Page:CTRL0000034600 - Transcribed Interview of Richard Peter Donoghue, (Oct. 1, 2021).pdf/156

156 We talked about who had responsibility for which of those key areas. So, for instance, the Park Police had the monuments. Capitol Police had the Capitol. FPS had the various Federal buildings. We had DOJ. MPD had the city overall for all the areas that were not covered by someone else. So everyone had their own area of responsibility that they were going to take care of.

And would there have been a benefit to put one person in charge of all these different agencies who were involved in protecting, securing—

There might've been, but keep in mind, you've got three branches of government—I didn't even get into the Supreme Court Police here, but they exist too, right? And they report up to the Supreme Court.

So who's going to give up their power? Is the mayor of D.C. going to give her power to the executive branch and surrender control of MPD to the executive branch? Probably not. Is the executive branch going to surrender its power to the legislature because the Capitol Police should be running everything? Probably not.

This is a paradigm that had been used over and over many times and that had worked and that was successful because the agencies had expertise in covering their own areas. No one was better equipped to protect the Capitol than the Capitol Police, so it made perfect sense to leave that to them and to simply tell them, if you need assistance, let us know and we'll provide it.

So it wasn't as if anyone was looking at this, saying, "Wow, this is broken. We need one agency in charge." And even if we had drawn that conclusion, who would that agency have been?

So, again, it's a very unusual situation in D.C., where you have three branches of Federal Government, all of which have their own authorities and their own law enforcement agencies. And then you have the local D.C. authorities, like the mayor and