And that the new leadership he installed seized direct control over deploying the National Guard that day. And that deployment was delayed for hours.

One of the relatively unexamined pieces of the January 6 disaster is the delayed deployment of the D.C. National Guard to the Capitol. Politicohad a look on Monday at some explosive allegations from former D.C. National Guard official Colonel Earl Matthews, “who held high-level National Security Council and Pentagon roles during the Trump administration.” Matthews sent a memo to the House committee looking into the events of January 6 in which he offered detailed recollections of what happened inside the security apparatus that day. In it, he said the Pentagon’s inspector general assembled a report on the Department of Defense’s response to the attack on the Capitol that was riddled with errors and, in Politico‘s words, “protects a top Army official who argued against sending the National Guard to the Capitol on Jan. 6, delaying the insurrection response for hours.”

The main takeaway seems to be that two top Pentagon officials, General Charles Flynn—who happens to be the brother of Trumpist fanatic Mike Flynn, though Matthews’ memo does not seem to cast aspersions on this front—and Lieutenant General Walter Piatt, opposed deploying the Guard on conference calls that afternoon. That included a 2:30 p.m. call in which then-Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund “pleaded” for the National Guard to be deployed in order to aid his officers under attack.In Matthews’ telling, both Flynn and Piatt said on the call that they opposed the move because “the optics of having uniformed military personnel deployed to the U.S. Capitol would not be good.”

These “optics” were not a concern during the George Floyd protests the previous summer, when the Guard was frequently deployed alongside police. It’s absurd on its face. What worse “optics” are there in a democracy than people storming your seat of government in pursuit of elected officials, hoping to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power? “Optics” has been the party line throughout, but there’s reason to believe this is all a sideshow. Check out what else Politico found.