Sean Hannity demands to know “when” National Guard troops will be moved out of Capitol parking garage. (This already happened.)

Hannity falsely claims President Joe Biden “already treated his own troops this way” — while a conservative Republican senator says a lone Capitol Police officer was responsible

Written by Media Matters Staff

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Sean Hannity demands to know “when” National Guard troops will be moved out parking garage. (This already happened.)

hannity audio image

From the January 22, 2021, edition of iHeartRadio’s The Sean Hannity Show

SEAN HANNITY (HOST): Now, there is something that should outrage every American. How did this happen? Thousands of National Guard troops forced to leave Capitol grounds, and they're now sleeping in parking garages where it's freezing.

…

Now, interesting side note, I saw [John] Nolte over at Breitbart wrote an article, “The Geneva Conventions expressly forbid forcing prisoners of war from sleeping on concrete or in garages.” Every picture I've seen is our National Guard in garages, asleep on concrete floors.

In other words, yes, the ever-weak, frail, cognitively struggling Joe, the commander-in-chief, has already treated his own troops this way — it violates the Geneva Conventions. Wow, I didn't know that until I read that one.

Well, what are they going to do to rectify it? And when? Because I haven't heard anything that rectified this situation.

By the time Hannity asked “when” this situation would be corrected, it had already been reversed on Thursday night, following a wave of bipartisan outrage from members of Congress including Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), and many others.

The Biden administration also says that the president had expressed his “dismay” about the treatment of guard personnel. First lady Jill Biden visited troops outside the Capitol on Friday, telling them: “I’m a National Guard mom and when I saw all of the great work you have done during the inauguration … I just wanted to say thank you from President Biden and from the whole entire Biden family.”

The National Guard has also said the troops did have access to “heat and restroom facilities,” and furthermore that the request for personnel to sleep away from the Capitol did not come from lawmakers but from a Capitol Police official. The Capitol Police in turn say they did not issue such an order, but have since issued a joint statement with the guard acknowledging, “As with any large security operation, coordination and flexibility are required for all involved.”

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), an arch-conservative who is no political ally of the Biden administration, is also backing up the general explanation: “So this is what happened. There was one uniformed police offer who issued ... an order without authority or going through the chain of command. I’m glad the Capitol Police are trying to figure who it was. We will identify who that person was and make it public.”