Trump Aides Prepared Insurrection Act Order
During Debate Over Protests
President Donald Trump never invoked the act, but
fresh details underscore the intensity of his interest last June in using
active-duty military to curb unrest.
President Donald J. Trump’s actions on June 1, 2020,
when he walked across Lafayette Park after it was cleared of protestors, marked
a pivotal moment in his presidency.
Michael S. Schmidt Maggie Haberman
By Michael
S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman
June 25,
2021
Responding
to interest from President Donald J. Trump, White House aides drafted a
proclamation last year to invoke the Insurrection Act in case Mr. Trump moved
to take the extraordinary step of deploying active-duty troops in Washington to
quell the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd, two senior Trump
administration officials said.
The aides
drafted the proclamation on June 1, 2020, during a heated debate inside the
administration over how to respond to the protests. Mr. Trump, enraged by the
demonstrations, had told the attorney general, William P. Barr, the defense
secretary, Mark T. Esper, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, Gen.
Mark A. Milley, that he wanted thousands of active-duty troops on the streets
of the nation’s capital, one of the officials said.
Mr. Trump
was talked out of the plan by the three officials. But a separate group of
White House staff members wanted to leave open the option for Mr. Trump to
invoke the Insurrection Act to call in the military to patrol the streets of
the capital.
They
decided it would be prudent to have the necessary document vetted and ready in
case the unrest in Washington worsened or the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser,
declined to take measures such as a citywide curfew, which she ultimately put
in place.
According
to one former senior administration official, Mr. Trump was aware that the
document was prepared. He never invoked the act, and in a statement to The New
York Times he denied that he had wanted to deploy active-duty troops. “It’s
absolutely not true and if it was true, I would have done it,” Mr. Trump said.
But the new
details about internal White House deliberations on a pivotal day in his
presidency underscore the intensity of Mr. Trump’s instinct to call on the
active-duty military to deal with a domestic issue. And they help to flesh out
the sequence of events that would culminate later in the day with Mr. Trump’s
walk across Lafayette Park to St. John’s Church so he could pose in front of it
holding a Bible, a move that coincided with a spasm of violence between law
enforcement and protesters camped near the White House.
Although
the main elements of what happened in and around the White House on June 1,
2020, have been well established, some aspects remain a subject of dispute. A
federal watchdog concluded this month that the United States Park Police had
been planning to clear protesters from Lafayette Park well before they learned
that Mr. Trump was going to walk through the area. And a federal judge this
week partly dismissed claims in a civil suit accusing the Trump administration
of abusing its power in clearing the park.
A Trump
adviser, echoing the former president’s insistence he did not want to deploy
active-duty troops, said that Mr. Trump rejected the option when presented with
it by advisers, and maintained that had he done so, he would have “owned the
problem” politically.
Despite
being convinced not to invoke the act, Mr. Trump continued to bring up the idea
of deploying active-duty military in the weeks that followed, as unrest
unfolded in major cities including New York, Chicago, and Portland, Ore., the
officials said.
Their
accounts comport with others, including one in a forthcoming book by the Wall
Street Journal reporter Michael Bender that says Mr. Trump repeatedly urged
General Milley and other top military and law enforcement officials throughout
the summer to confront the protesters physically, according to excerpts from
Mr. Bender’s book published by CNN.
The basic
facts of Mr. Trump’s deliberations about how to respond to the protests that
broke out after the killing of Mr. Floyd have been widely reported. NBC News
reported on June 1, 2020, that Mr. Trump was considering invoking the
Insurrection Act.
CNN later
reported the White House wanted to deploy 10,000 troops onto the streets but
that Mr. Esper and General Milley pushed back on the idea.
But the new
details help illustrate the intensity of Mr. Trump’s demands for militaristic
action to curb the protests.
In the Oval
Office on the morning of June 1, 2020, Mr. Trump was furious about the
televised images he had seen of the unrest in Washington and elsewhere.
For roughly
20 minutes, according to the former officials, Mr. Trump went on about how to
contain the protests. General Milley and Mr. Esper appeared particularly
stunned by Mr. Trump’s eruption, according to one of the officials.
Throughout
Mr. Trump’s presidency, he had a broad view of his powers as president,
claiming that he could take an array of aggressive actions using federal
authorities and military personnel to handle problems typically left to local
authorities.
But
invoking the Insurrection Act, a rarely used authority allowing presidents to
use active duty military for law-enforcement purposes, would have been a
dramatic escalation. The act has only been invoked twice in the past 40 years —
once to quell unrest after Hurricane Hugo in 1989, and once during the 1992 Los
Angeles riots.
“We look
weak,” Mr. Trump said, according to one of the officials. He complained about
having been taken to the bunker below the White House on the night of May 29
when the barricade outside the Treasury Department was pierced. The New York
Times had reported the bunker visit a day earlier, infuriating Mr. Trump.
But all
three officials pushed back against the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act.
Mr. Barr, who had been Mr. Trump’s attorney general for a year and a half and
had been increasingly clashing with the president, told Mr. Trump that civilian
law-enforcement authorities had enough personnel to manage the situation and
that a drastic move like invoking the Insurrection Act could spawn more
protests and violence. Mr. Esper agreed, according to the two former officials.
Mr. Trump’s
meeting with Mr. Barr, Mr. Esper and Mr. Milley was marked by his rage at being
embarrassed on the world stage, according to two of the officials.
Mr. Trump
grudgingly went along with their counsel not to deploy active-duty troops,
according to the officials. Immediately after the meeting, Mr. Trump joined a
call with governors around the country, some of whom were seeing protests
increase in their states. Mr. Trump urged them to “dominate” the protesters, as
he said the National Guard in Minnesota had.
Mr. Esper
told associates that he was so concerned that Mr. Trump would deploy
active-duty troops that he echoed the need for them to get control of their
states, hoping he could encourage governors to deploy the National Guard to
head off federal action. Using Pentagon terminology that he later told
associates he regretted, Mr. Esper told the governors to “dominate the battle
space,” a sentiment stemming from concern about Mr. Trump’s intentions.
But one
backdrop for the drafting of the Insurrection Act proclamation was that
discussions between the White House and city officials about containing the
protests remained contentious throughout the day. At one point, White House
officials suggested taking over the city police force to tamp down the unrest
and impose order. That idea stunned Washington city officials.
Mr. Esper —
who, associates said, so feared the situation was spinning out of control that
two days later he publicly said he opposed invoking the Insurrection Act —
later tried to again communicate the gravity with which he feared Mr. Trump
would act when he held a handful of private calls with specific governors that
afternoon, according to the former senior administration official.
Mr. Trump
delivered a Rose Garden address later that evening, saying he was prepared to
deploy the military if the rioting did not cease.
“If the
city or state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life
and property of their residence, then I will deploy the United States military
and quickly solve the problem for them,” Mr. Trump said.
Active-duty
military, including from the 82nd Airborne Division, were airlifted to bases
outside Washington, but Mr. Esper mobilized a National Guard deployment in the
city in an effort to thwart them being deployed. By June 5, they were all
ordered to return to their home bases.
Michael S.
Schmidt is a Washington correspondent covering national security and federal
investigations. He was part of two teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2018 — one
for reporting on workplace sexual harassment and the other for coverage of
President Trump and his campaign’s ties to Russia. @NYTMike
Maggie
Haberman is a White House correspondent. She joined The Times in 2015 as a
campaign correspondent and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018
for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia.
@maggieNYT
A version
of this article appears in print on June 26, 2021, Section A, Page 17 of the
New York edition with the headline: Trump Weighed Insurrection Act Amid
Protests. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário