Then-Acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen made the decision to deploy "commandos" "with shoot-to-kill authority" to the U.S. Capitol ahead of the Jan. 6 protest, a report said.
Rosen made the "unilateral decision" to deploy Department of Justice and so-called "national" forces even though no formal request from the U.S. Capitol Police, the Secret Service, the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, or any other external request from any agency, Newsweek reported.
"The leadership in Justice and the FBI anticipated the worst and decided to act independently, the special operations forces lurking behind the scenes," the report noted.
A meeting on Jan. 3, 2021 in Quantico, Virginia included the heads of several elite government special operations teams who discussed potential threats, contingencies, and plans for Joint Session of Congress to count electors on Jan. 6, 2021.
"The meeting, and the subsequent deployment of these shadowy commandos" had not been revealed until early this year, the report added.
Rosen, who was Acting AG for the last month of the Trump administration, "approved implementation of long-standing contingency plans dealing with the most extreme possibilities: an attack on President Donald Trump or Vice President Mike Pence, a terrorist attack involving a weapon of mass destruction, and a declaration of measures to implement continuity of government, requiring protection and movement of presidential successors," Newsweek noted.
The teams of commandos who met at Quantico on Jan. 3 included the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team, the FBI's national "Render Safe" team, an FBI SWAT team from the Baltimore Field Office, Special Response Teams from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and the U.S. Marshals Service Special Operations Group.
Rosen stated that the commando units were "pre-deployed" and ready to go over the weekend of January 2-3, 2021 and were staging out of the FBI Academy complex in Quantico, 30 miles south of the Capitol building.
If a WMD or terrorist attack occurred, the units were to move via helicopter to the site of the incident.
"The activation of the catastrophic response units, operating under plans already approved by President Trump, entailed an automatic green light allowing federal responders to take the initiative and spare no resources, including shoot-to-kill authority, to deal with this most extraordinary condition," the Newsweek report noted.
Rosen later told Congress: "I believe that DOJ [Department of Justice] reasonably prepared for contingencies ahead of January 6, understanding that there was considerable uncertainty as to how many people would arrive, who those people would be, and precisely what purposes they would pursue." He stressed that his department played "no frontline role with respect to crowd control," that they were focused on "high-risk" operations.
"The presence of these extraordinary forces under the control of the Attorney General — and mostly operating under contingency plans that Congress and the U.S. Capitol Police were not privy to — added an additional layer of highly armed responders," the Newsweek report noted. "The role that the military played in this highly classified operation is still unknown, though FBI sources tell Newsweek that military operators seconded to the FBI, and those on alert as part of the National Mission Force, were present in the metropolitan area."
The lingering question is, Newsweek added: "What was it that the Justice Department saw that provoked it to see January 6 as an extraordinary event, something that the other agencies evidently missed."
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