Pentagon Officials Feared Trump Would Order U.S. Troops To Enforce Coup
During its final January 6 hearing Monday, the House Select Committee found that leading up to the insurrection, Department of Defense officials worried that Donald Trump would impose an ‘illegal order’ on U.S. troops to support his attempted coup, HuffPost reports.
“The select committee recognizes that some at the [Defense] department had genuine concerns, counseling caution, that President Trump might give an illegal order to use the military in support of his efforts to overturn the election,” the committee stated in the 161-page executive summary of the report.
The committee did not find any evidence that the Department of Defense supported Trump’s coup attempt in any way. However, the report says “President Trump had authority and responsibility to direct deployment of the National Guard in the District of Columbia, but never gave any order to deploy the National Guard on January 6th or on any other day.”
The report continues, “Nor did he instruct any federal law enforcement agency to assist. Because the authority to deploy the National Guard had been delegated to the Department of Defense, the secretary of defense could, and ultimately did deploy the Guard.”
Trump has blamed Nancy Pelosi for not calling on troops to immediately intervene.
HuffPost reports that the executive summary of the report also includes an explanation of the committee’s “recommendations of criminal prosecution against Trump and several of his allies on charges that include making false statements, obstructing an official proceeding and seditious conspiracy.”
The committee wrote, “The underlying and fundamental feature of that planning was the effort to get one man, Vice President Mike Pence, to assert and then exercise unprecedented and lawless powers to unilaterally alter the actual election outcome on January 6.”
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
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