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The incoming Donald J. Trump administration should investigate whether Department of Defense personnel were involved in nefarious acts that promoted rioting on Jan. 6 or acted in a political manner outside lawful authority, a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Army told Blaze News.
In a wide-ranging interview with Blaze Media investigative reporter Steve Baker, one of the top civilians at the Pentagon under the first Trump administration said some of the DOD actions could have been seditious.
“We’ve got people at the top of the Army and the military who I believe were operating outside the Constitution and certainly outside the authorities that they were granted by the commander in chief,” said Casey Wardynski, former assistant secretary of the Army for Reserve and Manpower Affairs. “They were operating in a way that was very political. Could they have been involved?”
“I’d say the fact that that question is a viable question means it’s got to be dug into,” Wardynski said in an hour-long interview, available at BlazeTV and on YouTube.
‘What was January 6 really about? How did it get so far afield?’
The possibility of U.S. military service members operating at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was raised by Baker in a 2021 column, and by Newsweek, which said FBI sources told the publication military operators technically under the authority of the FBI, “and those on alert as part of the National Mission Force, were present in the metropolitan area.”
Wardynski, who served in his Pentagon post from 2019 until 2021, rejected the talking points of the corporate media and the Democrats that Jan. 6 was some kind of “insurrection” or de-facto “coup” engineered by Trump to remain in power.
“January 6 was a pivotal event in this country’s history,” Wardynski said. “Some have claimed it was the most serious insurrection since the Civil War, and yet there were no guns. It’s a funny civil war. We’ve got [250] people in jail, many who had very little due process or none yet. They’re still awaiting trials [in some cases].”
All one has to do when considering whether the DOD was up to no good at the Capitol is look at recent history and how U.S. forces have been involved in fomenting strategic instability around the globe, Wardynski said.
“If you look at what went on in the Ukraine and the Color Revolution, what went on in Kazakhstan, the Color Revolution; Georgia. To many, it looks like a color revolution,” he said. “OK, how would that have happened? Who would’ve had to help? What was the attitude of the people that could have guided that help?”
‘This culture grew and it grew as you got closer and closer to the election and it became frankly seditious.’
During the June 2020 Lafayette Park unrest in D.C., President Trump visited the historic St. John’s Church. The left accused Trump of using tear gas and violence to clear out protesters so he could walk to St. John’s for an alleged “photo op.”
That galvanizing event led Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump since 2018, to break with his boss and threaten to quit over the optics of the now-famous photo of Trump holding a Bible outside St. John’s. Wardynski said Gen. Milley began to show his true character at this point.
President Donald Trump poses with a Bible outside St. John’s Episcopal Church after a news conference in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC, on Monday, June 1, 2020.Photo by Shawn Thew/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images
“You’ve got this guy at the chairman of the Joint Chiefs who’s maneuvering through this and in routine contact with the president who turns on the president after the trip to St. John’s Church,” Wardynski said, “acting like he had no idea.”
“I mean, Milley’s not politically elected, not politically poised, but you don’t get to be chairman and Joint Chiefs if you don’t understand politics,” Wardynski said. “And so he’s chagrined, now he’s going to resign, and now he starts showing his true colors.”
Milley turned to his onetime boss, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
“Gates had come out strongly against Trump,” Wardynski said. “Gates had encouraged Milley, ‘Don’t resign.’ Milley was making noises about resigning and he encouraged Milley, ‘Don’t resign. Stay in and fight him.'”
“OK, well that’s not the job of a military officer to stay in and fight the commander in chief,” Wardynski said. “This culture grew and it grew as you got closer and closer to the election, and it became, frankly, seditious.”
January 6 left a whole series of serious questions that need to be answered by Congress and the incoming Trump administration, he said.
“What was January 6 really about? How did it get so far afield, and why was it allowed to go further afield by denying the deployment of the National Guard?” Wardynski asked. “There are some good questions, and good leaders ask good questions and get good answers.”
Riot-gear-clad Metropolitan Police Department officers clash with protesters on the West Plaza of the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Photo by Steve Baker/Blaze Media
Wardynski had a front-row seat to the drama that developed on Jan. 6 as two Pentagon generals and Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy worked to stymie deployment of the District of Columbia National Guard even as Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund begged for troops to protect the Capitol.
