 [Newsweek] On Sunday, January 3, the heads of a half-dozen elite government special operations teams met in Quantico, Virginia, to go over potential threats, contingencies, and plans for the upcoming Joint Session of Congress. The meeting, and the subsequent deployment of these shadowy commandos on January 6, has never before been revealed.
Right after the New Year, Jeffrey A. Rosen, the acting Attorney General on January 6, approved implementation of long-standing contingency plans dealing with the most extreme possibilities: an attack on President Donald Trump or Vice President Mike Pence, a terrorist attack involving a weapon of mass destruction, and a declaration of measures to implement continuity of government, requiring protection and movement of presidential successors.
Rosen made a unilateral decision to take the preparatory steps to deploy Justice Department and so-called "national" forces. There was no formal request from the U.S. Capitol Police, the Secret Service, or the Metropolitan Police Department—in fact, no external request from any agency. The leadership in Justice and the FBI anticipated the worst and decided to act independently, the special operations forces lurking behind the scenes.
"I believe that DOJ [Department of Justice] reasonably prepared for contingencies ahead of January 6, understanding that there was considerable uncertainty as to how many people would arrive, who those people would be, and precisely what purposes they would pursue," Rosen later told Congress. He stressed that his department "no frontline role with respect to crowd control," that they were focused on "high-risk" operations.
The contingency units meeting on January 3 included the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team, the FBI's national "Render Safe" team, an FBI SWAT team from the Baltimore Field Office, Special Response Teams from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and the U.S. Marshals Service Special Operations Group.
Most of the literature mistakenly says that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)—including, famously, the units formerly known as Delta Force and SEAL Team 6—is the primary national mission force. Although overseas, the National Mission Force often operates as a Joint Special Operations Task Force (with FBI augmentation), made up of dedicated teams assigned to JSOC, inside the United States, the FBI is in charge.
A tactical team of the Hostage Rescue Team was one of the first external federal agencies to actually enter the Capitol after protestors breached the building. In addition to augmentation of emergency security assets, one team coordinated with the U.S. Capitol Police and Secret Service to provide additional safeguarding of Vice President Pence, who had been moved to the underground parking structure beneath the Capitol, from where he was supposed to evacuate. But Pence refused to leave the building and stayed underground instead.
The presence of these extraordinary forces under the control of the Attorney General—and mostly operating under contingency plans that Congress and the U.S. Capitol Police were not privy to—added an additional layer of highly armed responders. The role that the military played in this highly classified operation is still unknown, though FBI sources tell Newsweek that military operators seconded to the FBI, and those on alert as part of the National Mission Force, were present in the metropolitan area. The lingering question is: What was it that the Justice Department saw that provoked it to see January 6 as an extraordinary event, something that the other agencies evidently missed. 
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