Was worry about the Insurrection Act a reason for the slow response to the 1/6 coup attempt?

A short segment on MSNBC last night by Chris Hayes focused on one possible reason the Pentagon was slow to respond to the attack on the capitol on 1/6. One expert, Ryan Goodman, argued that the Pentagon feared that if it ordered the National Guard to go to the capitol to defend it, Trump would use that as an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and take control of the government by military force.

 

I didn’t recall hearing that concern expressed before in relation to the events surrounding Trump’s 1/6 coup attempt. Some searching showed that concern about the Insurrection Act was mentioned in regard to the George Floyd protests, but apparently not in regard to 1/6. There is some evidence to support Goodman’s argument. His website, Just Security, wrote on Dec. 21, 2021:

One of the most vexing questions about Jan. 6 is why the National Guard took more than three hours to arrive at the Capitol after D.C. authorities and Capitol Police called for immediate assistance. The Pentagon’s restraint in allowing the Guard to get to the Capitol was not simply a reflection of officials’ misgivings about the deployment of military force during the summer 2020 protests, nor was it simply a concern about “optics” of having military personnel at the Capitol. Instead, evidence is mounting that the most senior defense officials did not want to send troops to the Capitol because they harbored concerns that President Donald Trump might utilize the forces’ presence in an attempt to hold onto power.

According to a report released last month, Christopher Miller, who served as acting Secretary of the Defense on Jan. 6, told the Department’s inspector general that he feared “if we put U.S. military personnel on the Capitol, I would have created the greatest Constitutional crisis probably since the Civil War.” In congressional testimony, he said he was also cognizant of “fears that the President would invoke the Insurrection Act to politicize the military in an anti-democratic manner” and that “factored into my decisions regarding the appropriate and limited use of our Armed Forces to support civilian law enforcement during the Electoral College certification.” 

Miller does not specify who held the fears that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act, and he wasn’t asked by Congress. However, it’s now clear that such concerns were shared by General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as former CIA Director and at the time Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Before Nov. 3, Milley and Pompeo confided in one another that they had a persistent worry Trump would try to use the military in an attempt to hold onto power if he lost the election, the Washington Post’s Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker reported. “This military’s not going to be used,” Milley assured Pompeo.

After Trump issued a Dec. 19, 2020 call to action to his supporters to come to DC to protest the certification of the electoral college vote on Jan. 6 (“Be there, will be wild!”), “Milley told his staff that he believed Trump was stoking unrest, possibly in hopes of an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and call out the military,” and that he sought to stay ahead of any effort by the President to use the military in a bid to stay in office, Leonnig and Rucker write.

Milley, according to multiple reports, “feared it was Trump’s ‘Reichstag moment,’ in which, like Adolf Hitler in 1933, he would manufacture a crisis in order to swoop in and rescue the nation from it.”

The top officials’ fears were warranted: Donald Trump, his close aides and a segment of Republican political figures had openly discussed the possibility of invoking the Insurrection Act or using the military to prevent the transfer of power on the basis of false claims that the election was “stolen.” But the Pentagon’s actions with respect to the National Guard suggest a scenario in which, on the basis of such concerns, a potentially profound crisis of command may have played out on Jan. 6.

Close observers of the events of Jan. 6 have mainly posited two reasons for the delay in mobilizing the Guard. The first explanation is one of bureaucratic failures or managerial weaknesses in the military’s procedures that day. A second explanation is that the military was deliberately serving Trump’s effort to interfere with the election by withholding assistance.

We identify a third explanation: that senior military officials constrained the mobilization and deployment of the National Guard to avoid injecting federal troops that could have been re-missioned by the President to advance his attempt to hold onto power.

This third scenario, if true, raises fundamental constitutional questions about the transfer of power:

• Under what conditions might the U.S. military try to subvert the will of the President (even if one ethically agrees with the difficult choices the Pentagon made before and on Jan. 6)?
• What information did senior officials have concerning President Trump’s potential use of the military to hold onto power and who else did they believe was participating in such a scheme?

In June 2020, in response to the protests after the murder of George Floyd, then President Donald Trump indicated his willingness to deploy the U.S. military in American cities. 

• According to one account[1], Trump wanted the military to “beat the fuck out of” Black Lives Matter demonstrators. “Just shoot them,” he apparently told Milley and his Attorney General, William Barr.
• On Jun. 1, 2020, White House aides reportedly went so far as to draft a proclamation to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, which allows the president to employ military forces to “suppress” major civil unrest.

The notion that the President might use the Insurrection Act was seeded among his loyalists. Before and after the 2020 election, a network of individuals close to President Trump suggested, publicly and privately, that he should consider declaring martial law or invoking the Insurrection Act with respect to the election:

• In a Sept. 10, 2020 interview with Alex Jones on his InfoWars program, Trump confidant Roger Stone called for martial law if Trump were to lose the election.
• In a Sept. 12, 2020 interview at the White House with Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro, Trump was asked what he would do in the event Americans “threaten riots” in response to his winning the election. He replied: “We’ll put them down very quickly if they do that…. We have the right to do that, we have the power to do that if we want. Look, it’s called insurrection. We just send them in and we do it very easy. I mean it’s very easy. I’d rather not do that because there’s no reason for it but if we had to we’d do that and put it down within minutes, within minutes. Minneapolis, they were having problems. We sent in the National Guard within a half an hour. That was the end of the problem. It all went away.” (emphasis added)

This bit of news seems to be underreported in view of how important it is to help understand what went on during Trump's 1/6 coup attempt.

Two points here are worth remembering:

• Trump wanted George Floyd protesters shot dead by the US military, not just wounded.

• The Pentagon worried that Trump would use the 1/6 insurrection as an excuse to invoke Insurrection Act and take control of the government by military force. 

Questions: 

1. Is Trump mostly an anti-democratic, violence-prone authoritarian or fascist, mostly a law-abiding patriot, or mostly something else?

2. If Trump claims he had no intention to take and keep power after the 2020 elections, would that be credible or not? 

Footnote: 

1. That account by CNN included these comments about the 2020 George Floyd protesters:

“That's how you're supposed to handle these people,” Trump told his top law enforcement and military officials, according to Bender. “Crack their skulls!”

Trump also told his team that he wanted the military to go in and “beat the f--k out” of the civil rights protesters, Bender writes.

“Just shoot them,” Trump said on multiple occasions inside the Oval Office, according to the excerpts.

When Milley and then-Attorney General William Barr would push back, Trump toned it down, but only slightly, Bender adds.

“Well, shoot them in the leg—or maybe the foot,” Trump said. “But be hard on them!”