Despite attempts to shift blame for the Guard not being deployed in time to the command staff of the D.C. National Guard, Wardynski said the “Capital Defenders” were trained, mission-briefed, and ready to move to the Capitol. But the order didn’t come until it was too late.
Wardynski said he lost faith in top generals at the Pentagon during and after Jan. 6, saying their actions were nakedly political.
“These guys revealed themselves to be very partisan and very aligned with Democratic politics,” he said.
A recent report by the Committee on House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight sounded the same theme, saying worry about “optics” overcame concern for protection of life and property. The report blamed Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy and Generals Walter Piatt and Charles Flynn for the dithering that kept the D.C. Guard sidelined during riots for perhaps the first time in its nearly 220-year history.
Wardynski echoed assertions in the House report that Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller and Army Secretary McCarthy basically disobeyed Trump’s orders to have Guard troops available to ensure Jan. 6 at the Capitol and Ellipse was safe and secure.
“Instead in the Pentagon, what you find out, what happened, was they tightened the deployment criteria for the D.C. Guard to the extent that they had no discretion to send the quick-reaction force when requested by the police chief, which had been the previous operating procedure. And so it made it tougher for the Guard to deploy, not easier.”
Major Gen. William Walker testified in 2021 that the restrictions put on him and the D.C. Guard were “unusual.”
DC National Guard troops at US Capitol on the evening of Jan. 6, 2021. Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images
House investigators described them in almost comical terms, with the Army secretary hiding himself away at the Metropolitan Police Department ostensibly drafting a “concept of operations” document for deployment of the Guard. That work and the procedures flowing from it was done by staff at the Guard Armory.
General Walker was in contact with Chief Sund and top staff of the MPD as conditions deteriorated at the Capitol, Wardynski said.
“He’d be talking to these kind of guys. And my recollection from talking to him was that was the case. He was hearing from them that things were out of control at the Capitol,” he said. “They needed his help pronto.”
What they got were two Pentagon generals objecting to troops at the Capitol on the grounds it was bad optics. Even though Sund sounded truly desperate on a 2:30 p.m. conference call with Pentagon leaders.
“January 6 was a political matter, and they’re asserting, ‘My best military advice is we don’t think it looks good for Army soldiers to be standing in front of the Capitol,’” Wardynski said. “That was it. That’s not military advice. That’s political advice.”
Wardynski sat in on a video conference with Gen. Walker and top Pentagon brass after the 2:30 call with Chief Sund. Updates from the field combined with politics made it clear things would not get any better, he said.
“You can hear in the background his [Gen. Walker’s] deputy saying, ‘The Virginia Guard’s on its way and the Maryland Guard’s on its way,’” Wardynski said. “Well, that got my attention. I’m like, OK, what’s going on in the Capitol?”
“This is the National Capital region. There’s a lot of military here for a reason,” he said. “It’s the seat of government. And now we’ve got state-level armies coming into the Capitol.”
Send the Guard back to WNC
Wardynski continued his criticism of how military forces were misused and under-utilized after Hurricane Helene laid waste to swaths of Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee. Photos and videos posted daily on social media show daily life has not improved in many areas since walls of water swept away entire communities.
The National Guard should be ramped up again and sent by President-elect Trump to do the work that should have been done before winter set into the Appalachian mountains, he said.
National Guard, U.S. Army, and Air Force troops pulled out of Western North Carolina in December with many families living in tents and hundreds more about to lose hotel vouchers from the federal government.
He rapped the Federal Emergency Management Agency for delivering and setting up only a few dozen mobile homes across North Carolina while volunteers with donated RVs housed hundreds of storm-displaced residents.
Record flooding washes away homesteads in Burnsville, NC, after Hurricane Helene dumped massive amounts of rain on the mountains of North Carolina.Photo courtesy of Woody Faircloth/EmergencyRV
“That’s ridiculous,” he said.
“You can fly in a whole city,” he said. “It’s a tent city with everything you need. Here comes the engineer battalion that does prime power. They can light up 72,000 homes and electrify them. Bring in the contractors later and put in the permanent solution.”
Wardynski said either North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper didn’t support the military help or it was squelched by the Biden-Harris administration.
“Where the hell is the governor? Where the hell is use of his resources and mutual aid from the nearby states and the federal money that comes to help pay for all that?”
Cooper’s office has not replied to repeated Blaze News requests for comment since November on the situation in Western North Carolina. Blaze News requests for comment to the Department of Defense went unanswered.
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