In her memoir, former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., falsely framed former President Donald Trump as the mastermind of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, with claims that the commander-in-chief resisted calls to deploy the National Guard. The Federalist exclusively reported on Friday that the vice chair of the since-disbanded Select Committee on Jan. 6 even suppressed evidence showing Trump actually pushed for more troops.
In her December book, Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning, Cheney outlined how the select committee discovered the White House was warned about the potential for violence in the run-up to Jan. 6, 2021. The chapter titled “They Knew” said the committee learned of warnings through records obtained by the Secret Service.
“To be clear, the issue was not that the Secret Service failed to brief those up the chain at the White House about the threat,” Cheney wrote. “It appeared to the Committee that this information was being conveyed up the chain, including directly to Mark Meadows and President Trump.”
Cheney wrote as if Trump was negligent about the need for security in Washington on the day of the electoral count.
“With the weight of the intelligence we received via Homeland Security, it is exceptionally difficult to believe that anyone in the White House with access to this information could have failed to recognize this obvious menace,” Cheney wrote.
But the Trump administration did recognize the risk of mayhem and actively sought to deploy 10,000 National Guard troops to reinforce D.C. police. Cheney just covered it up.
Last week, Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway reported that Cheney’s committee concealed testimony from former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Anthony Ornato. In Ornato’s first interview with House investigators on Jan. 28, 2022, Ornato told lawmakers he overheard Meadows urge D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to mobilize as many National Guard troops as needed.
“He also testified President Trump had suggested 10,000 would be needed to keep the peace at the public rallies and protests scheduled for January 6, 2021,” Hemingway reported. “Ornato also described White House frustration with Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller’s slow deployment of assistance on the afternoon of January 6, 2021.”
Lawmakers on the partisan probe kept the transcript from the public and went on a press campaign to discredit Ornato as a witness. In her book, however, Cheney cited Ornato’s testimony as evidence of White House dismissiveness surrounding the security situation in Washington on Jan. 6.
“It is also extremely difficult to believe that Mark Meadows, Donald Trump, and others were not briefed,” Cheney wrote, adding:
I would invite anyone who still harbors doubts to read the Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, and in particular to download and read the November 29, 2022, recorded examination by Chief Investigative Counsel Tim Heaphy of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Tony Ornato. They knew.
But Cheney made no reference to Ornato’s Jan. 28 interview when he told lawmakers that Trump actually sought 10,000 National Guard troops to secure the Capitol.
“The former J6 Select Committee apparently withheld Mr. Ornato’s critical witness testimony from the American people because it contradicted their pre-determined narrative,” Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., who is investigating the Jan. 6 committee, said on Friday. “Mr. Ornato’s testimony proves what Mr. Meadows has said all along: President Trump did in fact offer 10,000 National Guard troops to secure the U.S. Capitol, which was turned down.”
Ornato told lawmakers that Mayor Bowser rejected the request for additional Guard troops in Washington, D.C. “Meadows,” he said, “wanted to know if she needed any more guardsmen.”
And I remember the number 10,000 coming up of, you know, ‘The president wants to make sure that you have enough.’ You know, ‘He is willing to ask for 10,000.’ I remember that number. Now that you said it, it reminded me of it. And that she was all set. She had, I think it was like 350 or so for intersection control, and those types of things not in the law enforcement capacity at the time.
Bowser ultimately requested a few hundred unarmed troops to offer District police rudimentary assistance.
“No DCNG personnel shall be armed during this mission, and at no time, will DCNG personnel or assets be engaged in domestic surveillance, searches, or seizures of US persons,” she wrote in a New Year’s Eve letter to the commanding general of the local National Guard. Bowser had previously been a critic of additional federal troops in D.C. when far-left demonstrators were tearing down the city in 2020.
The White House then turned to the Department of Defense to preemptively deploy more Guard troops.
“I remember Chief Meadows talking to DOD about that, I believe,” Ornato told the J6 committee. “I remember Chief Meadows letting me know that, ‘Hey, there was going to be National Guard that’s going to be at Joint Base Andrews in case they’re going to need some more, we’re going to — the Mayor would need any, we’re going to make sure they’re out there.’”
The select committee, with Cheney at the helm, refused to investigate then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s own opposition to additional Guard troops at the Capitol. Pelosi was reportedly concerned about the “optics” of reinforcements at the Capitol after Democrats condemned the use of federal troops in Washington amid the 2020 riots.
The House speaker was slow to give the green light for additional Guard troops on Jan. 6, while the White House became frustrated with Secretary Miller’s slow response to dispatch reinforcements once the Capitol was breached. Cheney herself reportedly discouraged the Pentagon from taking action with an op-ed she organized by former defense secretaries days before the riot to preemptively condemn troop mobilization.
Ornato described Meadows’ vexation with the Defense Department on the day of the riot:
“Every time [Meadows] would ask, ‘What’s taking so long?’ It would be, like, you know, ‘This isn’t just start the car and we’re there. We have to muster them up, we have to’ — so it was constant excuses coming of — not excuses, but what they were actually doing to get them there. So, you know, ‘We only have so many here right now. They’re given an hour to get ready.’ So there’s, like, all these timelines that was being explained to the chief. And he relayed that, like, you know — he’s like, ‘I don’t care, just get them here,’ you know, and ‘Get them to the Capitol, not to the White House.’”
Cheney, however, never let Ornato’s testimony come to light. Instead, her committee said in the final report that Trump “never gave any order to deploy the National Guard on January 6th or on any other day. Nor did he instruct any Federal law enforcement agency to assist.”
Hemingway reported Friday, “Ornato’s description of events also matched testimony offered by Kash Patel, the former chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense, in the Colorado Supreme Court hearing about Democrat efforts to limit the ability of Americans to vote for the candidate of their choice.”
“The Colorado court, whose efforts to remove Trump from the ballot were so extreme they were overturned this week by a unanimous Supreme Court, claimed Patel’s ‘testimony regarding Trump authorizing’ at least 10,000 National Guardsmen was ‘illogical’ and ‘completely devoid of any evidence in the record,’” Hemingway wrote. “Because Ornato’s corroborating information had been suppressed from the public record by the January 6 committee, the Colorado Supreme Court improperly dismissed evidence.”
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