Two days after pro-Donald Trump rioters attacked the Capitol, then-national security adviser Robert O’Brien got a call from Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell and an aide who asked him to look into something he’d been hearing: retired military personnel sympathetic to Donald Trump might be preparing to prevent Joe Biden’s inauguration.
“[H]e was concerned that there were reports that there were retired military personnel who were sympathetic to the president and might be organizing,” O’Brien said in the interview. McConnell’s own national security aide, Robert Karem, was on the call as well and raised similar concerns about Navy SEALs, O’Brien said.
O’Brien described this call in testimony to the Jan. 6 select committee during a newly revealed Aug. 23 interview. He told the panel he had never heard similar concerns from other sources and doubted their accuracy, but he told the two men he would check with John Ratcliffe, then the director of national intelligence. Ultimately, he said, those fears amounted to nothing, and he acknowledged they occurred in a period of massive concern and preparation for the safety of Biden’s inauguration.
“I think we could’ve repelled a Chinese airborne invasion of Washington that day,” he said.
Yet the extraordinary conversation underscored the intense fears and instability that gripped Washington in the two weeks between the Jan. 6 assault and Biden’s ascension to the presidency. Those fears were prevalent throughout O’Brien’s testimony, a 210-page transcript of which was released Friday.