Hannity and Guest Repeat False Claim That Trump Authorized 20,000 Soldiers Ahead of Capitol Riot

As he has done before, Sean Hannity claimed on Friday night that Donald Trump ordered 20,000 soldiers deployed to keep the peace in Washington in Jan. 6, 2021. However, he said, Speaker Nancy Pelosi declined them.

The bogus claim has become Republican orthodoxy.

“You have information that nobody really else has,” Hannity said to Kash Patel, the former lame duck acting chief-of-staff at the Department of Defense in the waning days of the Trump administration.

“You were in the White House in the Oval office I believe – I think it was the Oval Office – with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, with the defense secretary,” Hannity continued. “You were the chief-of-staff for the department of defense. I think Mark Meadows was in the room. And President Trump was in the room. And on January 4th in that room, Donald Trump authorized the use of up to 20,000 National Guard troops knowing that there was going to be a large crowd coming to the nation’s capital, that they would be marching on the Capitol.”

The Fox News host asked Patel to “give more insight” about the meeting and asked, “Why didn’t Nancy Pelosi or [D.C. Mayor] Muriel Bowser take advantage of the resources that Donald Trump signed off on?”

Patel “confirmed” Trump authorized the deployment of soldiers.

“The law requires his authorization and the law requires Muriel Bowser or Nancy Pelosi and the Capitol Police to request National Guard,” he said. “Otherwise we are prohibited from doing that. Why Nancy Pelosi refused, I don’t know. You’d have to ask her.”

The one glaring problem this claim is that the Department of Defense has no record whatsoever of the authorization.

“We have no record of such an order being given,” Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby told the Washington Post.

So where does this claim come from?

Fortuitously, it turns out Vanity Fair reporter Adam Ciralsky happened to be embedded with acting defense secretary Christopher Miller and top aides at the time. Miller told Ciralsky about a meeting in the Oval Office in which Trump mentioned deploying soldiers:

The president, Miller recalled, asked how many troops the Pentagon planned to turn out the following day. “We’re like, ‘We’re going to provide any National Guard support that the District requests,’” Miller responded. “And [Trump] goes, ‘You’re going to need 10,000 people.’ No, I’m not talking bullshit. He said that. And we’re like, ‘Maybe. But you know, someone’s going to have to ask for it.’” At that point Miller remembered the president telling him, “‘You do what you need to do. You do what you need to do.’ He said, ‘You’re going to need 10,000.’ That’s what he said. Swear to God.”

However, no action was ever taken. Trump didn’t “sign off” on any formal deployment of soldiers. His remark was little more than a throwaway comment in a meeting. And therefore, there was no order for Pelosi or Bowser to reject.

The Post noted, “In fact, the Defense Department never acted on Trump’s remarks, according to our reporting, as department officials did not regard the offhand comment to be a ‘direct order’…”

The “10,000 soldiers” have now become 20,000 in many standard retellings of the tall tale, perhaps because Trump did authorize 20,000 soldiers deployed for Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021. It’s possible this fact is being conflated with the 10,000 troops line.

Moreover, the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack said it has firsthand testimony that Trump watched the riot on television as aides pleaded with him to act.

Watch above via Fox News.