Today, Explained - How security at the Capitol failed

Episode Date: January 8, 2021

Washington Post national security reporter Dan Lamothe explains how a number of agencies and politicians put together a historically bad security plan for Congress on Wednesday. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos-Firum. Back when we still went into our office in DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C., I'd bike past the Capitol building and the White House almost every day. And it's impossible to not appreciate the openness of these institutions. You can

walk right up to them. You can protest in front of them. You can flip the bird and yell at your leaders if you want to go nuts. But then last year, there were the protests after the death of George Floyd and things got a little less open. There was more security around the Capitol. And eventually, they kind of turned the White House into like a walled fortress. It's still like that today. And that is sad. But it certainly suggests that the powers that be in Washington, D.C., they know how to really keep people away when they want to, which made yesterday's events all the more confusing, per're going to try and explain what we do know, how a number of players and agencies managed to let the United States Capitol fall. Dan Lamothe reports on national security at The Washington Post. And we started with one peculiar thing you need to understand about the district. It's kind of like a police convention out there, 24-7, 365. Yeah, even on a normal day, you're working with Capitol Police, Park Police, DC Police, Pentagon Police, you know, and that's to say nothing of any kind of unusual day or event

where you end up with, you know, other forces of various kinds that can be called in to assist. And how do all these forces work together typically, which they have to almost every day, I imagine, on some level? There's usually a specific organization put in charge with others coordinating with them. In this case, this week, Justice Department is taking the lead. And then you've got involvement from the Pentagon with the Army Secretary and the Defense Secretary. I feel like this isn't the first time in recent memory where we could look at how all of these different forces maybe didn't work together as optimally as possible. This was something that was subject of discussion after the protests around Black Lives Matter, right? Yeah, and I actually think what we saw and the limited response that we saw in real time

as the Capitol was being breached, you know, at least in part, a large function of possibly overcorrecting from June. Black lives matter! Black lives matter! They launched these flashbang grenades at first, then these tear gas canisters. In June, you had thousands of National Guardsmen who were on duty before, you know, too long. This giant armory two miles from the Capitol building was the staging ground for 5,100 Guard members sent from 11 states and D.C.

You had this weird hodgepodge of not only typical police, but like prison guards and other things that were, you know, put on the city streets as additional bodies and sort of this nebulous police force that weren't even well identified and nobody really knew who they were working for or who they were reporting to. A group of Democrats from the Senate and House are demanding answers from Attorney General William Barr about unidentified law enforcement officers seen in Washington. This time it was much more limited in terms of scope. And while Mayor Bowser, the mayor of D.C., was quite forceful and openly

opposing this vast response that they saw in June, concerned about sort of this militarized look in the city, in this case, what she requested from the National Guard and the Pentagon is pretty much what she got. And what was that? Whereas you had several thousand National Guardsmen on duty at any time, sort of at the height of the protests in June. In this case, you had a total of 340 DC National Guard members who were activated. And that's not even to say they were all on duty at one time. It was more like half at a time, 12-hour shifts. Sources say the soldiers will not be armed or wearing body armor

and will mainly be around for traffic control. They'll be active today through Thursday. No traditional active-duty military will be present. That would, in part, allow police to do other things more focused on some sort of protest. And the idea was to keep law enforcement in the front of a law enforcement response. So 300 some odd National Guard from D.C. were mostly unarmed and doing traffic control. So what does that mean for the Capitol yesterday, where there was some awareness in advance that these protests, these riots, whatever they were, would end up at the Capitol, where a pivotal confirmation vote would happen for President-elect Joe Biden? Who was put in charge of the Capitol yesterday? At the Capitol, in terms of the security response, the Capitol Police would have had a very leading role. And then, you know, the Justice Department would have been coordinating with other organizations to make sure that the overall federal response was working,

that they were tracking intelligence, that they were, you know, aware of any problems as they were coming up in real time. In this case, my own reporting would suggest that as things got increasingly hairy at the Capitol and the outer perimeter, which wasn't even really well hardened or formed around the building, was breached. Meanwhile, up on the steps of the backside of the Capitol, we're seeing protesters overcome the police. The police are now running back into the Capitol building. They put in a request from D.C. officials and Capitol Police to the military saying, hey, can you send National Guard immediately? immediately. And because of all of these previous discussions and restrictions that were put on the National Guard, there was some, at least a half hour of sort of indecision in terms of what they

could do, how they could respond, what was appropriate. And I have heard frustration from some in the Pentagon saying, you know, we reined it in at your own request. Now we're getting basically an earful for the flip side of it, which was that, you know, we didn't have a heavy-handed response the way a lot of people argued we did, didn't you? I'd like to talk a little bit more about how the security bureaucracy interacted yesterday. But before we go there, let's focus as much as we can on what exactly transpired at the Capitol. are still a little hazy, but what was the security setup, as best as we know,

yesterday on the Capitol to protect this vote and this building? Several thousand police were in various roles involved. And I think for that reason, they had the sense that that was sufficient. But looking back on it, this included a sort of limited response

in terms of what they had outside the building. Barriers to traffic, sawhorse-type things that were set up outside, you know, a ways away from the Capitol building. You had some police, but they weren't in any kind of riot gear. You know, and they were sort of observing when a large crowd is directed at the Capitol building all at once.

