Two senior Trump administration officials to testify on Jan 6 Capitol riots

Two senior Trump administration officials plan to defend their actions during the Jan 6 riots at the US Capitol when they appear before Congress, with former acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller standing behind every decision he made that day.

Miller will tell the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday that he was concerned before the insurrection that sending troops to the building could fan fears of a military coup and cause a repeat of the deadly Kent State shootings, according to a copy of prepared remarks obtained by The Associated Press.

His testimony, in the latest in a series of congressional hearings centered on the riot, is aimed at rebutting broad criticism that military forces were too slow to arrive even as pro-Trump rioters violently breached the building and stormed inside.

Miller will be joined by former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, who is also testifying for the first time about the Justice Department's role in the run-up to the riot.

Miller will say he was determined that the military have only limited involvement, a perspective he says was shaped by criticism of the aggressive response to the civil unrest that roiled American cities months earlier, as well as decades-old episodes that ended in violence.

The Defense Department has an extremely poor record in supporting domestic law enforcement," including during civil rights and Vietnam War protests in the 1960s and 1970s and the fatal shooting 51 years ago of four students at Kent State University by Ohio National Guard members, Miller says in his prepared remarks.

I was committed to avoiding repeating these scenarios," he says.

Miller also denies that former President Donald Trump, criticized for failing to forcefully condemn the rioters, had any involvement in the Defense Department's response.

Miller will be the most senior Pentagon official to participate in hearings on the riots. The sessions so far have featured finger-pointing about missed intelligence, poor preparations and an inadequate law enforcement response.

The Capitol Police have faced criticism for being badly overmatched, the FBI for failing to share with sufficient urgency intelligence suggesting a possible war at the Capitol, and the Defense Department for an hourslong delay in getting support to the complex despite the violent, deadly chaos unfolding on TV.

Our hearing will provide the American people the first opportunity to hear from top Trump Administration officials about the catastrophic intelligence and security failures that enabled this unprecedented terrorist attack on our nation's Capitol, the committee's chair, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., said in a statement.

Rosen, for his part, is expected to tell lawmakers that the Justice Department took appropriate precautions ahead of the riot by putting tactical and other elite units on standby after local police reports indicated that 10,000 to 30,000 people were expected at rallies and protests.

Miller's testimony will amount to the most thorough explanation of Pentagon actions after months of criticism that it took hours for the National Guard to arrive.

In his prepared remarks, he defends his resistance to a heavy military response as being shaped in part by public hysteria about the possibility of a military coup or concerns that the military might be used to help overturn the election results.

Fearful of amplifying those suspicions as well as the possibility a soldier might be provoked into violence in a way that could be perceived as an attack on First Amendment activities he says he agreed in the days before the insurrection to deploy soldiers only in areas away from the Capitol.

No such thing was going to occur on my watch but these concerns, and hysteria about them, nonetheless factored into my decisions regarding the appropriate and limited use of our Armed Forces to support civilian law enforcement during the Electoral College certification, Miller says. My obligation to the Nation was to prevent a constitutional crisis.

Although he says the Defense Department should not play a lead role in domestic law enforcement, he felt it important to initiate planning discussions out of concern about a lack of coordination and information-sharing between other agencies.

Democrats have signaled that they intend to press Miller on why it took so long for the National Guard to arrive despite urgent plans for help. In his prepared testimony, Miller contends that those complaints are unjustified, though he also concedes that the Guard was not rushed to the scene which he says was intentional.