J6 Committee gave the Pentagon a huge pass in its insurrection report.

Special Report: The missing piece in the January 6th Committee Report

The House Select Committee on the January 6 attack on the Congress did an admirable job of cutting through the obstruction of justice, obfuscation, and plain old lying from Donald Trump and his administration’s and presidential campaign’s hopeless sycophants. However, the committee failed to answer the mail on the military’s involvement in pre- and post-coup plans for a Trump military-civilian junta to rule the United States. Far too many Department of Defense political appointees were not criticized in the committee’s report, particularly those who failed to order the early deployment of National Guard troops to safeguard the Capitol complex for the ceremonial counting of the electoral votes to proclaim Joe Biden and Kamala Harris the president- and vice president-elect of the United States.

It is quite clear that Trump had installed a coterie of military and civilian officials at the Pentagon whose main task it was to fail to respond to pleas for assistance from congressional and Washington, DC authorities as insurrectionists stormed the Capitol. The presence of then-Major General Charles Flynn within the U.S. Army’s Pentagon staff should have raised the suspicions of the committee. Flynn’s brother, Trump’s former national security adviser Mike Flynn, had been one of the chief proponents of advancing Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign to the point where he called for the military to not only seize voting machines but Trump to declare martial law and hold an unconstitutional “do-over” of the November 3rd election.

Other active duty officers who stymied the dispatch of National Guard troops to the Capitol included Lieutenant General Walter Piatt, Charles Flynn’s immediate superior, who remains the Director of the Army Staff at the Pentagon, and then-Brigadier General Christopher LaNeve, the Director of Operations and Mobilization, who worked under Piatt and Flynn, and has since been promoted to Major General and is currently the Commander of the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

It is very clear that a group of far-right retired flag rank military officers stood ready to fill important government positions in a Trump junta after a successful January 6 coup. During the 2020 campaign 317 of these officers, representing “Flag Officers 4 America,” signed an open letter full of vitriolic pro-Trump rhetoric, including the charge that the “Democrat Party” was “welcoming Socialists and Marxists” and that “our historic way of life is at stake.” After January 6, a smaller group of Flag Officers 4 America, in signing another open letter, bemoaned Trump’s election loss because of the “election process.”

The Flag Officers 4 America called for the primacy of “State Legislatures” in validating legal votes, exactly the scheme that Trump attorney John Eastman was proffering to justify the de-certification of the electoral votes of a number of states that had voted for Biden. The retired generals and admirals claimed that neither the FBI nor the Supreme Court acted swiftly to deal with the “election irregularities” of the 2020 election. In fact, the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, had rejected over 60 Trump lawsuit claims of election fraud. The flag officers accused the newly-minted Biden administration of an ”assault on our Constitutional rights in a dictatorial manner,” claiming, among other conspiratorial claptrap that it was attempting to carry out “population control actions such as excessive lockdowns, school, and business closures,” during the Covid pandemic. The language and tone of the retired officers was right out of the scene from the movie “Dr.. Strangelove” when General Jack Ripper complains about the government fluoridating the water supply.

With Flag Officers 4 America, a Trump dictatorship would have a cadre of far-right true believers in Trumpism. The group’s post-coup open letter attacked the “Socialism, Marxism, and Progressivism in American politics,” calling the eventual dispatch of troops to guard the Capitol in the aftermath of the failed coup as responding to “a non-existent threat.” The open letter also had the temerity to attack President Biden’s mental acuity, stating, that the “mental and physical condition of the Commander in Chief cannot be ignored.”

Among the signatories of the screed were several well-known far-right wing supporters of Trump, including one, Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania – a retired Brigadier General in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard, who the January 6 Committee referred to the House Ethics Committee for his role in the attempted coup. Another is Representative Ronny Jackson of Texas, a retired Navy Rear Admiral medical services officer who was White House physician during the Trump presidency. Other signatories, including retired Navy Admiral John Poindexter and retired Air Force Major General Richard Secord, representing a past presidential scandal -- Iran-Contra – all came to Trump’s defense for trying to overthrow the government.

