Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) laid blame on herself for the lack of National Guard troops at the US Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021, video footage released by House Republicans on Monday showed.
As rioters stormed the seat of Congress, Pelosi, 84, fumed about the lack of “accountability” and accepted “responsibility” for a lack of security ahead of former President Donald Trump’s “Stop The Steal” rally, the video clip – shot for an HBO documentary by the congresswoman’s daughter, Alexandra Pelosi – showed.
“We have responsibility, Terry,” Pelosi is heard telling her chief of staff Terri McCullough as they’re whisked away in a vehicle from the Capitol. ”We did not have any accountability for what was going on there, and we should have. This is ridiculous.”
Pelosi then appeared to chide McCullough for asking her amid the chaos if they should call in the National Guard.
“You’re gonna ask me in the middle of the thing, when they’ve already breached the inaugural stuff, ‘should we call the Capitol Police?’ I mean the National Guard. Why weren’t the National Guard there to begin with?” the former House Speaker said.
McCullough explains that “they thought that they had sufficient resources,” an answer that does not satisfy the California Democrat.
“It’s not a question of how they had … they don’t know! They clearly didn’t know, and I take responsibility for not having them just prepare for more,” Pelosi declared.
The exchange was part of about 45 minutes of footage handed over recently to the GOP-controlled House Administration oversight subcommittee, according to Politico.
A report on the riot, authored by House Republicans in 2022, found that Democratic leadership had concerns over the “optics” of having National Guard troops present at the Capitol Building in the aftermath of the summer 2020 “Black Lives Matter” protests.
Both the House and Senate Sergeant at Arms, as well as the chief of Capitol Police, resigned in the days following the riot.
A spokesperson for Pelosi dismissed the video clip released by House Republicans, accusing them of attempting to “whitewash” Jan. 6.
“Numerous independent fact-checkers have confirmed that Speaker Pelosi did not plan her own assassination,” Aaron Bennett wrote on X. “Cherry-picked out-of-context clips don’t change that.”
“Three years later, House Republicans are still trying to whitewash January 6th,” he added. “It’s shameful, unpatriotic & pathetic.”