Col. Earl Matthews, a former D.C National Guard official, has accused top Army generals of blatantly lying to Congress in a secret attempt to alter the military’s response at the Jan. 6 Capitol breech.
In a 36-page memo obtained by Politico, Matthews slams Gen. Charles Flynn, who served as deputy chief of staff for operations on Jan. 6, and Lt. Gen. Walter Piatt, the director of Army Staff, as “absolute and unmitigated liars” for their statements to the House Oversight Committee.
On Jan. 6, Mattews was the top attorney to Maj. Gen. William Walker and then commanding general of the D.C. National Guard. Matthews claims in the memo that both he and Walker attended a call with military and law enforcement personnel at 2:30 p.m. on Jan. 6. During the call, former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund requested Gen. Flynn and Lt. Gen. Piatt to deploy the National Guard to the Capitol but both Military generals denied the request.
“LTG Piatt stated that it would not be his best military advice to recommend to the Secretary of the Army that the D.C. National Guard be allowed to deploy to the Capitol at that time,” the memo reads. “LTGs Piatt and Flynn stated that the optics of having uniformed military personnel deployed to the U.S. Capitol would not be good.”
Instead, Flynn and Piatt suggested that D.C. Guardsmen take over police officers’ traffic duties so the officers could move to the Capitol.
However, responding to a question from House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., in June about whether Piatt advised to not deploy the National Guard to the Capitol, Piatt stated “At no point on January 6 did I tell anyone that the D.C. National Guard should not deploy directly to the Capitol.”
Flynn also told Maloney that he “never expressed a concern about the visuals, image, or public perception of” sending the National Guards to the Capitol.
Mathews slammed their statements as “false and misleading” and “outright perjury.”
Matthews further accuses the Army of writing their own version of events that day, saying Piatt “directed the development of an Army ‘White Paper’ to retell events of 6 January in a light more favorable to LTGs Flynn, Piatt, Secretary McCarthy and the Army Staff.”
Matthews called their attempt to rewrite the military’s response that day to “a revisionist tract worthy of the best Stalinist or North Korea propagandist.”