These flag rank officers were complemented in supporting the January 6 siege of the Capitol by a host of other retired non-flag military officers, including Pennsylvania’s unsuccessful Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, a former Army Colonel. Current reserve officers such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Navy Reserve Judge Advocate General Lieutenant Commander, and Army National Guard Lieutenant Colonel Lee Zeldin, who voted not to certify the electoral vote count of January 6, came to Trump’s defense in advancing conspiratorial notions about election theft.. Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller’s special assistant, retired Army Colonel Douglas MacGregor, Trump’s failed appointee for ambassador to Germany, was also involved in creating a bottleneck for rapid Pentagon assistance to lift the siege of the Capitol.

Among the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol were several former members of the military, including a few retired officers. They include retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Larry Brock, Jr., found guilty of the federal felony of obstruction of an official proceeding and five misdemeanors, and retired Navy Lieutenant Commander Thomas Caldwell, a member of the Oath Keepers charged with seditious conspiracy. One former Navy Intelligence Lieutenant (junior grade), who not only served as a conduit to the white nationalist and neo-Nazi far right but political groups like Turning Point USA, is One America News host Jack Posobiec. He should have been called before the J6 Committee to answer questions about the Trump White House’s call to groups like the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and Groypers to travel to Washington to storm the Capitol.

Piatt, General Charles Flynn’s and Christopher LaNeve’s superior at the Pentagon, had, leading up to January 6th, told Dr. Christopher Rodriguez, the Director of the Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency (HSEMA), “We don’t like the optics of having military personnel at the Capitol against peaceful protesters.” But Trump’s “wild time” in DC (January 5 and 6) message had gone out to violent groups like the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and others. The mere fact that Piatt would think such groups were “peaceful” protesters and that influenced his decision to not authorize the call-up of the National Guard is appalling in itself.

The military, active and retired, involvement in Trump’s coup is significant. The January 6 Committee report states “the Select Committee recognizes that some at the Department [of Defense] 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.” Unfortunately, those anonymous “concerns” had not been transformed into action on January 6. The report states that “military and agency personnel whose names the Committee agreed not to disclose publicly” had come forward in testifying before the Committee.

Trump Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy testified to the J6 Committee about the military coup plans by Trump and Michael Flynn. The committee’s report states: “President Trump had considered proposals from Lt. General (ret.) Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, and others that troops be utilized to seize ballot boxes in certain parts of the country.” McCarthy also testified that he thought “he would be fired after publicly stating that the military would not assist in a coup.” [emphasis added]. Even with that very specific reference to a coup, the J6 Committee concluded that “there is no evidence the Department of Defense understood exactly what President Trump and his associates planned for January 6th.” McCarthy added, “There was a lot of talk in the lead-up about martial law . . . and the employment of forces, and you know, that was something that we were all, you know, conscious of.” One cannot go much higher than the Secretary of the Army in the Defense Department’s chain-of-command and McCarthy stated that before January 6 he was aware of Trump and his allies planning a coup. So, contrary to the J6 committee report, the Defense Department did know exactly what Trump and his cronies, including the 200-plus “Flag Officer 4 America,” were planning for January 6th and its aftermath.

On January 3, 2021, another list of former Defense Department officials appeared. This was a list of signatories of former Secretaries of Defense in a Washington Post op-ed. In it, the former secretaries of past Democratic and Republican presidents warned that “involving the military in election disputes would cross into dangerous territory.” The op-ed was signed by Trump’s two Defense Secretaries – James Mattis and Mark Esper, who was fired by Trump right after the 2020 election – and Ashton Carter, Dick Cheney, William Cohen, Robert Gates, Chuck Hagel, Leon Panetta, William Perry, and Donald Rumsfeld. Was one of the factors in convincing all the then-living past Secretaries of Defense to sign on to the op-ed the fact that over 200 retired flag officers, the most senior being retired four-star Admiral Thomas Hayward -- a Chief of Naval Operations now deceased – were openly backing Trump’s fraudulent stolen election claims? The J6 Committee should have probed deeper into the malfeasance of these retired generals and admirals and, perhaps, the Democratic-led Senate can pick up where the House Select Committee left off.