Conservative raises dire questions about security failures that nearly allowed Trump's coup to succeed

Donald Trump deserves the ultimate blame for the Jan. 6 insurrection, but the House select committee's investigation found a cascading series of failures that nearly allowed the attack to succeed.

Multiple investigations by lawmakers, inspectors general and others have examined the failures by law enforcement and federal agencies that allowed the mob of riled-up Trump supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol, fight their way inside and come agonizingly close to preventing Congress from certifying President Joe Biden's election win, wrote The Bulwark columnist Amanda Carpenter.

"The January 6th security lag — the fact that it took more than three hours for the National Guard to arrive on Capitol Hill and secure the grounds — can largely be attributed to three factors: Washington bureaucracy, a backlash to the militarized response to Lafayette Square in June 2020, and concerns over how Trump might use the military for his political purposes," Carpenter wrote.

Although many of the witnesses interviewed by the committee defended their own actions, the evidence shows a lack of urgency ahead of the attack and an overemphasis on political considerations until it was too late to stop the mob -- who the former president refused to call off for hours.

IN OTHER NEWS: The powerful GOP Oversight Committee chairman is pushing a a baseless narrative that Biden is ‘compromised’

"The January 6th insurrection proved that, even twenty years after 9/11 and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security to coordinate a national security response in the event of a major emergency, the United States Capitol remains a soft target — and not necessarily for lack of manpower or funding," Carpenter wrote. "Our national security apparatus is only as good as the political appointees who run it, and many of them provided a gross disservice to the men and women in uniform on the ground that day."