A former Washington, D.C., National Guard official said two high-ranking generals lied to Congress about their roles in delaying the deployment of the National Guard during the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
Col. Earl Matthews, who was the attorney for retired Gen. William Walker, the former commanding general of the District of Columbia National Guard, wrote on Dec. 1 in a memo to the Jan. 6 House committee that several reports, including one in November by the Pentagon’s inspector general and an Army report, “adopted a narrative” favorable to Lt. Gen. Walter Piatt and Gen. Charles Flynn, who both had the authority to deploy the National Guard to stop the rioters earlier than they did.
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In the 36-page memo, Matthews called the Army report “a revisionist tract worthy of the best Stalinist or North Korea propagandist,” and he claimed the generals lied to the Pentagon and the Jan. 6 committee about how they responded when local officials “pleaded” with them to deploy the National Guard quickly.
The memo called Piatt and Flynn “absolute and unmitigated liars,” and it claimed that they delayed the National Guard for hours from going to the Capitol building, where local police were unable to keep the rioters at bay.
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The memo mostly focused on a 2:30 p.m. conference call between local officials, including Walker and Mayor Muriel Bowser, as well as Piatt and Flynn, who were the highest-ranking officers.
While Piatt told the House Oversight and Reform Committee in June that “at no point on January 6 did I tell anyone that the D.C. National Guard should not deploy directly to the Capitol,” Matthews’s memo said: “Piatt and Flynn stated that the optics of having uniformed military personnel deployed to the U.S. Capitol would not be good.”
The Army defended Piatt and Walker’s statements and said the reports were accurate.
