Sandy Fitzgerald wrote in a May 17 Newsmax article:
This week’s House Administration Oversight subcommittee hearing on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol revealed an “absolute failure of leadership with the Capitol Police on that day,” Rep. Greg Murphy, one of the congressmen grilling Capitol Police Chief J. Thomas Manger, said Wednesday on Newsmax.
Murphy, a North Carolina Republican, also told Newsmax’s “Wake Up America” that he thinks some of the “obstruction of justice” by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office on that day became “almost like an invitation for a riot to occur.”
“There was a refusal to allow the National Guard to come in with the anticipation that this could get rowdy,” said Murphy.
However, he said he thinks with new leadership in place, including with the Capitol Police, “a lot of those mechanisms of the line of order have been corrected. … I’m a lot more optimistic about the role of the Capitol Police as we move forward, but the last leadership was absolutely derelict in their duty.”
In fact — as we documented when WorldNetDaily pushed this same claim — the conservative website the Dispatch reported that Donald Trump gave no order to deploy the National Guard, and not only did Pelosi not reject a request to deploy them, she was not in a position to because she wasn’t in the chain of command — in Washington, D.C., the National Guard can be deployed only by the president.
Not only did Fitzgerald refuse to fact-check Murphy’s false claim, the Newsmax TV host didn’t either, responding only, “Yeah, absolutely.” Not exactly a good sign for journalism at Newsmax.