received any requests, he wanted to make sure that we had every available asset in or near D.C. in case the situation got out of control in the city on January 6th.
So, pursuant to that, I called each of the heads of the five law enforcement agencies within DOJ, and I spoke to them and said, "The Acting AG wants to know what kind of resources you can offer up in terms of tactical teams who we can bring to D.C. to be here in case one of our partners needs reserves."
And, pursuant to that, each of those agencies sent special operations teams to Washington in advance of January 6th. We had them prepositioned in or outside the Capitol for that day. And, ultimately, when the Capitol Police asked for assistance that afternoon, we were able to deploy them fairly quickly to get them to the Capitol.
You have to keep in mind that these are special tactical teams. It's things like the FBI SWAT Team or the FBI Hostage Rescue Team or the Marshals Special Operations Group. These are not street cops. We don't have street police officers in the Justice Department. We're not in a position to do street policing.
But we told our partners that we would have reserves, and if anyone had a problem or got overwhelmed or needed assistance, they just needed to reach out to us and we would deploy those units to help them out.
Q Can you tell us which five components you reached out to?
A So, within DOJ, you have the FBI, ATF, DEA, U.S. Marshals Service, and Bureau of Prisons. Those are our five law enforcement agencies.
Each one of them provided specialized times. So FBI had their SWAT teams and their HRT teams, as well as bomb teams. ATF had their special operators. The Marshals had the special operations groups that I mentioned earlier. BOP sent what they call their SORT; I think it's Special Operations Response Teams. They sent those to D.C.
