The Best Of The Morning Drive 020623 Fmr Acting Sec. of Defense Chris Miller

Soldier Secretary: Warnings from the Battlefield & the Pentagon about America’s Most Dangerous Enemies, will be released on February 7, 2023 by Center Street, but is available for pre-order now. This is the first time the leader of the Pentagon has told the full inside story of the military's January 6 response.

'At 3:44 p.m. on January 6, 2021, I was sitting at my desk in the Pentagon holding a phone six inches away from my ear, trying my best to make sense of the incoherent shrieking blasting out of the receiver. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was on the line, and she was in a state of total nuclear meltdown.

To be fair, the other members of congressional leadership on the call weren’t exactly composed, either. Every time Pelosi paused to catch her breath, Senator Mitch McConnell, Senator Chuck Schumer and Congressman Steny Hoyer took turns hyperventilating into the phone.

Two hours earlier, a crowd of Trump supporters had unlawfully entered the Capitol. Congressional leadership had been swept away to a secure location at a pre-Civil War era Army installation less than two miles away. As acting secretary of defense, I was across the river at the Pentagon, speaking to them by phone and watching the mayhem play out on my TV screen.

“Get troops to the Capitol now, Mr. Secretary,” Pelosi demanded. The irony wasn’t lost on me. Prior to that very moment, the speaker and her Democrat colleagues had spent months decrying the use of National Guard troops to quell left-wing riots following the death of George Floyd that caused countless deaths and billions of dollars in property damage nationwide. But as soon as it was her ass on the line, Pelosi had been miraculously born again as a passionate, if less than altruistic, champion of law and order.'