Mark Swanson wrote in a March 22 Newsmax article:
Former acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, who served in the final months of Donald Trump’s administration, said he felt “threatened” by the Democrat-led Jan. 6 select committee over his assertion that the former president did indeed authorize deployment of the National Guard during the Capitol Hill riots.
Miller told the Daily Mail that Trump verbally authorized him to mobilize the National Guard during a meeting on Jan. 3, 2021. However, that assertion — and his sworn testimony to the committee — contradicted the narrative that the Jan. 6 panel was pushing, Miller said.
Because of that, Miller told the outlet, he “definitely interpreted” the panel would “make my life hell” if he kept going on TV to press the truth and defend Trump’s actions.
[…]“The next day my lawyer got a call from the Jan. 6 staff director — I forgot exactly who it was — but basically saying, very legalistic: ‘Well, if your client has additional information he wants to share, we’d be happy to have him re-interviewed,'” Miller told the outlet.
“It was more that latent threat of, If you want to keep going on TV, we’re gonna drag you in here again for additional hours of hearing testimony. So that was the nature of that whole thing,” he added.
As we pointed out when WorldNetDaily uncritically repeated Miller’s claim, the much more likely reason the committee wanted to talk to Miller again is because he changed his story — he had previously testified to the committee under oath that Trump never issued an order to deploy National Guard troops.
Swanson also repeated another bogus claim, this one from Republican Rep. Barry Loudermilk:
Loudermilk asserted that the Jan. 6 committee suppressed testimony from Anthony Ornato that proved Trump’s intent on the National Guard.
“Mr. Ornato’s testimony proves what Mr. [Mark] Meadows has said all along, President Trump did in fact offer 10,000 National Guard troops to secure the U.S. Capitol, which was turned down,” Loudermilk said in a statement.
Swanson seems to have missed that a couple days earlier, Newsmax itself walked back that claim, admitting that the committee withheld release of Ornato’s transcript for security reasons on the request of the Secret Service.