Pelosi vs. Sund: The January 6 National Guard Dispute Is About Facts, Not Feelings
Steven A. Sund is a 30-year law enforcement veteran who served as Chief of the U.S. Capitol Police from 2019 until January 8, 2021. Before that, he spent more than two decades with the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, D.C., leading major incident responses from presidential inaugurations to active shooter situations. On January 6, 2021, he was the man responsible for defending the Capitol—and the man now directly refuting former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s version of events.
We bring this up because January 6 is one of the most politically charged days in modern history, and the attack on the Capitol has shaped laws, prosecutions, and public opinion ever since. But according to Sund, the dominant narrative about what happened—and who delayed the National Guard—is not the truth. This article is not about taking sides in a partisan fight. It’s about looking at the facts, the timeline, and the law so that the truth is not buried under political spin.
Pelosi recently claimed that Donald Trump delayed deploying the National Guard during the Capitol riot. Sund, who was actually in charge of securing the building that day, says that claim doesn’t match the facts or the legal reality of his role. Under 2 U.S.C. § 1970, the Capitol Police Chief cannot deploy the National Guard on his own. That authority rests with the Capitol Police Board, which includes the House Sergeant at Arms—a position appointed by and accountable to the Speaker of the House.
Sund says that on January 3, three days before the attack, he requested National Guard support and was denied. He even had an offer from the Pentagon to provide troops, but was forced to decline because he lacked the legal authority without the Board’s approval. On January 6, as the Capitol was under assault, Sund says he again urgently requested the Guard at 12:58 p.m. That request sat for over 70 minutes as it was “run up the chain” for approval. The green light didn’t come until 2:09 p.m.—by then, rioters had already breached the building and officers were fighting for control.
The key point in Sund’s rebuttal is that the delay was not caused by Trump, but by the internal security chain tied to congressional leadership. And that matters, because outcomes don’t lie. The outcome on January 6 was a catastrophic security failure—one that began before the first rioter even arrived. Advance requests for troops were denied. Authority to act was trapped in a political process. And when the call for help finally came during the crisis, it was stalled by over an hour of procedural delay.
Sund also notes the contrast: days after the riot, Pelosi ordered the Capitol surrounded by thousands of armed National Guard troops and topped fencing with concertina wire. In his view, when the political optics aligned, the security was there. When lives and the Capitol’s safety were on the line in real time, it wasn’t.
This is not about partisan point-scoring—it’s about structural flaws that put politics above security. If Congress truly wants to prevent another January 6, it should start by removing political bottlenecks from urgent security decisions. That would be a real reform. That would be an outcome worth debating.
