Forget Pelosi, What Was Gen. Milley's Role in The "Insurrection"?

The Dems War-Gamed a Coup, and Milley Chose Sides

The proposed $1.776 billion settlement for victims of Obama-Biden weaponization has focused attention anew on the events of January 6, 2021. The settlement has also renewed interest in the mind-bending August 2020 document, “Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition.” As the document makes clear, the Democrats anticipated January 6 and may have facilitated it.

Once again, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi finds herself at the center of the conversation. She ought not be, at least not at the center. If there was any one person who deserves extra scrutiny it is former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley.

True, Pelosi did everything wrong on January 6, 2021, and lied about her screw-ups shamelessly. That conceded, she lacked the wherewithal to orchestrate an insurrection. A video shot by daughter Alexandra captured her hysterical mother in a rare honest moment as she fled the Capitol.

“We take responsibility, Terri,” a testy Pelosi said 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.”

Pelosi continued to rant, “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. Why weren’t the National Guard there to begin with?”

Arguably, the person most responsible for the Guard’s lethal delay is the TDS-addled Milley. Milley’s paranpoia about President Trump chilled everyone in his orbit to the point of near paralysis.

If not earlier, Milley showed his penchant for mutiny in June 2020 when he publicly apologized for accompanying Trump on a walk to DC’s Lafayette Park. This projection of power occurred in the midst of the George Floyd riots. “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics,” Milley told an NPR interviewer while DC still simmered.

In truth, the riot resembled “domestic politics” less than it did an insurrection, an insurrection more grave by any metric than the mostly peaceful protest of January 6. On Friday, May 29, the rioting around the White House grew so intense Secret Service agents ushered the president and his family into an underground bunker. The rioting resumed on Saturday and grew more serious.

Rioters tried to push through security barriers, damaged a half-dozen Secret Service vehicles, and threw bricks, rocks, fireworks, bottles, and other objects at Secret Service personnel. In some instances, they kicked, punched, and threw bodily fluids at the officers. By Sunday morning, 60 of the officers had been injured, and the Church of St. John’s in Lafayette Park, the “Church of the Presidents,” had been set on fire.

By publicly repudiating the president at this critical moment, Milley let the Democrats know he was not going to interfere with their plans to use this so-called “racial-justice uprising” to secure the 2020 election. By this time, he had to have been aware of their plot to unseat President Trump should the Left’s attempt to rig the 2020 election fail.

The only slightly disguised outlines of this coup are evident in the August 2020 document. To produce the document, the ironically named “Transition Integrity Project” (TIP) convened a TDS-infected “bipartisan group of over 100 current and former senior government and campaign leaders.” The document reeks of mendacity and self-interest.

What the plotters feared most about a contested election—or claimed to—was the “President’s ability to federalize the national guard or invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy active duty military domestically.” This fear Milley and his allies had been stoking since at least June 2020.

Of the thousands of words of sworn testimony given at an April 2024 hearing held by the House Oversight Committee, some of the most revealing came from Colonel Earl Matthews. In rebutting the questions asked by Rep. Norma Torres, a California Democrat, the intrepid Matthews shared some inconvenient truths.

Col. Matthews faced retaliation for telling the truth about January 6

When asked if there was “widespread fear” that the president would use the military to impact the election, Matthews responded, “No. It was not a widespread fear. It was
a fear among a clique of officers led by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who talked about a so-called Reichstag moment.” Matthews called the fear “irrational,” adding, “I do not believe the President ever gave any of them an unlawful order.” On hearing this, Torres quickly cut Matthews off.

This fear led the Pentagon to slow walk the president’s request for National Guard support on January 6. When the National Guard arrived at the Capitol too late to be of much use, the media and the Democrats blamed the president. By June 2025, Pelosi was making the outrageous claim, “We begged the president of the United States to send in the National Guard. He would not do it.”

In a September 2024 press release, Rep. Barry Loudermilk, Oversight Committee Chairman, made hash of Pelosi’s nonsense: “The transcripts released [from the DoD IG report] show Trump gave senior Pentagon leadership directives to keep January 6 peaceful -- including using the National Guard -- which the Pentagon leaders ignored.”

Gen. Milley and a president he could manage

To make his case, Loudermilk shared some direct quotes from Milley and others. On January 3, 2021, Milley quoted Trump as saying, “Hey, look at this. There’s going to be a large amount of protesters here on the 6th, make sure that you have sufficient National Guard or Soldiers to make sure it’s a safe event.” Again, according to Milley, Trump added, “Hey, I don’t care if you use Guard, or Soldiers, active duty Soldiers, do whatever you have to do. Just make sure it’s safe.”

Acting U.S. Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller also heard Trump’s say “that they were going to need 10,000 troops.” Although not part of Milley’s clique, Miller was well aware of Milley’s flirtation with treason. “I want to remind you and the American public that during that time, there was irresponsible commentary by the media about a possible military coup or that advisors to the president were advocating the declaration of martial law,” Miller testified at a May 2021 House hearing.

The rumors of a Trump-led military coup and the “hysteria about them,” said Miller, “factored into my decisions regarding the appropriate and limited use of our armed forces to support civilian law enforcement during the electoral college certification.” Appointed just two months prior, Miller lacked the confidence to silence a subordinate of Milley’s stature.

The Pentagon’s betrayal of Trump should not surprise. The FBI and the intelligence community had sabotaged his presidency as well as the campaigns of 2016 and 2020, the latter fatally. “Let me tell you,” Senate leader Chuck Schumer warned the president-elect days before his 2017 inauguration, “you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you.” As President Trump learned, the Pentagon had its ways too.