When Nancy Pelosi appeared on ABC’s Sunday morning talk show “This Week,” the former House Speaker made a dubious claim that would undoubtedly come as a surprise to many of the key decision-makers on Capitol Hill during the events of January 6.
Former Speaker Pelosi, who has been less than forthright about her controversial role in the leadup to and during the Capitol Riots, has added a new wrinkle to her story about what she did to secure the Congress on that fateful day.
“It’s very clear what happened that day,” she claimed. “And at that same time, from the undisclosed location, Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell and I were begging the administration to send the National Guard, to send the National Guard.”
“We spoke to the Army, the Secretary of the Army,” she went on. “‘Well, I don’t know. It takes time. I have to talk to my boss about it.’ His boss being the acting Secretary of Defense, who that one thing and another.”
“So it took hours, hours of what we have seen transpire, hours where we saw people going under the dome that Lincoln built,” she added. “Lincoln built the dome during the Civil War. People said, ‘don’t build the dome, use the steel, and then person power, the manpower for the war. And he said, ‘no, I must show our resolve and our strength to build the dome’ and to see the confederate flag under that dome, to see the disrespect.”
“They’re coming,” she continued. “A bullet in my head, hanging Pence, and the President being so casual about it. So it’ll be interesting to see how we proceed. But remember this, whether it was our testimony for the Electoral College case, whether it was what the January 6th committee put forth and what you’re hearing today, overwhelmingly coming from the Republicans.”
But the consistent testimony of former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, who Pelosi had ceremoniously fired despite his vigilance and persistence on January 6, exposes why the ex-Speaker’s narrative breaks down in many key aspects.
Sund, shunned by much of the corporate media and by the January 6 committee, despite his unique perspective into the events of January 6, appeared on “Tucker on Twitter” and laid bare Pelosi’s failures during the Capitol Riots with a clear, credible, and incisive account.
“Big picture, just to restate,” Tucker said. “You’ve seen many things like this, and as you just said, this was very different. This was handled very differently. By whom?”
“By the intelligence. I’d say one, by the intelligence agency, two by the military,” Sund responded. “So the reason why I say the military, think of this, by federal law, Congress passed a law that requires me to go to the Sergeant at Arms, Capitol Police Board, in advance of an event and to request federal resources such as the National Guard.”
“So, Congress passed the law,” he said. “It’s 2 US Code 1970. Look it up. Just make sure you look it up before December 22 when they changed it. So what was in effect on the 6th? That requires me to go and get approval for bringing in National Guard or federal assistance in advance. I have to go to the Capitol Police Board and get approval from congressional leadership in advance like I did on January 3rd. I’m denied twice because of ‘optics’ and because the intelligence didn’t support it. So think about that.”
“Let me ask you, who made that decision?” Tucker asked. “Who denied you?”
“I was denied by Paul Irving, House Sergeant at Arms, and also Mike Stenger, Senate Sergeant at Arms,” Sund responded. “January 3rd.”
“Who do they work for?” Tucker asked.
“It would’ve been working for Pelosi on the House side,” Sund said. “Pelosi was the number one boss, and then McConnell on the Senate side.”
“So effectively Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi shut down your request,” Tucker remarked.
“My requests were shut down,” Sund continued. “One because of ‘optics,’ which is interesting. You’re going to hear that term come up a couple more times. Optics over the look of the National Guard on the Hill. But yeah, and the Capitol Police Board. I mean, it’s unbelievable that I’m the only Chief of Police in the United States that has a law preventing me. Not just regulations, rules, that say I got to go and get approval to bring in the National Guard. A law.”
“So that’s crazy that Congress is going to pass a law that controls what I can do to protect the Capitol, and even in emergency, so think of this, even while we’re under attack, I have to go to those same two people to request the National Guard to be brought in,” he noted.
“I have 340 National Guard that have been activated,” he remarked. “At least 150 to 180 of those are in the city, many of them within eyesight of the Capitol. We got to come under attack at 12:53, 12:55. I called the Washington D.C. Police Department. I talked to their assistant chief, Jeff Carroll, thank God I had talked to him at 10:59 in the morning and asked him if he could possibly put some additional resource on Constitution Avenue.”
“And he had some CDU platoons up there called him, said, ‘Hey, please send those in right away.’ Because we knew as soon as they came up to their West front, they started attacking. It was going to be bad. 12:58. I make my first call to the Sergeant at Arms asking, saying, ‘Hey, it’s bad. We need assistance. I need a declaration of emergency. I need to bring in the military immediately. And federal resources.’ ”
“I’m told by Paul Irving, quote, ‘I’m going to run up the chain. I’ll get back to you’,” Sund said.
