Fact Check: Nancy Pelosi Claims Trump Refused National Guard to Capitol
CLAIM: “On January 6th…we begged the President of the United States to send in the National Guard. He would not do it.”
VERDICT: FALSE. Trump offered the National Guard ahead of time, but Democrats refused.
Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) claimed Tuesday in a news conference on Capitol Hill that President Trump refused to send the National Guard to protect the Capitol from rioters on January 6, 2021.
Her point was to contrast Trump’s supposed refusal to protect the Capitol with his apparent enthusiasm for federalizing the California National Guard in recent days to quell left-wing riots in Los Angeles, California.
She made her remarks among other California Democrats, who called on the President to withdraw the Guard and the Marines from L.A. Some, such as L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, have even said that the president should suspend immigration enforcement as a precondition for ending the violence, as if justifying the riots.
Pelosi repeated several false claims, including the claim that the January 6 riot resulted in the deaths of law enforcement officers. Her main point, however, was that Trump had refused to summon the National Guard.
This is a false claim that Breitbart News has fact-checked before. As Breitbart News noted in May 2023:
Trump did, in fact, offer the National Guard to Pelosi, who was broadly in charge of Capitol security as Speaker of the House. His administration also offered the National Guard to the mayor of Washington, DC. The offer was refused because Democrats had spent the previous summer attacking Trump for deploying the National Guard to calm Black Lives Matter riots in the city and did not like the idea of doing so again. (Pelosi and the Democrats later surrounded the Capitol with barbed wire fencing and troops in the wake of the January 6 riot.)
Later, video footage emerged of Pelosi admitting that she and her party were responsible for security lapses at the Capitol. Neither Pelosi nor her hand-picked January 6 COmmittee ever subpoenaed that crucial evidence.
Pelosi and the Democrats have referred to the Capitol riot as an “insurrection,” though many participants believed they were defending democracy, not overthrowing it. Trump has used the same word to describe rioters’ attacks on federal buildings and law enforcement personnel — and to describe to Democrats’ open defiance of federal immigration law, which they are continuing by demanding ICE withdraw from cities.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
