Insecure State Of The Union, But With Fences
Guns, Guards, & Gates Can't Protect From The Dangers Inside Government
When you live or work in downtown Washington, DC, the week before the State of the Union (SOTU) speech is noticeable. It’s a production. It gets trickier to get around in areas around the US Capitol. Fencing seems to materialize out of nowhere, and to go up in unending layers way further out than one might think is necessary. Road closures start in, and the buzz in town ramps up.
The SOTU is always designated as a National Security Special Event, or NSSE. That comes with a certain set of security protocols for any event, but there are pre-set measures for the US Capitol area, and for the US government overall. Those include continuity of government (COG) considerations to preserve Constitutional government in the case of an attack. The most well-known provision for that during the SOTU is that one member of the administration’s cabinet does not attend the event at the Capitol, but is relocated to an undisclosed location for the duration.
Because of the insurrection and coup attempt on January 6, 2021, reporting indicates that a few additional security measures will be put in place for this SOTU.
Oh. Okay. That’s nice.
Except that that seems absurd and ridiculous given the many problems not addressed since that fateful day. Not the least of which is that that planned election certification should have been designated by the Secretary of Homeland Security as an NSSE; especially given the publicly available threats to the US Capitol and to the proceedings scheduled there that day. There’s been no accountability about the fact that that didn’t happen, or the intel failures, or the preparedness failures, or the response failures. The lists go on.
We had an entire year-and-a-half “investigation” into January 6th through a House Select Committee to look into January 6th… and that investigation didn’t get into details on any of the spectacular intelligence, information sharing, law enforcement, military, and mutual aid mobilization failures in the lead-up to January 6th and in the response. It did not get into the threats, encouragement, obstruction, reconnaissance, or other actions taken by federal legislators in the US House or in the US Senate that may have contributed to or worsened the insurrection and coup attempt.
The hearings and final report focused primarily on the actions of Trump, his cabal, the White House, and the crowd of insurrectionists. The Committee’s collection of assembled information is here.
The Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol has very little actionable collected info for the Executive Branch. It does not focus on the actions Trump’s cabinet and other political appointees in the federal departments and agencies took or may have taken to obstruct, obscure, dilute, or distract from the threats prior to January 6th, and in their obstruction or failure to respond as the attack unfolded. It’s a problem.
On top of all that… Trump’s Administration actively eroded government departments and agencies themselves, including those agencies critical to national security. Most notably relevant to today’s major SOTU security event, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Trump appointees left in federal agencies who were not removed by President Biden actively obstructed the January 6th Committee’s investigation.
DOJ itself did not appear to be aggressively looking into the coup attempt or insurrection until certain January 6th Committee hearings took place; despite obvious interviews and investigations that could have been conducted. For example, why on earth had DOJ not already spoken with every member of the US Secret Service present in and around all coup attempt activities in the lead-up to January 6th, and in the days after? Those are sworn federal officers with incredible visibility and access to key coup plotters. What in the what?
As far as that goes, why is it that the Biden Administration did not clear Trump political appointees out of critical national security agencies after the Trump Administration attempted a coup that several of the agencies either made worse or actively refused to provide appropriate security for? For example, there were political appointees at DOJ, DHS, and other federal agencies involved in not moving intel appropriately prior to January 6th, not acting on it, not designating January 6th as an NSSE, and deliberately decimating domestic mechanisms for disseminating domestic violent extremist threats to state and local governments in the fall of 2020 after a summer of protests. Political appointees left in place by the Biden Administration were also able to interfere with the January 6th Committee’s attempts to get information and interviews from the Executive Branch; especially through DHS.
The Biden Administration has not been aggressive in dealing with all of this. There was no known internal interagency governmental after-action investigation in the Executive Branch once the Biden Administration began to look into January 6th to help figure out what went wrong, or where there were weaknesses or failures that need to be addressed. There has been no known department-specific investigation or survey, either.
So how do we know 1) what didn’t work, and 2) that it’s been addressed?
I doubt that many of the issues in government have been resolved. We also don’t know if the problems were caused entirely by political appointees… or if there were career civil servants who took part in obstructing or failing to respond to some aspects of all of this.
An authoritarian-wannabe such as Donald Trump erodes government and institutions on purpose so that things become a bigger mess; so that the authoritarian movement can point to the broken, dysfunctional government and proclaim that we should give the authoritarian person the power to go in and “fix” it all. They don’t want to fix anything, though… they’ll just break more parts in order to get more power.
Trump did break parts of government. We don’t have great reassurances from the Biden Administration that those pieces are restored or refurbished appropriately. We don’t even have acknowledgment that things were even broken.
We barely have acknowledgment from the US government that Trump has created national security vulnerabilities in addition to fomenting an insurrection and coup by stealing code-word and other highly classified documents and doing god-knows-what with them for 18 months. Or that the knowledge he and his people have just from being in government ("This Is Way More Dangerous Than Piles Of Papers") makes us highly vulnerable. His whole team knows a ton about the US government, about our vulnerabilities, about our continuity of government provisions, and about our capabilities.
We also have members of Congress who were part of fomenting an insurrection and attempting a coup who have had exactly zero accountability — from either the US Congress itself, or from the US Department of Justice. Several of these people were allowed by their states to run for re-election. Several were re-elected by voters just last fall, and were sworn in again just last month.
They are effectively above the law. They know it.
