By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Democrats on the House Oversight and Reform Committee had their first shot this week at questioning Trump’s acting Secretary of Defense Christopher C. Miller about his role in botching the military response to the U.S. Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6., along with the questionable advance intelligence handling of the acting attorney general at the time, Jeffrey A. Rosen.

Bill Barr had resigned as attorney general at Christmas, and Trump had fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper in November by Twitter Tweet.

In the cursory deadline local reporting on the hearing by the Washington Post, much is made of Miller’s testimony under oath attributing the Capitol riot and breach to an “organized conspiracy,” but not so much is made of Miller’s and Rosen’s dancing around the facts about President and Commander-in-Cheif Donald Trump’s role in inciting the insurrection and delaying the police and military response to quell the riot.

Several Democrats took shots at Miller and Rosen during the hearing, but none of those shots landed with an explosive thud. No wrongdoing was admitted.

If you were to go online and watch the video of the hearing, however, and go in about three hours and eight minutes, you will see Georgia Democrat Hank Johnson come the closest to nailing Miller down.

“In short it was three hours after the first request for National Guard assistance at the Capitol before permission was granted by you (to respond), isn’t that correct?”

Miller, who was in charge at the Pentagon across the Potomac River in Virginia during the insurrection, claimed that was not the case, and hemmed and hawed a response.

“How did it come to pass that you slow-rolled the deployment of National Guard troops to put down a violent insurrection that you were observing taking place at the Capitol? How could it be that three hours would pass before you authorized National Guard troops to reinforce the Capitol Hill and DC police?”

Once again, Miller claimed that was “inaccurate.”

But in testimony before the U.S. Senate, under oath, William J. Walker, Commanding General of the District of Columbia National Guard, testified it was 5:08 p.m. before Miller gave the authorization to approve the “operational plan” and allow his troops to deploy. That came after Trump himself finally made a statement urging his “good people” to finally go home.

According to The Washington Post’s detailed timeline of the events that day, the first breach of the Capitol occurred about 2:15 p.m.

“Did you ever plan, with anyone inside or outside the Trump administration, or with President Trump himself, to delay deployment of National Guard troops to the Capitol on Jan. 6?” Johnson asked.

Miller denied it with a “no” so emphatic that it might qualify for a Shakespearean response: “methinks he doth protest too much.”

“Were you ordered to delay deployment of troops?”

“One hundred percent absolutely not,” Miller denied. “No, that is not the case.”

So at least we have one member of Congress asking this direct question and Miller’s emphatic denial on the record, although that may not be the end of the story. Also during the hearing, Miller begged the committee for mercy since he is no longer working under the umbrella of protection of the U.S. government, and he said his family had already been threatened, although he didn’t say by whom. Who else but by Trump and his band of right-wing, neo-Nazi militiamen?

Miller detailed multiple conversations with Trump in the days before the riot in his full written statement submitted to the committee, but he omitted those and previous criticism of Trump’s speech Wednesday in his opening statement. He did affirm those points later in response to questions from members of the committee.

During the combative committee hearing, with Republicans trying to spin the story to make it seem Trump had no responsibility for inciting the insurrection, even arguing that it was not in fact an insurrection, Massachusetts Democrat Stephen F. Lynch pressed Miller about whether Trump’s speech incited the riot. The president and still commander-in -chief at the time, technically in charge of the troops, implored thousands of supporters to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell” to save their country (from a fraudulent election stolen by the black people in cities who out voted them).

Miller, appearing remotely via live video feed, contradicted his previous statements and said he did not believe Trump’s speech was the only reason for the violence, citing the apparent degree of preparation and organization on the part of the Proud Boys and other groups taking part in storming the Capitol.

But Illinois Congressman Mike Quigley was having none of it.

“If you were the effing cavalry, you never showed up. You never got there on time, and we were exposed because of this,” Quigley said. “You were not in the room, I was.”

He chided Miller after nearly five hours of questioning. “You lost, and you don’t have the intestinal fortitude to own up to your responsibility.”

There are many in Washington who believe the insurrection was an “inside job” in a way, and that Trump as commander-in-chief issued some kind of a tacit “stand down order” to allow the breach to take place. We reported as much on Jan. 11, only five days after the siege.

Some of this reporting has been confirmed, with video evidence showing that some Capitol Police officers took down barriers and let the rioters in, and escorted them in some doors on the East side of the Capitol and into the Senate chamber and back out again.

