Trump Leaves Mount CPAC: On Cue Violates the Ninth Commandment

Left CPAC 2021 with a Pack of Lies

(Over 50 documented lies)

Startling story here from the Daily Mail from Trump who said Sunday on Fox News that he requested 10,000 National Guard troops deployed to Washington, DC before the January 6 Capitol attacks, in his own words:

“I requested … I definitely gave the number of 10,000 National Guardsmen, and [said] I think you should have 10,000 of the National Guard ready. They took that number. From what I understand, they gave it to the people at the Capitol, which is controlled by Pelosi. And I heard they rejected it because they didn’t think it would look good. So, you know, that was a big mistake.”  — In his interview with Steve Hilton of Fox News (February 28, 2021)

He said he was not actually watching the events unfold in real-time and then claimed he reacted immediately when he was alerted to the ongoing attack on the Capitol.

This huge lie and make no doubt about it – it’s a whopper also fact checked by the Washington Post here and proven totally false and rightly so.

NOW THE FACTS THAT TRUMP HATES:

On January 22, Vanity Fair published an inside look at what transpired at the Pentagon during the insurrection, with the reporter, Adam Ciralsky, in effect embedded with Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller and his top aides during this period.

Here’s the key section from that Vanity Fair article:

“On the evening of January 5 — the night before a white supremacist mob stormed Capitol Hill — Miller was at the White House with his chief of staff, Kash Patel, meeting with Trump on “an Iran issue. But then the conversation switched gears. The president, Miller recalled, asked how many troops the Pentagon planned to turn out the following day. ‘We’re like, we’re going to provide any National Guard support that the District requests,’ Miller responded. Trump goes: ‘You’re going to need 10,000 people. No, I’m not talking bullsh*t.’ He said that. And we’re like: ‘Maybe. But you know, someone’s going to have to ask for it.’ At that point Miller remembered the president telling him: ‘You do what you need to do. You do what you need to do. You’re going to need 10,000.’ That’s what he said. Swear to God.”

Reporter Ciralsky, asked Miller why Trump threw out such a big number: “The president’s sometimes hyperbolic, as you’ve noticed. There were gonna be a million people in the street, I think was his expectation.”

(It turned out that Trump’s rally attracted merely thousands of people, though even in his Fox interview with Hilton, Trump still claimed that the crowd numbered “hundreds of thousands of people.”)

So 10,000 appears to be a guesstimate based on the president’s own inflated belief in his ability to draw a crowd. The statement did not come as part of a meeting to discuss how to handle the event. Instead, it appears to have been an offhand remark. That’s not the same thing as a “request.” (Trump certainly knew how to order the deployment of National Guard troops in June 2020.)

Trump then maintains that the Defense Department “took that number” and gave it to the Capitol Police. But that also did not happen, according to officials.

My 2 cents: Why are we not surprised at Trump about this CYA from Trump? That’s all he knows – lies on top of lies. This account from Trump:

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