military leadership essentially stripped the president of his authority as commander-in-chief by preemptively planning to go against orders because they didn’t like the optics of uniformed soldiers at the Capitol.
‘I think a very plausible argument can be made that through no fault of his own, President Trump’s command authority over both the D.C. National Guard and the U.S. Army itself had been surreptitiously curtailed by the senior leadership of the Army on January 6, 2021,’ Matthews told DailyMail.com.
He continued: ‘Army leadership had unreasonably anticipated an ‘unlawful order’ from the President, an order that the President had no plans to issue, and were preemptively seeking to curtail his discretion to issue such an order.’
Matthews, who was the Staff Judge Advocate of the DCNG during the riot, was on the consequential and highly discussed phone call the afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021 with McCarthy, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and other senior leadership.
U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund pleaded during the call for the DCNG to help law enforcement in responding to the Capitol riot. And DCNG Commander Maj. Gen. William Walker had prepared his troops to deploy.
Sund said at a congressional hearing, and Matthews reiterated in his interview with DailyMail.com, that Army Staff Director Walter Piatt and Chief of Staff for Operations Charles Flynn were part of that discussion, despite the latter claiming under oath he was not on the call.
