ProPublica reports today on interviews where riot squad cops open up about the disastrous response to Capitol insurrection.
The Capitol Police were prepared extensively for BLM protesters, but were not prepared for pro-Trump protests.
The interviews also revealed officers’ concerns about disparities in the way the force prepared for Black Lives Matter demonstrations versus the pro-Trump protests on Jan. 6.
Some officers did not believe their leadership’s “intelligence” and even forwarded scary social media posts to their superiors, but many officers on the ground were neither warned nor equipped to deal with pro-Trump violence.
“We had intel that nothing was going to happen — literally nothing,” said one former official with direct knowledge of planning for the Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
After being told Trump’s mob was not a threat, the officers were warned about the possibility of violence from the left.
“The main thing we were told was to be on the lookout for counterdemonstrators.”
The article describes years of mismanaged contingency planning and siloed miscommunication, but these intelligence reports were particularly biased and inaccurate.
The intelligence reports provide a kind of threat scale that gauges the likelihood of arrests. The Jan. 6 rally was scored as “improbable,” meaning it had a 20% to 45% chance of resulting in arrests. Two small anti-Trump counterdemonstrations organized by local left-wing and antifascist groups were assigned the same risk level.
Instead of assigning the threat based on the size of the mob, the scale of the social media campaign, the level of grievance, the dangerous rhetoric, or the past patterns of violence among groups known to be coming to DC for the event, the still officially secret intelligence report both dismissed the significant risk of pro-Trump arrests while inflating the risk of anti-Trump arrests, without any documented reasoning.
Ex-chief Sund denied spending less effort preparing for Trump’s mob than for BLM protesters and blamed commanders for not passing on intel to their officers. Sund blames ‘unpredictable events’ and ‘intelligence failures’ instead of himself, but Sund also blames those above him, from the sergeants-at-arms, who supposedly ignored his requests for the National Guard two days earlier and who still remain silent after resigning, to the Pentagon.
“I still cannot fathom why in the midst of an armed insurrection, which was broadcast worldwide on television, it took the Department of Defense over three hours to approve an urgent request for National Guard support,” Sund wrote in his letter.
The whole article is a must read, and concludes in part by noting that the officers are still waiting for an apology from their leadership for the total disaster most of them survived.