On Sunday, January 3rd, Secretary McCarthy called Chief Contee, who had formally assumed the role of acting head of MPD just the day before.[51]
"I thought initially that . . . he is just calling me basically as a rubber stamp to say, . . . 'You asked for it, you got it.' . . . It didn't go that way," Chief Contee said.[52] "[H]e had concerns about deploying National Guard for this event. He talked about the optics of the event, having boots on the ground. . . . And I pushed back on that."[53]
In his interview with the Select Committee, Secretary McCarthy described evaluating the request on the evening of January 3rd. "I sat at home. I chewed on it," he said.[54] "You know, I'm not particularly inclined to support it, because my concern was really we didn't have a commandand-control architecture in place. We didn't really have all of the mechanisms to be successful, you know. . . . So it was a very tough decision for me."[55]
Over five days, from December 31st to January 4th, District officials faced what Major General Walker called "tremendous resistance."[56]
Both Chief Contee and Director Rodriguez recalled that five-day period on January 6th, when Chief Steven Sund, of the U.S. Capitol Police, was pleading for reinforcements.[57] Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, "heard through the grapevine that [Secretary McCarthy] was inclined—I don't want to say inclined to disapprove, but, you know, looking at it carefully or whatever. So—but that's fine. He can do whatever he wants. I knew that I was going to honor [the mayor's] request . . . ."[58]
How close those Guard assets could go to the Capitol became a sticking point. Colonel Craig Hunter, the highest-ranking commander on the ground on January 6th, said the Army "really want[ed] to go through the concept of operations to see, okay, exactly—basically Metro stop by Metro stop, intersection by intersection, to see where will Guardsmen be exactly, you know, how close are you to the Capitol . . . ."[59] He said an initial request by MPD to post Guard troops at the South Capitol Metro station—like all other Metro stations—was denied.[60] In conference calls that "went back and forth,"[61] Major General Walker was told, "There was a concern about being too close, military uniforms too close to the Capitol."[62]
Major General Walker had a different perspective. He saw his people as "citizen soldiers," "your neighbors that are going to come to your aid and rescue when you need us,"[63]—not traditional boots on the ground. "[T]hat's where, to me, the vest came in. This was the National Guard, not the Army," he said.[64]
Military authorities determined that a geographical boundary would have to be established as a condition of approving the Guard's deployment to assist MPD. No servicemember could go east of Ninth Street. It wasn't made explicit to District officials, but they all knew what lay east. "[T]he
