Former Capitol Police chief warns of vulnerabilities that remain 2 years after Jan. 6

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• Geoff Bennett:

  Friday marks the second anniversary of the January 6 attacks, when a crowd of angry Trump supporters violently stormed the U.S. Capitol in an effort to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden's presidential election win.

  Steven Sund was the chief of the Capitol Police that day. And he describes the events as the worst mass attack on law enforcement in his nearly-30-year-long career.

  He writes about that and more in his new book, "Courage Under Fire."

  And he joins me now.

  Thanks so much for coming in.

• Steven Sund, Former U.S. Capitol Police Chief:

  Thanks for having me here today.

• Geoff Bennett:

  And you write that January 6 was treated differently from a security standpoint than any other major event on Capitol Hill.

  Help us understand how. In what ways?

• Steven Sund:

  so, I look at that from the intelligence point of view.

  I have been in Washington, D.C., like you said, for close to 30 years. I have done many national special security events, some of the major events they have, major demonstrations. And any event that has a threat stream even far less than what we saw now I know it existed on January 6, the FBI would do a number of things.

  Usually, they call together an executive meeting, where they pull together the chiefs and say, hey, we're seeing a lot of concerning rhetoric, online, a lot of concerning threats, or they do what's called a joint intelligence bulletin with DHS, or even a conference call with your local area chiefs to say, this is what they're seeing.

  We saw none of this on January 6.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Well, in the book, you point to an alarming lack of coordination with other government agencies, to include the FBI, DHS, even the intelligence unit within Capitol Police.

  And you say that they were aware, they had warnings about the far right extremists, the Trump supporters who were readying for a violent attack, but yet that wasn't shared with you. What intelligence were you seeing?

• Steven Sund:

  So, the intelligence I was saying was, we had a total of four intelligence bulletins that were put out by my intelligence unit within the Capitol Police.

  You got to understand, we're a consumer of intelligence. We don't have — we don't create our own intelligence. So we get it from the intelligence community. The first three all indicate no indication of civil disobedience, it's all going to be like the previous MAGA 1, and MAGA 2.

  The fourth one comes up.

• Geoff Bennett:

  And you mean the previous MAGA rallies in Washington, yes.

• Steven Sund:

  Yes, in November and December. I'm sorry, yes, the previous MAGA rallies in December.

  And the fourth one that's put out on January 3 late in the evening, received on the 4th and reviewed on the 4th, is 15 pages and has a final paragraph that talks about possibly people coming armed, possibly white supremacist militia attending, the same things we saw in the previous MAGAs, nothing about a coordinated attack on the Capitol.

  The very next day, the same intelligence unit puts out an intelligence product that says low probability of civil disobedience and demonstrations and also recommends I approve the permits for all the demonstrations on the Capitol grounds.

  So, at that point, I see the same — the same information the 5th and on the 6th. So I'm not seeing the stuff that's coming up saying that we're going to have a coordinated attack on the Capitol. But we now know that intelligence existed.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Well, in the book, you say that the Department of Homeland Security and the intelligence community watered down the intelligence.

  Was that a bureaucratic failing, as you see it, or was that intentional?

• Steven Sund:

  So, when I say they watered it down, it was a thought — now, this may be what happened.

  There's a lot of concern within the president's Cabinet of the president invoking the Insurrection Act. If he felt that there's a big enough threat against the Capitol — and we now know that his secretary defense and his joint chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Milley, both suspected there was going to be mass violence in Washington, D.C., so much so, they talked about locking down the city, that, if the president knew that could happen, that could give him the ammunition he needs to invoke the Insurrection Act.

  So there's a lot of people thinking that he was going to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy the military around the Capitol. And I think that cascading effect just created failure after failure with the Department of Defense, possibly the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.

• Geoff Bennett:

  You also write about the fact that the — as you say, the Pentagon was concerned about the optics, that you had requested National Guard assistance, but you were rebuked.

• Steven Sund:

  That is correct.

  What people need to realize is, on January 6, when we came under attack, I reached out to all the law enforcement resources I possibly could. I called — called in 17 law enforcement agencies, 1,700 officers to help us battle the riot that we were seeing.

  When the cops are overrun and outnumbered 58 to one, when we dial 911, the last resort is the Department of Defense. I called the Department of Defense to activate the defense support for civil authority. It should be an easy call. I have done it many, many times for other events.

  But they have an emergency authority to immediately send me resources. What I didn't know was that, two days before January 6, Defense Secretary Miller had put out this memo that restricted the very resources he can only suspect my guys would need on January 6 for the violence he knew was coming, civil disobedience resources, riot gear, riot control agents, vests, helmets, things that his soldiers would need to give protection to my officers.

  And it took three-and-a-half-hours for them to arrive on the scene after my repeated begging with the Pentagon. They only arrived after the fighting was over.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Is this suggestion, then, that this was all coordinated, and that it was intentional to deprive you of the security resources that you needed?

• Steven Sund:

  I can tell you, my repeated calls to the Pentagon — I first had to deal with a 71-minute delay in getting approval from the Capitol Police Board to even call the National Guard.

  Then, once I got that, my repeated calls to the Pentagon begging and pleading for — my repeated pleas for the National Guard assistance, and then not sending it, when they're seeing the same images I'm seeing, I can only — I can only suspect they did not want to send them there. They weren't going to send them there no matter what.

  And Miller had actually said that. He said: There's no way I was going to deploy National Guard west of Ninth — east of Ninth Street, anywhere near the Capitol.

  I think he was afraid of the same thing, an Insurrection Act.

• Geoff Bennett:

  In the book, you reveal that Pentagon officials at the time, as they were refusing your requests to deploy the National Guard, that they were sending security forces to protect the homes of high-ranking Pentagon officials and generals.

• Steven Sund:

  Yes, think — think about that.

  Again, they placed the look of the National Guard, the optics of them being on national — on Capitol territory over the lives and safety of my officers who were being beaten. Yet, like you said, they deployed resources, security resources, to their own generals' homes.

  That's absurd.

• Geoff Bennett:

  The day after the attack on the Capitol, you were forced out of your job.

  What do you make of your responsibility at the time and your assessment of how you handled that day and the lead-up to it?

• Steven Sund:

  When you look at everything that I tried to do on that day, on January 6, with the particular circumstances that I faced, the fact I made dozens of calls to bring in outside resources that actually turned the tide and helped my officers win back the Capitol, I did everything I could that day.

• Geoff Bennett:

  One of the takeaways is, you say that this could happen again, that there aren't enough barriers, there isn't enough planning that could prevent another attack on the U.S. Capitol at this point.

• Steven Sund:

  What I'm concerned about is really three or four things.

  One, the security structure on Capitol Hill is way too politicized. You have a police department with a chief that is supposed to be experienced in law enforcement that's overseen by three politically appointed people, that's overseen by four Oversight Committees that all report to put certain political parties within Congress.

  That's a recipe for disaster. That first has to be changed. The intelligence community has to be corrected. We can't have these issues on January 6 after September 11, when we created the DHS, Department of Homeland Security, to prevent this from happening. And Department of Defense has not — has got to stop being politicized.

  They can't be worried about optics when the lives of members of Congress and the lives my officers are at stake and refuse to send help.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Steven Sund.

  The book is "Courage Under Fire."

  Thanks again for your time.

• Steven Sund:

  I appreciate it, sir. Thank you.

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