The head of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) in Washington, DC, told senators Tuesday that there was an initial “reluctance” to send the National Guard during the Jan. 6 riots to the U.S. Capitol, a resistance that the he left “surprised” and “stunned,” given the severity of the violent attack.
Speaking before a couple of Senate committees, Acting Chief Robert Contee said that at 2:22 p.m., Jan. 6, more than an hour after his forces were summoned to the Capitol, he was part of an emergency phone call that included leaders from the Capitol Police, the National Guard, and the Army Department.
“I was surprised by the reluctance to immediately send the National Guard to the Capitol precinct,” Contee told senators on the National Security and Standards committees.
It would be almost an hour before the Pentagon approved the deployment of more Guard troops to deactivate the violent crowd, and those troops would not arrive at the Capitol until 5:40 p.m. Capitol police had called for federal reinforcements.
This long delay has become the central focus of Congressional investigation into the deadly assault, an investigation that was publicly launched with a view to the Senate on Tuesday.
Contee said that at two-thirty in the afternoon, just minutes after the emergency call with the Pentagon, his office had called for help from New Jersey police departments.
“From then on, another 3 and a half hours passed until all the riot police were removed from the Capitol,” Contee said.
Other witnesses testifying before the Senate are Sund, former House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving, and former Senate Arms Sergeant Michael Stenger, all in office on Jan. 6, but they have since resigned.
Echoing the accounts of others, Contee told lawmakers that there was intelligence indicating that there were protests in support of the former. President Trump
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“The district had no intelligence information to point to a coordinated assault on the Capitol,” its prepared statement says.
Contee said there were 300 unarmed members of the DC National Guard initially deployed on the day of the attack, but only to provide traffic control and other non-interventionist services. He noted that because Washington is not a state, only the president, not DC officials, have the power to deploy the guard.
Contee emphasized other limitations of DC police force authority, including the fact that it has no jurisdiction to patrol or make arrests at the Capitol without an explicit request from the Capitol Police. That request, Contee said, came on Sunday before 1 p.m., Jan. 6, and MPD arrived at the scene “within minutes.”
More than 1,100 district police officers would eventually respond to the attack, Contee said, and 65 of them were injured. A 66th would take his life a few days later.
“Those resources were barely enough to offset an event that had never happened in U.S. history,” he said. “A crowd of thousands of American citizens launching a violent assault on the United States Capitol … in an attempt to stop the counting of the ballot boxes.”