Donald Trump’s favorite general was a key player in the Pentagon’s calamitous Jan. 6 response.
General Chris LaNeve, who has been tasked by Pete Hegseth to lead the Army, was a central figure in the most disputed moment of the Pentagon’s botched intervention, documents reviewed by PunchUp show.
It comes after reports of a reason behind LaNeve’s predecessor as Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George’s dismissal: his desire to push forward with the investigation of a bizarre Apache helicopter flyby of MAGA singer Kid Rock’s Tennessee estate.
Days before George was dismissed as Army chief of staff in April, LaNeve, 59, reportedly told him the defense secretary did not want the probe to go ahead. Concerned, George confided in colleagues, only to be fired on Apr. 2, the Washington Post reported Wednesday. George also refused to strike two Black and two female officers from a promotion list.
LaNeve, Hegseth’s former military aide who was handed his job in an acting capacity and is in line to keep it permanently, was spotted by Trump on an inaugural-ball video call in January 2025 and asked the room: “Is this man central casting, or what?” Months later, LaNeve returned from South Korea as Hegseth’s senior military assistant and, by Feb. 6, had a fourth star, rising from brigadier to full general in five years.
But PunchUp, the Daily Beast’s sister investigations Substack, has uncovered documents that highlight a key role he played in the Pentagon’s ill-fated handling of the Capitol riots of Jan. 6, 2021.
By mid-afternoon that day, the D.C. National Guard was in riot gear and on buses a few miles from the Capitol, awaiting an order. It came when Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller approved the deployment at 3:04 p.m.
But Maj. Gen. William Walker, the Guard’s commanding general, did not move his men until 5:09 p.m. He says nobody told him he could. McCarthy says somebody did—and that the man he used to pass on the message was LaNeve.
Buried in the House Jan. 6 committee’s final report is the account of one phone call that could explain the bungle—about which three Army officials, including LaNeve, gave three different versions.
Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy told investigators he issued the order telling Walker he was finally cleared to move at 4:35 p.m., and that he used LaNeve—then a one-star and his director of Army operations—as his go-between. The report states it was “a conversation Major General Walker said never happened.”
LaNeve, however, told the committee that he had called Walker at 4:25 p.m. to say his forces should “get on the bus, do not leave.” On a second call ten minutes later, he said, he heard McCarthy give the order himself, then took the phone back to pass on the rally point and the officer Walker’s troops should meet. Walker, he recalled, replied “Roger,” but LaNeve also admitted there was “mass confusion in that room.”
McCarthy says he never spoke to Walker, and Walker says neither call happened. He “never saw” LaNeve on the video teleconference that afternoon, he told the committee, and “didn’t hear General LaNeve’s voice.”
Walker’s aide-de-camp, Lt. Timothy Nick, on just his second day in the job, had been ordered to keep a handwritten log. At 4:37 p.m., he appears to have scribbled down the same details McCarthy says he asked LaNeve to relay. Walker says his aide could only have gotten it from the video call he was on. Nick put the moment the orders came at 5:09 p.m.
That was the same minute the Army’s chief of staff, Gen. James McConville, passed a teleconference screen and spotted Walker doing nothing. “General McConville came back into the call and said, ‘Hey, you’re a go,’” Walker recalled.
The Guard reached the Capitol after the fighting was effectively over, three hours and 19 minutes after the first plea for help. “It shouldn’t take three hours to respond to an urgent request,” Walker told the Senate in March 2021.
In the end, the committee gave up trying to settle the matter. The delay was “unnecessary and unacceptable,” it found, but not deliberate. The two sides held accounts that “are not reconcilable.” While the contradictions were never resolved, LaNeve was never accused of wrongdoing.
Hegseth calls LaNeve “precisely the kind of leader the U.S. Army needs right now,” dismissing critics as out-of-touch insiders. Yet five months into the acting job, LaNeve has still not been nominated.
Without unanimous Republican support, any nomination cannot clear the Senate Armed Services Committee, and several members have raised concerns about the speed of LaNeve’s rise and lack of experience.
When asked about LaNeve’s role on Jan. 6, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell did not address it, and instead told PunchUp that LaNeve “is delivering an outstanding performance,” adding the department was “actively coordinating with our Senate partners to lock in the optimal moment to formally submit his nomination.” He earlier called the Post’s reporting a “tired, old story simply to manufacture drama.”
PunchUp also approached the Army for comment. They did not respond by the time of publication.
Tom Latchem exposes the secrets, scandals, and stories that powerful people and institutions want to keep under wraps. Follow all of his reporting at PunchUp on Substack.
