The leadership of the U.S. Capitol Police proved either reckless or incompetent Wednesday afternoon. There is no way around that, and each of the excuses offered up as to why there were not sufficient officers or force on hand to prevent the seat of government from being seized in a self-described act of sedition on Donald Trump's behalf are so thin and ridiculous as to be insulting to the nation.
The statement issued by the USCP after the ransacking of congressional offices reeks of misdirection and evasion.
The nation's most violent far-right actors organized their action far in advance, and in public. These actors were well known to law enforcement. Their desire to incite violence was well-known and reported. Donald Trump himself publicly encouraged the mob to attend. That the mob would be (1) very large, (2) composed of the most violent figures on the far-right, and (3) had been formed with the express intent of sabotaging or halting the counting of presidential electoral votes was all public information—even without the cooperation of the FBI or other federal anti-terrorism experts, the extreme danger posed by the crowd of known violent seditionists was evident for many days beforehand.
And yet security at the U.S. Capitol, during a joint session of Congress, gave no indication that law enforcement was prepared for any violent confrontation whatsoever. The same displays of force and the same heavy weaponry deployed to get Donald Trump to a church he had not been given permission to be at were nowhere to be seen. When the Capitol lines were quickly breached, there was no assembled backup to protect the officers being attacked. As top figures in the presidential line of succession gathered in the building were forced to hide or evacuate, officers took no further action.
If Capitol Police leadership found themselves overwhelmed by a violent white nationalist, neo-Nazi and insurrectionist mob, it is because they still assumed the mob to be less dangerous than any collection of Black Americans protesting for their basic rights.
Law enforcement used less force to protect the top members of federal government than are brought to bear to protect the windows of a Starbucks.
It is unforgivable, to be sure. But we also cannot assume that Donald Trump's appointed law enforcement officials did not intentionally minimize their calculations of probable violence in briefing lower tiers of government on what would be taking place. We can presume with near-certainty, in fact, that the same Department of Justice and other officials who responded to protests this summer with paramilitary force explicitly chose to minimize law enforcement presence around the Capitol in an effort to avoid photographs of such presence during a pre-organized event promoted and encouraged by Donald Trump himself.
It is entirely possible that top law enforcement officials chose to leave the Capitol insufficiently protected so as to avoid angering Trump with pictures of federal officers confronting his crowd. This may amount to treason.
There is no way any American can trust any official left in Donald Trump's government. They have repeatedly assisted Donald Trump in crimes; they have repeatedly abandoned their own oaths when faced with a whining, petulant, and delusional madman's latest tantrum. From top military officials to the Department of Justice, from the FBI to Trump's national security advisers—it is now taken as a matter of course, and especially after the mass purge of government officials mounted by Trump's own in-house fascist allies, that remaining officials are the ones willing to damage the nation rather than oppose Trump's orders.
The Capitol Police leadership must be investigated, but there seems no possible defense of their incompetence. But the extent to which the Trump administration intentionally downplayed the known threat of precisely what we saw on Wednesday—the precise attack on Congress that had been previously planned by seditionist Trump allies—and intentionally misled Capitol officials or withheld needed aid should also be investigated.
When the seat of our government was breached by a band of mere petty thugs, the government of the United States could mount no competent resistance.
That is unforgivable. Absolutely unforgivable. And it may yet amount to complicity in the attacks.