US Capitol Police Chief Testifies FBI Report Warning Danger of ‘War’ on January 6 Never Reached Him

10/03/2021

by Morgan Artyukhina
Feb. 24, 2021

Despite his far-reaching testimony about the police force’s response to the January 6 insurrection, Steven Sund, the since-resigned chief of US Capitol Police (USCP), questions remain about the extent to which his own officers cooperated with the crowd in breaching the legislature.

Sund, who was chief during the January 6 insurrection by supporters of then-US President Donald Trump, told Congress during a public hearing on Tuesday that he never received a key FBI intelligence report about the violent intentions of members of the crowd.

“That information would have been helpful,” Sund told a joint investigation by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and the Senate Rules Committee on Tuesday.

Sund said he only learned after the attack that the FBI’s field office in Norfolk, Virginia, had predicted the crowd of Trump supporters would commit “war” during their huge rally in Washington, DC, on January 6.

‘Stop the Steal’

Prior to the riot, thousands of participants had attended a rally in front of the White House hosted by Trump that aimed to “Stop the Steal,” furthering Trump’s claims that his loss in the November 2020 presidential election was due to fraud.

At the rally, Trump urged his followers to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell,” promising he would join them in convincing Congress to halt its certification of the election results, a process already underway. While Trump didn’t accompany them, some 8,000 people quickly descended on the Capitol and overwhelmed parts of the police line

“When the group arrived at the perimeter, they did not act like any group of protestors I had ever seen,” Sund told lawmakers. He resigned the day after the attack. “No single civilian law enforcement agency – and certainly not the USCP – is trained and equipped to repel, without significant military or other law enforcement assistance, an insurrection of thousands of armed, violent, and coordinated individuals focused on breaching a building at all costs,” Sund said.

Indeed, among those who stormed the legislature were many radical elements, including neo-Nazis, “Three Percenter” and “Oath Keeper” militia members, as well as former and currently serving members of the US military, who were seen deploying military tactics such as the “Ranger file,” a technique used by US Special Forces as they prepare to breach a building, along with other militant tactics.

Army Help Rebuffed Over ‘Optics’

Sund also sought help from the National Guard a total of six times before and after the insurrection. However, he told lawmakers Tuesday that in the days prior, then-House Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving was concerned about the “optics” of soldiers outside the Capitol and referred him to then-Senate Sergeant at Arms Michael Stenger, who similarly refused the request. However, Stenger advised Irving to seek information about how quickly guardsmen could be deployed if requested. Both figures denied Sund had made the requests during their Tuesday testimony; they have both since resigned.

However, over at the Pentagon, even more gum was being placed in the works. Maj. Gen. William J. Walker, the commanding general of the District of Columbia National Guard, told the Washington Post that he was required to seek a “concept of operation” approval before even a tiny number of guardsmen would be dispatched – a standard that effectively guaranteed an emergency deployment would be impossible.

The reason for this, Pentagon officials told the Post, was again a question of optics. One Trump appointee at the Pentagon told the paper the military had “learned its lesson” from the disastrous way the June 2020 Black Lives Matter protests were crushed by the guard and would be “absolutely nowhere near the Capitol building” because “we don’t want to send the wrong message.”