“I was actually on the phone with Leader Hoyer who was pleading with us to send the guard,” Hogan said. “He was yelling across the room to Schumer and they were back and forth saying we do have the authorization and I’m saying, ‘I’m telling you we do not have the authorization.' ”
Hogan said Maj. Gen. Timothy Gowen, the adjutant general of the
Maryland National Guard, was repeatedly rebuffed by the Pentagon.
Gowen “kept running it up the flagpole, and we don’t have authorization,” Hogan said. “We don’t have authorization.”
Ninety minutes later, Hogan said, he received a call “out of the blue, not from the secretary of defense, not through what would be normal channels,” but from Ryan McCarthy, the secretary of the Army. McCarthy asked if the Maryland guardsmen could “come as soon as possible,” Hogan recounted.