Bill Whitaker speaks with one of the three law enforcement officials who resigned in the wake of the attack on the Capitol, and reports on the threat behind what one expert says « may have been the most predictable terrorist incident in modern American history. »
The FBI has spent much of the weekend identifying and hunting down more than 300 suspects from the attack on the United States Capitol on January 6th. Whipped into a seditious frenzy at a rally behind the White House, thousands of pro-Trump demonstrators marched on the Capitol to stop the electoral vote count presided over by Vice President Mike Pence. Trump true-believers, Proud Boys and Boogaloo Bois joined costumed QAnon conspiracists. There were neo-Nazis and other white supremacists. Some were armed or wearing tactical gear or capes improvised from Trump flags. What was once the fringe had become a threat to American democracy. Steven Sund: They came with body armor, they came with helmets, they came with respirators. They came with baseball bats, they came with pipes. They came with bear spray. They came with their own explosives. They came with climbing gear. They came well-prepared and coordinated. This was no less than a coordinated, violent attack on the United States Capitol. On January 6th, Steven Sund was chief of the Capitol Police. He’d held the post a year and a half, but he’d spent almost 30 years in law enforcement in the nation’s capital. He’d seen massive, sometimes violent protests before and from the intel he says he’d received, Sund was confident his plan for deploying his officers was robust enough to handle the pro-Trump demonstration. It was a tragic miscalculation. When insurgents filled the Capitol’s grand halls with rage and rancor, Chief Sund was scrambling to mount a response from his command center two blocks away, watching the defilement of the « People’s House » on security cameras. Bill Whitaker: You offered your resignation in the wake of this. Steven Sund: Yes sir. Bill Whitaker: Why? Steven Sund: I understand how things work. I’m the chief the visuals of what I watched were– were alarming. Five people died as a result of the siege, including Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick. The next day, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she’d lost confidence in the chief. Speaker Nancy Pelosi day after Capitol assault: I am calling for the resignation of the Chief of the Capitol Police, Mr. Sund. His two superiors, the sergeants at arms of the House and the Senate, resigned as well. Steven Sund: She had gone onto national TV and basically made everybody feel that it was a failure on my part. If that’s how the leadership feels, then I have no problem. Then I will step down to let this department move forward. Bill Whitaker: You said that you let your officers down. Steven Sund: No leader wants to see their officers go through what they went through. You know it’s heartbreaking to see that. Three days before the siege, an internal report by Sund’s own intelligence unit, obtained by the Washington Post and confirmed by 60 Minutes, warned the rally of angry Trump supporters, white supremacists and militia members January 6th could erupt in violence, their rage focused on Congress. Steven Sund: We were expecting– some large crowds are gonna come down. Their grievance would be on the Capitol and the counting of the votes. We expected altercations between some of the counter protests. We may have some people within the group that may be armed. We had contingency planning for that. But nothing about an armed, violent attack on the United States Capitol Building. Bill Whitaker: But I’m sitting in New York, and I was aware that this was likely to be– a day of violence. Steven Sund: We expected demonstrators with some pa– potential for violence. Not a directed, coordinated violent attack toward the nation’s Capitol. Make– I consider those two different things. He told us he thought he had everything under control. But he was concerned enough to get additional helmets for his officers and widen the perimeters. He asked the sergeants at arms to activate the National Guard but they wouldn’t approve a formal request… A decision he told us he came to regret before President Trump finished speaking to his throng of supporters.
