Ex-Capitol police chief who was forced to quit gets a million-dollar book deal

The former U.S. Capitol Police chief who was forced to resign in the aftermath of the January 6 riot has inked a million-dollar book deal where he promises to reveal harrowing new details of the day and a ‘cover-up’ that followed.

Steven A. Sund’s ‘Courage Under Fire: Under Siege and Outnumbered 58 to 1 on January 6’ is slated to be released on January 3, just shy of the two-year anniversary of the riot by supporters of former President Donald Trump.

‘It’s time to break my silence and reveal everything that I know happened,’ Sund said in a statement released by Blackstone Publishing.

Blackstone CEO Josh Stanton told Publishers Weekly that Sund’s account contains details that ‘will alter some of the accepted facts about January 6’ as well as ‘new insights about the cover-up that followed, including shocking new information that the American public needs to know.’ 

Sund, who became Capitol Police Chief in June 2019, resigned under pressure – including from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – soon after January 6, and testified the following month that he hadn’t seen an FBI field report warning of potential violence.

Since resigning, he has maintained that the overrunning of the U.S. Capitol was the result of ‘widespread failures’.

According to Blackstone, Sund will provide ‘a detailed and harrowing minute-by-minute account of the attack’ and trace ‘Sund´s extraordinary journey from his command post on January 6 to his explosive behind-closed-doors testimony before the January 6 committee.’ 

Sund’s book will include a ‘never-before-heard accounting of a call from the White House’ during the siege and ‘never-before-detailed conversations’ between himself and Congressional leadership.

He had testified a month after the riot that none of the individual agencies tasked with protecting the Capitol were prepared to take on such an attack. 

‘No single civilian law enforcement agency – and certainly not the USCP – is trained and equipped to repel, without significant military or other law enforcement assistance, an insurrection of thousands of armed, violent, and coordinated individuals focused on breaching a building at all costs.’

Last month, Random House and Celadon Books announced that they will release editions of the Jan. 6 committee’s final report once it is completed. 

Panelists aimed to wrap up the report prior to the November 8 midterm elections, but members have said that date will likely slip to the end of the year. Celadon Books, for its own part, have said the book version will be go on sale November 29.

Sund’s book will be released on January 3, just shy of the two-year anniversary of the attacks, and will include never-before-seen photographs never seen before and details of audio recordings, documents, and government records along with Sund’s own account of the day.

Sund made the request for the National Guard to Paul D. Irving, the House sergeant-at-arms at the time, but Irving said he needed to run the request for National Guard troops ‘up the chain of command,’ according to a letter the former police chief wrote to Congress.

By then, just after 1 p.m., it was clear rioters were becoming a threat. Sund said he did not hear back from Irving until 2:10 p.m. – a full hour after his plea for help. 

And it wasn’t until 3.51pm – nearly four hours after Trump spoke at the rally – that 1,100 armed National Guardsmen were finally mobilized. 

Five people died as a result of the riot, including a Capitol Police officer and a woman who was shot as she tried to enter the House chamber with lawmakers still inside. 

Sund described a scene as the mob arrived at the perimeter that was ‘like nothing’ he had seen in his 30 years of policing and argued that the insurrection was not the result of poor planning by Capitol Police but of failures across the board.

‘No single civilian law enforcement agency – and certainly not the USCP – is trained and equipped to repel, without significant military or other law enforcement assistance, an insurrection of thousands of armed, violent, and coordinated individuals focused on breaching a building at all costs,’ he testified in early 2021.

The hearing was the first of many examinations of what happened that day, coming almost seven weeks after the attack and over a week after the Senate voted to acquit Trump of inciting the insurrection by telling his supporters to ‘fight like hell’ to overturn his election defeat. 

Fencing and National Guard troops surrounded the Capitol in a wide perimeter, cutting off streets and sidewalks that are normally full of cars, pedestrians and tourists for weeks after the insurrection.

The joint hearing, part of an investigation by two Senate committees, was the first time the officials testified publicly about the events of Jan. 6. 

In addition to Sund, former Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Michael Stenger, former House Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving and Robert Contee, the acting chief of police for the Metropolitan Police Department, testified.

Irving and Stenger also resigned under pressure immediately after the deadly attack. They were Sund’s supervisors and in charge of security for the House and Senate.

Sund told the lawmakers that he didn’t know then that his officers had received a report from the FBI’s field office in Norfolk, Virginia, that forecast, in detail, the chances that extremists could bring ‘war’ to Washington the following day. 

The head of the FBI’s office in Washington has said that once he received the Jan. 5 warning, the information was quickly shared with other law enforcement agencies through a joint terrorism task force.

Sund said that an officer on the task force had received that memo and forwarded it to a sergeant working on intelligence for the Capitol Police but that the information was not sent on to other supervisors.

Even without the intelligence, there were clear signs that violence was a possibility on Jan. 6. 

Far-right social media users openly hinted for weeks that chaos would erupt at the U.S. Capitol while Congress convened to certify the election results.

Sund said he did see an intelligence report created within his own department warning that Congress could be targeted on Jan. 6. 

But he said that report assessed the probability of civil disobedience or arrests, based on the information they had, as ‘remote’ to ‘improbable’ for the groups expected to demonstrate.

Sund and Irving disagreed on when the National Guard was called, and on requests for the guard beforehand. 

Sund said he spoke to both Stenger and Irving about requesting the National Guard in the days before the riot, and that Irving said he was concerned about the ‘optics’ of having them present. Irving denied that, saying Sund’s account was ‘categorically false.’ 

After smashing through the barriers at the perimeter, the invaders engaged in hand-to-hand combat with police officers, injuring dozens of them, and broke into the building.

Once the violence had begun, Sund and Irving also disagreed on when the National Guard was requested — Sund said he requested it at 1:09 p.m., but Irving denied receiving a call at that time.

Contee said he was ‘stunned’ over the delayed response. He said Sund was pleading with Army officials to deploy National Guard troops as the rioting rapidly escalated. 

Police officers ‘were out there literally fighting for their lives’ but the officials appeared to be going through a ‘check the boxes’ exercise, he said.

Pentagon officials said it took time to put the troops in position, and there was not enough contingency planning in advance. 

They said they offered the assistance beforehand but were turned down.