Those people are going to be inside the fences today.
Why are we even putting fences up when members of Congress who can carry guns inside the Capitol complex will be inside? When the US House has opted to get rid of the magnetometer on the House floor?
Will the US Secret Service (USSS) change that absurd rule to require a gun prohibition in the House chamber for today’s SOTU event since the leadership for all three branches of government will be assembled there? Does the USSS have that kind of power, when they’re acting in a Legislative Branch facility for an NSSE? Do they get to override the Republican majority’s choice to remove the magnetometer?
This is the state of things in the US Capitol today in the world’s most powerful superpower.
So where does that leave us?
I’ll tell you where. It means that this State of the Union speech is probably the most insecure one of them in decades… if not since the post-Civil War era.
It leaves us with useless fences around an event where the most powerful government in the world will be gathered… when its own members are part of the threat.
It leaves us with no confirmation that the federal government has fixed the issues with threat monitoring, intel sharing, and preparedness between agencies so that any threats to this particular event would be mitigated appropriately, and any necessary response to any crises would be handled effectively.
Security is about way more than guns, guards, and gates. That stuff is an illusion when you don’t hold members of Congress accountable, uphold the law, or uphold institutions and keep government functioning well. It’s security theater.
What if members of Congress do something outlandish or dangerous tonight? Do we have confidence that the US Secret Service, the rest of DHS, DOJ, and the US Capitol Police would react appropriately? Do you have confidence that they would? I don’t.
It’s hard to say that. It’s hard to write this whole post… and I’m sure it’s still missing vulnerabilities. I worked for over a decade in homeland security for both DHS and for the US Department of the Interior (DOI). That included work protecting continuity of Constitutional government, and protecting critical infrastructure such as government facilities and also national monuments and icons including the US Capitol. I also worked with the local government agencies in the entire National Capital Region on certain emergency management systems and protocols. Some of the people ramping up security and response actions for tonight’s SOTU are my former colleagues.
The good news there is that there are some pretty awesome region-wide protocols in place for major events such as this that I don’t think the Trump Administration was able to completely dissolve… partly because key aspects of them were not inside the federal government. I know that staff level folks in the federal government do tend to take national security seriously. I hope that enough of them remain in government to ensure that as much as possible has been done to help mitigate security risks for tonight’s event… and really for our country overall.
We’re not in a good place.
Hopefully we make it through tonight without a major incident. Hope isn’t a security measure, though.
I’m not convinced that we’ve mitigated the overall risks enough to think that something crazy won’t happen tonight at the SOTU. I did used to have a whole lot of faith the Secret Service… but after the coup attempt, insurrection, and Secret Service insouciance since then I’m not 100% convinced they’ll be able to cover all the necessary bases to mitigate security risks tonight from inside Congress. Especially when the members of Congress that may have aided and abetted the coup attempt and insurrection are essentially above the law. At least for now. That’s not going to get fixed before the big speech tonight.
Last but not least, there are the actual hostilities and aggressiveness from those same members of Congress. They are disrespectful of President Biden and of their own legislative colleagues. More than one of them have made threats against their own colleagues, and/or taken pictures or put out ads with firearms insinuating threats.
The culture war up in this country has gone off the charts. What was unfathomable even two years ago is now the everyday. Shock and overwhelm are persistent, because the unexpected keeps happening. Why would we think it wouldn’t tonight, especially from some of the same people who tried to have a coup?????
Hopefully at a minimum the USSS is able to keep the guns out of the House chamber. I’m sure they’ve thought of that. They used run a pretty tight ship back in the before-Trump-times, and so far the fact that President Biden remains upright and unshot indicates that they’ve been keeping him pretty secure. So that’s good.
No doubt there will be some serious tensions for everyone, though, about security. But likely about other things as well. The media keeps talking about how now House Speaker Kevin McCarthy will be behind President Biden for the whole SOTU speech and that that will likely be awkward. But the US Supreme Court Justices will be present in a chamber with a bunch of Democrats and Republicans for the first time since they gutted 50 years of rights in last year’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade. What they do with any one of several critical cases could further damage this democracy, too.
Should be interesting.
I write these types of analyses for a number of reasons, but one of them is that this country remains unstable… and I think we’re going to need to do different stuff to a) get through it, and b) turn the ship.
To that end, we’ve started a nonprofit. It’s called Shift the Country. Support our work and this kind of writing by donating here or on ActBlue. Volunteer here. We are starting Zoom calls soon to ramp this shift up with activity to help energize the majority based on our 5-part approach.
Be safe and be well. Long term I think we can hold this democracy. But it will help if we can see it honestly for what it is. Right now, we’re still pretty vulnerable… and we will be for years.
We need good people, and we need to believe together that we can get through all this and change the direction we’re headed in. And then we need to do it.
Onward.
Sobering, Vanessa. Especially given your experience working for Homeland Security. I've wondered about many of the issues you raise--especially about the trump holdovers in Biden's administration. I guess Old Joe wants to be a Nice Guy. I can't imagine any other president to follow trump who wouldn't have cleaned house on day 1. I can't imagine that if Joe dragged his feet that his advisors didn't try to steer him to action. But this is where we are. Let's hope it all turns out OK tonight--no security breach, the messages Biden delivers land the way he wants them to with no gaffes, and the media accurately portray them. Guess it's time to hold our breath....