We're going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue. And we're going to the Capitol and we're going to try and give. The Democrats are hopeless. They're never voting for anything. Not even one vote. But we're going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don't need any of our help. We're going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country. That was not something they were prepared for, clearly. I mean, I don't think we can really even argue otherwise at this point. I mean, we all saw what happened. You trip off on it! I can see it in his cowl! The response immediately around the Capitol building, once this crowd and mob really was right on the Capitol steps, our own reporting,

talking to law enforcement experts, previous police chiefs, things of that sort, is that it was really already too late. We were speaking to protesters who said there was a bottleneck. They were trying to get more protesters up from the Ellipse to the Capitol, but there was a log jam. And so what we're seeing now is more people coming up from my right side. Once you're already that close, you don't have the standoff distance. You don't have the ability to protect all your doors and all your windows

and keep people outside. You know, that's how you're able to start breaking side windows and getting in, you know, in other ways. And once you've got a couple people in, it's pretty darn easy to open the door and let others in. You know, it's almost the reverse of a prison break or to draw a connection to some of the things I've covered more typically. When you have an attack on a military base in a foreign country, you know, this is the sort of things you see there. You breach in one spot, a handful of people get in, and then you try and open up as many entranceways as possible. It's the same sort of idea. There's been lots of video circulating online of these breaches, and there seems to be this impression that the Capitol Police may have at some point just capitulated and opened the floodgates

to these rioters. Is that a possibility here? Do we know at this point? I don't think we know definitively who did what, but I do think we've got some images to work on and ask questions about, you know, a seemingly friendly conversation inside the building between police and members of this mob. We do have selfies being taken with police and members who are already in the building without authorization. That doesn't look like everybody on that police force was doing their level best to keep the building free. You know, particularly with, you know, federal business going on at that very minute. On the flip side, we do have signs that at least some were trying to keep people out. Take a look at this. This is the crypt of the U.S. Capitol. And what you're looking at is essentially hand-to-hand combat between Capitol police officers and these protesters who appear to be trying to storm that area of the Capitol as police officers try to keep them back.

You know, there were images of police shoving mob away from the building outside. What would your grandfather think of you? What would your grandfather think of you? What would your grandfather think of you? There is a fatality here where one of the people who got in the building was shot as she entered. He's got a gun. He's got a gun. This is about to get dirty, man. So I think it's a mixed response and we're likely to find that some did everything they could to keep this mob outside,

and that some either gave up or didn't really try that hard to begin with. There's been a lot of attention on how this particular incident was handled in comparison to the protests during, say, the Kavanaugh hearings, where dozens upon dozens of arrests were made. Do we have any idea how many arrests were made on Wednesday on the Capitol? The numbers the police released late in the evening, close to midnight, was that they were

up to 52 arrests, which, you know, clearly the crowd inside the building was larger than that. So you're left to wonder why. I think the short answer from what we've seen so far is the police also didn't have enough ability to keep people, to detain people once they were breaking the law. And then I think the other thing is once there was a mob in the building, the immediate concern and response became protecting staff, protecting lawmakers, protecting journalists, and anybody else that was doing their regular job in the Capitol.

Safety became the primary concern for people as opposed to the building itself. More on why after a quick break. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Thank you. Our AuraFrames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an AuraFrame as a gift, you can personalize it. You can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday. And she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids.

And so we wanted to surprise her with the Aura Frame. And because she's a little bit older, it was just easier for us to source all the images together and have them uploaded to the frame itself. And because we're all connected over text message, it was just so easy to send a link to everybody. You can save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carvermat frames with promo code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com, promo code EXPLAINED. This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. Dan, do we have any idea why the Capitol Police were so unprepared for a rally, for a protest, for a mob that had done weeks of planning that, you know, the president had encouraged for days and days and days. It's something the whole country saw coming. And yet it feels like this police force whose job it is to defend this building was caught completely off guard. I don't think we have clarity on why yet. I think we have a lot of good hard questions that need to be asked and answered. One thing that is a possibility here

is there have been a lot of sort of situations where people have called for violence, where people have suggested, you know, taking action. And some of those have turned out to be nothing. But I think the fear is if the vigilance doesn't stay there when those calls for action are happening, you know, when something actually does go down, you might get caught with your pants down. But this is a city that's used to massive crowds, right? That's used to inaugurations and rallies against gun violence and, you know, for more action on climate change and the right to life. I mean, you live around D.C., I live in D.C. We're used to seeing tens upon thousands upon tens upon thousands of people

flood into the city and for a really coordinated response. And in this case where, you know, you could say our democracy was hanging in the balance, there wasn't this coordinated effort on the same level, it seemed like. Yeah, no, I think that's a fair description of events. They didn't have the preparation for this kind of response. I think the argument will probably be made in at least some quarters that they thought they had a handle on it, and maybe they did.

