authority as the Secretary of the Army" to conduct a mission analysis and send troops at his discretion, not that of Major General Walker.[294]
Major General Walker himself understood he had to wait for approval from Secretary McCarthy to deploy his forces. But as he waited on that video call for hours, he did strongly consider sending them anyway. He turned to his lawyer and said, "Hey, you know what? You know, we're going to go, and I'm just going to shoulder the responsibility."[295] According to Major General Walker, his lawyer responded, "What if you get sued?"[296] Colonel Mathews, that lawyer, "told him not to do that. Just hold on."[297] The Guard officials located with Major General Walker at the Armory all say he seriously contemplated aloud the possibility of breaking with the chain of command.
"Should we just deploy now and resign tomorrow?" was how Lieutenant Nick recalled Major General Walker bluntly putting it.[298]
"I would have done just that," Major General Walker said, "but not for those two letters"[299] from his superiors curtailing Guard redeployment.[300]
The man who signed one of the letters, however—himself a former member of the DC Guard [301]—now says Major General Walker should have moved forward regardless of whether he had proper authorization.
"I've launched QRF without approval more than once," Acting Secretary Miller said.[302] "If you're the person on the ground in the Army, and you realize that there's something that is unpredictable or unexpected and you have the ability to influence it, the culture, the training, the education, the expectation of you, the American people, is that you will execute and do what you can, even if it costs you your job."[303]
After authorization at 3:04 p.m., Secretary McCarthy said he gave Major General Walker a call. He told him to "[m]obilize the entire Guard, bring everybody in. . . . And I said, you know, move the QRF to the armory and get as many people as you can to the armory and configure them in a minimum of riot gear and batons. And then we're going to do a mission analysis of what we need to do with the police . . . ."[304] Major General Walker "categorically denies" that any such call took place.[305] In fact, Major General Walker said the two men did not talk at all until much later that night.[306] "Here's the bottom line. The Secretary was unavailable to me, and he never called me," Major General Walker said.[307]
Beginning around 3:00 p.m., 25 minutes of Secretary McCarthy's time was spent reassuring members of Congress that the Guard was indeed coming,[308] although he had not yet conveyed the order. That was time unspent on facilitating their actual coming. In addition to the alleged threat on the 2:30 p.m. call, a media tweet had gone out at 2:55 p.m. declaring that the Department of Defense had denied requests for Guard support.[309]
