It was Mr. Pence who was instrumental in moving troops to the White House, officials said.
“There were two or three phone calls with Vice President Pence. He was very animated, and he gave very explicit, very direct, unambiguous orders. There was no question about that. And I can get you the exact quotes from some of our records somewhere,” Mr Milley told the House Committee in an interview. “But he was very animated, very direct, very determined to Secretary Miller. Get the army here, get the guard here. Put down this situation, et cetera.”
By contrast, said Mr Milley, the call he received from Mr Meadows was about preserving Mr Trump’s image. He remembered that Mr. Meadows said something along the lines of, “We need to stop the story that the vice president makes all the decisions. We need to establish the story, you know, that the president is still in charge and things are stable or stable.
The Inspector General’s report cleared top Pentagon officials of any wrongdoing in their response to the January 6 attacks. But a former top DC National Guard official sharply criticized the report, accusing top military officials of blocking attempts to deploy National Guard troops and lying about their actions to investigators.
Colonel Earl Matthews, who served as the DC National Guard’s top attorney, expelled two generals—Charles A. Flynn and Walter E. Piatt—for continuing to oppose the National Guard’s deployment even after Chief Steven A. Sund of the Capitol Police had issued an urgent call for backup.
General Flynn is the brother of Michael T. Flynn, who served as Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser and later took an active role in undoing the results of the 2020 election.
In addition to the delay in deployment, there was a Byzantine stew from competing authorities and jurisdictions that had various measures in place to bring order to January 6. For example, for Chief Sund to apply for DC National Guard troops to the Capitol, he needed the approval of an obscure organization called the Capitol Police Board, a group made up of House and Senate sergeants and, oddly enough, the Capitol’s architect.