I think they probably thought they would get one thing, prepared for one thing, and then saw something else entirely. I think we can see that in terms of the limited number of personnel that we're holding outside the building. Anytime you're usually talking about security, and this comes up in a military setting again, concentric circles where, you know, whatever is

important, whatever you're trying to keep safe is inside several different layers of security, multiple layers of people, security forces of various kinds. In this case, there weren't that many layers and the layers they had weren't that stiff. You mentioned earlier that there was a request from Mayor Bowser in D.C. for National Guard to be activated to at least control traffic in the streets. Do we have any idea why there wasn't a request for more reinforcements for the Capitol Police? No, other than it seemed pretty clear that they thought they had a handle on it. A request was made yesterday for additional reinforcements of the Capitol Police. But at that point, you know, they're already at your door.

Like there's only so much you're going to be able to pull off in the span of an hour. As it stood out when they activated upwards of 1,100 people last night in the National Guard, at that point, you're dealing with logistics and geography. You know, the National Guard members don't all live downtown. These are people that in some cases live hours away in Virginia and Maryland and beyond. So they're put on notice basically saying, hey, you need to get here. You're ordered to be here within four hours. And in some cases, they live three hours away and And it's too late. How did they ultimately deal with it? Because they did, of course,

clear the Capitol and Congress did get back to business. Yeah, it came down to police work. It came down to SWAT teams. One criticism that I've seen quite a bit of is, you know, why weren't the National Guard called into the Capitol building? Basically, why wasn't the military clearing this mob out? And I think the short answer is when you get down to expertise and who's trained to do what, that actually probably wouldn't have gone well. A lot of National Guard members, they're not trained in highly specialized police responses. These are truck drivers. These are clerks. These are folks that don't have that kind of skill set. What you do want at that point is probably highly trained police.

Have you spoken to people in the military about how this always a foreign, you know, adversary. You know, sometimes it's somebody who just doesn't agree with the way things are going at home, and they're willing to take action on that in a way that can be violent, in a way that can be seditious. You know, we're going to have to sort through what this ultimately looks like in terms of the specific charges that are brought. The military does not want, for the most part, to be in a law enforcement business. You know, they want to be in a reserve role. This is a country that I think is still dogged often by the memory of Kent State and the National Guard opening fire on college students and other people there. This is not

something the military wants to be in the business of having a leading role on. We go back to June, the president was openly flirting with invoking the Insurrection Act and putting active duty service members trained for combat on the streets of Washington. That was something that freaked out a lot of people in the Pentagon. They didn't want to go down that road. They didn't want to be that kind of country. One of the reasons that I think the Pentagon was particularly concerned about having too many military forces handy, on duty, in uniform, ready to go, is there was at least a concern in some corners of the Pentagon that if you make that force available, the president has the ability to use that force.

But if the military has National Guard on duty or some other force in reserve, the president can use that in a number of ways and has pretty unlimited authority to do so. If you take it off the table, the president is not immediately able to use it, but it's also not available to stop something like what you saw at the Capitol. So what you're saying here is that some of the general hesitancy to beef up the nation's Capitol yesterday more than it was might have had to do with giving the outgoing president power over that beefed up National Guard military presence, which is kind of amazing, I suppose.

Does that mean that this is ultimately just going to come back to a discussion about the police and how they can just be doing their jobs better? I would imagine there's going to be a few conversations here. I think one of the major places needs scrutinization is who was talking to who and at which point, which organizations are working together. And I think some of that was fair. We saw helicopters flying 50 feet over the top of protesters, unarmed civilians. That sort of thing is not the kind of thing you expect to see in the United States of America. In this case, the Pentagon said, all right, you don't want that. We don't want the look of this either. What do you need? What do you want? And in very sort of very limited ways, that's what

you'll get. The problem was when that was no longer sufficient, it wasn't really a backup plan yesterday. And that backup plan doesn't have to be the National Guard. In some ways, it probably shouldn't be the National Guard first. But what's your plan B? DC in general, and this is probably something that goes forward for a while, is grappling with how does it deal with mass demonstrations? It always has on some level, but I think this is a particularly sensitive time. And I think this will continue to be the case. How do you deal with pro-Trump groups that are willing to take actions like we saw yesterday? How do we deal with counter protests or counter actions to that?

There's a natural tension, I think, between security forces and civilians. If you do too much, it looks like it didn't June in a lot of ways for a lot of people. If you don't do enough, you know, you end up with things that look more like, you know, what we saw at the Capitol. Dan Lamothe, he writes about the military at the Washington Post. We, like just about every other news outlet in America, reached out to the Capitol Police for comment. They did not reach back, but U.S. Capitol Police Chief Stephen Sund released a statement today. In it, he says, The violent attack on the U.S. Capitol was unlike any I have ever experienced in my 30 years in law enforcement here in Washington, D.C. Maintaining public safety in an open environment specifically for First Amendment activities has long been a challenge, but...

He continues, these mass riots were not First Amendment activities. They were criminal, riotous behavior. The actions of the U.S. Capitol Police officers were heroic, given the situation they faced. He closes out by saying Capitol Police is conducting a thorough review of the incident's security planning policies and procedures. Shortly after he released that statement, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi called for his resignation. Shortly after that, Capitol Police Chief Sund resigned. It's Today Explained. Thank you.