Trump's defense secretary denies receiving orders to deploy 10,000 troops to the Capitol

MADRID, 27 Jul. (EUROPA PRESS) -

Chris Miller, the former Secretary of Defense of former President Donald Trump, has denied having received formal orders from the New York tycoon to deploy some 10,000 soldiers in the face of the assault carried out on January 6, 2021 by a mob of supporters of the former president. in the Capitol.

"I was never given such an instruction or order nor did I know of plans of this nature," he said during an appearance before the parliamentary commission investigating the assault, which resulted in five deaths and fifty detainees.

Miller has stressed that, "definitely, there was no such order by the president," according to information from the CNN television network. "We obviously had plans to deploy more troops, but it was just a contingency plan and nothing more. There was no official message of that nature," he said.

Trump, however, has indicated in the past that he asked the National Guard to be "prepared" to be deployed in Washington by January 6, considering that the crowd that was gathering around Congress was "too big".

For his part, the former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States Army, General Mark Milley, has also insisted that he never received such orders from Trump, as has since been suggested.

Milley testified that he had a conversation with now-former Vice President Mike Pence on two or three occasions that day, a version that fits with that of former national security adviser Keith Kellogg, who has stated that Trump never called for such a deployment by the Armed Forces.