Former President Donald Trump offered to deploy “as many as 10,000 National Guard troops,” ahead of Jan. 6 to support law enforcement, according to his one-time White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
Meadows, during an interview on Fox’s “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo,” said that in January and “throughout the summer … the president was very vocal in making sure that we had plenty of National Guard, plenty of additional support because he supports our rule of law and supports our law enforcement and offered additional help.”
He added, “Even in January, that was a given, as many as 10,000 National Guard troops were told to be on the ready by the Secretary of Defense. That was a direct order from President Trump and yet here is what we see, all kinds of blame going around but yet not a whole lot of accountability. That accountability needs to rest with where it ultimately should be and that’s on Capitol Hill.”
Meadows later said, “I can tell you that when we look at Washington, D.C., the Capitol Police, many of them are my friends. I can tell you they do a tremendous job, but they need to be empowered to do that job, and there were plenty of assets there to assist them in their efforts. And some of those decisions weren’t made appropriately, in my opinion, and those decisions did not come from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, it came from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.”