“Chain is Pelosi… his chain would be up to Nancy Pelosi,” Sund remarked. “He didn’t have to do that, but he wouldn’t give me authorization. The law says in emergency he can grant me authorization, but he didn’t. He said he’d run up the chain.”
“My next call was over to Mike Stenger,” Sund went on. “He’s now with the Chairman of the Capitol Police Board, told him the same thing. We’re getting our asses handed to us on the West front. I need federal resources. He says, ‘what did Paul tell you?’ He said, ‘he’s running it up the chain,’ goes, ‘let’s wait to hear what we hear from Paul.'”
“For the next 71 minutes, I make 32 calls. I’m in the command center. I’m calling my partner agencies, and by law, one of the first people to offer assistance was United States Secret Service. And by law, I shouldn’t have requested their assistance. I shouldn’t until I had approval. But I’m looking at my men and women having their asses handed to them and my first thought was, ‘f*ck it, I will take whatever discipline there is. Send me whatever you got.'”
“That’s the one text Secret Service turned over,” Sund remarked. “You know how they lost all their texts? It’s the text between their Chief Sullivan and myself. Thank God for him.”
“So you make this call immediately, immediately to the House Sergeant Arms, Mr. Irving, who reports to Nancy Pelosi,’ Tucker commented. He says, ‘I’ll call Pelosi’.” He says, ‘I’m running up the chain. Running up the chain. But that is the chain.”
“I want to tell you exactly what said,” Sund stated.
“What happens then? Does he get back to you?” Tucker asked.
“So for the next 71 minutes, I make the 32 calls to a number of agencies,” Sund replied. “11 of those calls are follow-up calls. And look in the Senate combined report… they have a great infographic of the call, after call, after call, after call…
“Where are we on the approval? Where are we on the approval?” he went on. “He goes, any minute now. Any minute I’m going to get any minute. Finally, at 2:09, 71 minutes later, 2:09, I’m finally given approval. Think about that. 71 minutes later. I immediately call Mike Stenger, say, ‘we’ve got approval.’ I was so pissed off. I made sure that the watch commander, I’m in the command center. I yelled to Jon Wisham, the lieutenant, that’s my watch commander. I said, Jon, mark the time as 2:10, I finally got approval for the National Guard. I was that mad.”
“What is the — I just want to pause on this for a minute,” Tucker chimed in. “That’s it’s almost unbelievable. So this is an event that Pelosi herself has likened to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, the worst thing that’s ever happened on American soil. And she’s in charge of allowing the National Guard to come in and respond, but she doesn’t for 71 minutes. What is that?”
“I can’t fathom why,” Sund said. “I mean, they had to have known what was going on. I was telling them how bad it was.”
“It was on TV,” Tucker noted.
“It was on TV,” Sund echoed. “It was right outside of Mike Stenger’s office, and they had a meeting in his office saying, ‘Hey, where’s the National Guard?’ They’re like, ‘oh, we’re trying to make’ — the fighting’s going on right outside his office and I’m still getting delayed.”
“This is an unbelievable story,” Tucker remarked.
“Oh, it is,” Sund agreed.
“Has anyone ever explained this?” Tucker asked.
“It’s verbatim in my book,” Sund said. “I have details. The whole chapter on January 6 is almost a hundred pages long.”
There is further, independent documentation that Sund’s version of events is the correct one.
On January 7, 2021, one day after the Capitol Riots and amid the 2020 election’s certification, the Associate Press issued a report corroborating the Capitol Police Chief’s story.
“Three days before supporters of President Donald Trump rioted at the Capitol, the Pentagon asked the U.S Capitol Police if it needed National Guard manpower,” the AP reported. “And as the mob descended on the building Wednesday, Justice Department leaders reached out to offer up FBI agents. The police turned them down both times, according to senior defense officials and two people familiar with the matter.”
“Despite plenty of warnings of a possible insurrection and ample resources and time to prepare, the Capitol Police planned only for a free speech demonstration,” the report noted.
Thus, Nancy Pelosi’s convenient historical revision of January 6 is is fundamentally contradicted in numerous ways by the various accounts of what happened that day.
Since Nancy Pelosi was considered ‘off limits’ under the House’s January 6 committee while she was Speaker of the House, she has largely been left free to weave her own version of events about what happened on January 6. And since Pelosi has not since been formally called by her Congressional successors to account for her actions during the Capitol Riots, it is as if she is daring the corporate media and the capitol’s powerbrokers to hold her accountable.
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