‘HOT MESS’

Top National Guard Bosses Say Army’s Jan. 6 Narrative Is a ‘Fiction’

A report from the U.S. Army described communications that never occurred during the Capitol riot, according to two senior leaders of the National Guard.

Two former top D.C. National Guard officials are pushing back on an Army report on its response to the Capitol riot, saying that the document is “whole fiction.” The report, published in March and obtained by Politico, is a 20-page outline of how the National Guard wasn’t prepared to respond to the insurrection. But the two Guard officials, Col. Earl Matthews and former Maj. Gen. William Walker, say that many of the events described in the Army’s report never occurred. Their refutation comes three days after Matthews accused two U.S. Army leaders of “outright perjury,” saying then-Lt. Gen. Charles Flynn and Lt. Gen. Walter Piatt rewrote the Jan. 6 narrative to shift blame to the Guard and the Capitol Police. Neither he nor Walker had seen the Army report until Politico shared it with them, they said.

Walker alleged that several conversations outlined in the report, supposedly between himself and then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, “didn’t happen.” The report also commends senior Army leaders for working “relentlessly” to “plan the new mission” of the Guard once they realized how serious the riot was. “I didn’t need them to create a plan for me and I still haven’t seen this plan they created,” Walker said. “Where’s the plan?” An Army spokesperson said that there had not been “time to memorialize this plan in writing.” An anonymous Department of Defense official told Politico the situation was “a hot mess.”