A former top D.C. National Guard official has accused two U.S. Army bosses of lying about what he alleges was an optics-driven decision to delay calling in the National Guard to deal with the Capitol insurrection rioters, and then trying to shift the blame onto the Guard itself. In a 36-page memo leaked to Politico, Col. Earl Matthews, called Gen. Charles Flynn, deputy chief of staff for operations on Jan. 6, and Lt. Gen. Walter Piatt, the director of Army staff, “absolute and unmitigated liars,” who were making a “Stalinist” effort to rewrite the history of the military’s response to the events of January 6. Matthews says they failed to act decisively on the deployment of the National Guard and have subsequently lied about that to Congress.
Piatt, for example, told the House Oversight Committee in writing: “At no point on January 6 did I tell anyone that the D.C. National Guard should not deploy directly to the Capitol.” Matthews says in his memo that this was “false and misleading.”
Flynn, the brother of former Gen. Michael Flynn, told the same committee that he “never expressed a concern about the visuals, image, or public perception of sending Guardsmen to the Capitol,” but Matthews says in his memo that this is “outright perjury.” Matthews, who was serving as the top attorney to Maj. Gen. William Walker, then commanding general of the D.C. National Guard, says that he and Walker were on a conference call at 2:30 p.m. that day, during which they “heard Flynn identify himself and unmistakably heard him say that optics of a National Guard presence on Capitol Hill was an issue for him. That it would not look good. Either Piatt or Flynn mentioned ‘peaceful protestors.’”
Piatt and Flynn have seemed to try to shift the blame for the slow deployment of the National Guard onto the reservists themselves, suggesting the Guard were not ready to jump into action, but the memo says they were “were delayed only because of inaction and inertia at the Pentagon.” Matthews describes the “alternate history” of January 6 produced by the Army top brass as “a revisionist tract worthy of the best Stalinist or North Korea propagandist.”
