For the last three-and-a-half years, the Democrats have owned the Jan. 6 narrative. Republicans in Congress and the media gave it away without a fight.
The good news is that party standard-bearer Donald Trump appears intent on taking it back. On Sunday in Las Vegas, Trump made his strongest statement yet about that memorable day, saying, "There has never been people treated more horrifically than J6 hostages."
Coincidentally or not, a snippet from the footage Pelosi's daughter Alexandra shot for HBO surfaced on line a day later. The video was extracted from about 45 minutes of footage handed over recently to the House administration oversight subcommittee.
Shot in the backseat of Pelosi's vehicle as she was being driven away from the Capitol on Jan. 6, Pelosi speaks about her own role in allowing the chaos to happen.
"We take responsibility, Terri," a testy Pelosi says to her chief of staff Terri McCullough. "We did not have any accountability for what was going on there, and we should have. This is ridiculous."
At this point, Pelosi appears to respond to a question McCullough asked earlier about calling in the National Guard. "You're going to ask me in the middle of the thing when they've already breached the inaugural stuff that should we call the Capitol Police. I mean the National Guard," Pelosi snaps. "Why weren't the National Guard there to begin with?"
"They thought they had sufficient resources," says McCullough referring to the Capitol Police.
"No, it is not a question of how they had … They don't know," a rattled Pelosi shoots back. "They clearly didn't know. And I take responsibility for not having them just prepare for more."
Pelosi has a lot to take responsibility for. Not since the War of 1812 has congressional leadership so clearly failed in its duty to keep the nation's capital secure.
The question remains, however, whether the failure was by design. "People don't really want to get to the bottom of this," former Capitol Police Chief Steve Sund told Tucker Carlson in 2023. "This didn't have to happen."
Sund's requests for assistance from the National Guard were denied before Jan. 6 and inexplicably delayed during the siege.
Within minutes of the first breach by Ray Epps and crew at 12:53 p.m., Sund called the House sergeant at arms, Paul Irving, demanding help from the National Guard. Irving told Sund he had to run the request up the chain to Pelosi.
If clever, the conspirators likely counted on law enforcement's amateurish and often violent overreaction to the incoming masses. Some among the police seemed to understand the good intentions of the MAGA crowd.
Others saw a horde of killer white supremacists. If the police behaved badly, the conspirators weren't worried. This wasn't Chicago 1968.
There would be no talk of a "police riot" as there had been at that year's Democratic National Convention. The media, they knew, would denounce the "insurrectionists" as they "stormed" the Capitol without prompting.
At 2:09 p.m., an inexplicable 71 minutes and 32 phone calls after Sund's initial call, the Capitol Police Board approved the use of the National Guard.
Although President Trump had pre-authorized the deployment of 10,000 troops – unusual behavior for an insurrectionist – the Pentagon hesitated.
The hesitance, as Julie Kelly has argued, emanated from then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, whose paranoid misreading of Trump made Jan. 6 possible.
Jack Cashill's new book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6 is now available for purchase.
At a House Oversight Committee hearing in April, Department of Defense witness Colonel Earl Matthews, spoke of an "irrational" fear among a "clique" of senior military officers.
Chief among the fear mongers was General Milley. Openly contemptuous of the president, the borderline mutinous Milley worried that Trump would somehow deploy the National Guard to stop the certification process to stay in power.
Only after the first shot was fired did the Pentagon get the National Guard into gear, but by then it was too late for Ashli Babbitt and too late for Rosanne Boyland, both of whom were killed by police action.
Standing to benefit from the disrupted proceeding were House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and, more passively, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Twelve hours of serious fraud allegations, presented by members of Congress, would have shown the "big lie" to be the big lie that it was.
The details of a larger conspiracy may never be sorted out, but as with so many seeming conspiracies – the Epstein jailers come to mind – incompetence masks many a sin.
If nothing else, Pelosi's exchange with McCullough convinced me that she was less an active conspirator in the trap set for the protestors than a reliably incompetent cog.
The conspirators may not have needed to include USCP assistant chief for intelligence Yogananda Pittman in the plot. Knowing her history, they might have just counted on her to screw things up.
That said, it was Pittman who led Sund to believe that the Jan. 6 rally would be a reprise of the November and December MAGA rallies. It wasn't.
Rather than discipline the head of intelligence, Pelosi promptly fired Sund and promoted Pittman to acting USCP chief, another clumsy move.
To get a sense of the contempt in which Pittman's colleagues held her, a staggering 92 percent of them voted no confidence in her leadership.
Challenged about her own leadership, Pelosi rushed to the MSNBC studios on Monday to shore up the Democrat narrative.
"The president of the United States, the former president and his toadies, do not want to face the facts," said Pelosi. "They are trying to do revisionist history on January 6, but we cannot let us be dragged into their again false impression about what that happened that day. They know what happened that day."
No, Republicans don't know what really happened that day, and Pelosi is desperate to keep it that way.
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