A little recognized fact with regard to the January 6 chaos on Capitol Hill is that Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker herself, is in total charge of security for the Capitol. She is, for instance, in charge of the Capitol Police. If they don’t perform, one way or another, the buck stops with her.
Everyone is looking for answers as to how the Capitol could simply be overrun as it was. Why were the Capitol Police not more strategically deployed? Why weren’t reinforcements called? Why did they make such lame attempts to stop the hoards of miscreants that overwhelmed them? The answers lie with Ms. Pelosi.
One citizen video showed a twenty-something man in a bright red Trump cap pleading with Capitol police to call for backup after the Capitol itself had already been breached. Yet they didn’t move a muscle. They kept lounging up against the Capitol building while the place was being pillaged right in front of them.
It’s worthy of reminder that the breach of the Capitol occurred 21 minutes before Trump even finished his speech, a 35-minute walk away. This means the chaos started almost a full hour before anybody listening to his speech could have even gotten there. This obviously creates severe logistical problems for the charge that his speech incited this whole thing.
It’s almost as if the police were under orders not to intervene, as if it was serving somebody’s political interest for the violence to go on virtually unchecked. It reminds you of the words of the mayor of Baltimore in the wake of the “mostly peaceful” Freddy Gray riots, in which she proudly proclaimed that she had held the police back in order to give rioters “the space to destroy.”
The FBI had known for months, by monitoring Facebook (note: not Parler), that groups had been planning the assault on the Capitol since November. The FBI director, Christopher Wray, is the only one who can explain why they didn’t bother to notify anybody. I’m not aware that anyone has even asked him that question.
We now know that President Trump had already ordered 10,000 National Guard troops to be standing by to assist. But they were never called into action. Nancy Pelosi will have to explain that one. Perhaps at some level she wanted maximum mayhem in the hope it would make Trump look as bad as possible and turn the public and even Republicans against him, even if she lost her lectern in the process.
We also now know that Officer Sicknick was not killed by being hit over the head with a fire extinguisher, as the media breathlessly claimed. In fact, he texted his brother that same night that he was fine. It was the next day that he experienced a medical event (a stroke?) that hospitalized him and killed him. The New York Times finally got around to retracting their original fact-free story on this just two days ago.
So while we are rightly castigating everyone who trespassed and vandalized the Capitol, and calling for their prosecution, let’s not forget that Nancy Pelosi, the Capitol Police, and the FBI did not exactly cover themselves with glory either.
The author may be contacted at bfischer@afa.net