But according to reporting by NPR, the Capitol Police answer only to Congress and are not subject to Freedom of Information Act demands, so no news organization has yet obtained the Capitol Police radio chatter from that day. A source told us, according to two officers who heard it on the radio, that they were issued a “stand down” order over the radio as the rioters approached the Capitol.

Let’s not forget what Trump actually said about letting the rioters into the building in his “Stop the Steal” speech.

TRUMP: … we’re going to walk down to the Capitol — (APPLAUSE) — and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. (LAUGHTER) Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.

And I would love to have, if those tens of thousands of people would be allowed, the military, the Secret Service — and we want to thank you — and the police and law enforcement — great, you’re doing a great job. But I would love it if they could be allowed to come up with us. Is that possible? Can you just let them (in), please?

We reported this along with the full text of the speech here.

The unintelligible full text of Trump’s Call to Arms on Jan. 6

As for Rosen’s testimony, he was relevant primarily because the U.S. Department of Justice was technically the lead agency for gathering and passing on intelligence about the planned insurrection to local law enforcement. In previous testimony, it has been established that a warning about potential violence at the “Stop the Steal” rally and march to the Capitol was simply sent in a regular email message to the House and Senate Sargent’s at Arms and Capitol Police Chief Steven A. Sund, as well as Robert J. Contee, the D.C. Metropolitan Police Chief.

Clearly the Trump administration officials were not on high alert because it was a rally by mostly white Trump supporters, who had clashed with Antifa and Black Lives Matters peaceful protesters in previous events. But according to exclusive reporting by the New American Journal, it was revealed that members of BLM and Antifa knew in advance that they would be blamed for violence on Jan. 6, so both groups issued stand down orders and told their people not to show up.

I personally interviewed members of Antifa that day and week and discovered that they were more than 1,000 miles away in a Florida campground.

Democrats scoffed at Rosen’s claims the Justice Department engaged in “very robust intelligence-sharing” with federal and local partners ahead of the violence.

“This appears to have been a Keystone cops operations when it comes to executive branch agencies pointing fingers at each other,” said Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Democrat from Florida.

California Democrat Jackie Speier accused law enforcement officials of trying to duck responsibility for failing to prevent the riot from happening, arguing that neither the FBI nor the Justice Department did enough to notify senior officials or other agencies of warnings indicating impending violence, or to call up reinforcements before the chaos erupted.

“It reminds me a lot of 9/11, where it never percolates to the top,” she said.

Rosen claimed he directed Justice Department agencies to take preliminary steps to prepare for the riot beforehand, including ordering an FBI SWAT team based in Baltimore to relocate to Washington for the day.

But in her closing statement, Committee Chair Carolyn B. Maloney, a Democrat from New York, took no quarter from Trump administration officials responsible for the nation’s security on Jan. 6. She indicated a disappointment with the testimony of Miller and Rosen.

“They would have us believe that DOJ and DOD did EVERYTHING right on Jan. 6. That there was no room for improvement,” she said. “And that the horror that every American saw on television was not their problem.”

“I strongly disagree,” she said. “Jan. 6 was a historic failure. The Capitol was overrun. Several Americans died. And our nation’s peaceful transfer of power was delayed and nearly derailed.”

“If the attorney general had done his job, then our law enforcement agencies would have been better prepared for the threat of violence by President Trump’s supporters,” she said.

“If the Defense Secretary had done his job, the mob attack would have been repelled, hours earlier,” she added.

Mr. Miller learned that rioters had reached the Capitol perimeter by 1:30 p.m.

He “activated” the Guard at 3 p.m.

But the Guard did not deploy until Miller approved an operational plan at 4:32 p.m.

“He admitted today that he did not approve that plan until 90 minutes later,” Maloney said, raising her voice.

The Guard finally arrived at the Capitol about 5 p.m., after the DC Metro Police had come to the rescue of Capitol Police and began clearing the building and pushing back the mob.

“Mr. Miller claimed this was response was ‘rapid’,” she said. “But the facts show it was disastrously slow.”

“Of course the person most responsible for this national travesty is former President Donald Trump himself,” she said. “He set the date. He fed the big lie to his supporters. He told them to go to the Capitol and ‘fight like hell.’ And when they attacked, they put lives at risk, they entered our Capitol, he just sat back and did nothing to protect the Capitol and the people.

“The Trump administration must be held accountable for the Jan. 6 attack,” she said. “They cannot pass the buck.”

She called for the various agencies to turn over requested documents and for a special bi-partisan commission to look into the events of the day.