By MARY CLARE JALONICK

WASHINGTON (AP) — Testifying publicly for the first time about the Jan. 6 insurrection, former security officials are poised to cast blame on the Pentagon, the intelligence community and each other for the disastrous failure to anticipate the violent intentions of the mob and defend the Capitol.

In prepared remarks before two Senate committees Tuesday, former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund will describe a scene that was “like nothing” he had seen in his 30 years of policing.

“When the group arrived at the perimeter, they did not act like any group of protestors I had ever seen,” the ousted chief will say, arguing that the insurrection was not the result of poor planning but of failures across the board from many agencies.

Congress is set to hear from the former U.S. Capitol security officials for the first time about the massive law enforcement failures on Jan. 6, the day the violent mob laid siege to the building and interrupted the presidential electoral count.

Three of the four scheduled to testify Tuesday before two Senate committees resigned under pressure immediately after the deadly attack, including Sund.

Much remains unknown about what happened before and during the assault, and lawmakers are expected to aggressively question the former officials about what went wrong. How much did law enforcement agencies know about plans for violence that day, many of which were public? How did the agencies share that information with each other? And how could the Capitol Police have been so ill-prepared for a violent insurrection that was organized online, in plain sight?

The rioters easily smashed through security barriers on the outside of the Capitol, engaged in hand-to-hand combat with police officers, injuring dozens of them, and broke through multiple windows and doors, sending lawmakers fleeing from the House and Senate chambers and interrupting the certification of the 2020 presidential election. Five people died as a result of the violence, including a Capitol Police officer and a woman who was shot by police as she tried to break through the doors of the House chamber with lawmakers still inside.

Former Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Michael Stenger and former House Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving will speak publicly for the first time since their resignations at the hearing, which is part of a joint investigation by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and the Senate Rules Committee. They will be joined by Sund and Robert Contee, the acting chief of police for the Metropolitan Police Department, who sent additional officers to the scene after the rioting began.

The hearing is expected to be the first of many examinations of what happened that day, coming almost seven weeks after the attack and over one week after the Senate voted to acquit former President Donald Trump of inciting the insurrection by telling his supporters to “fight like hell” to overturn his election defeat. Thousands of National Guard troops still surround the Capitol in a wide perimeter, cutting off streets and sidewalks that are normally full of cars, pedestrians and tourists.

Congress is also considering a bipartisan, independent commission to review the missteps, and multiple congressional committees have said they will look at different aspects of the siege. Federal law enforcement have arrested more than 230 people who were accused of being involved in the attack, and President Joe Biden’s nominee for attorney general, Judge Merrick Garland, said in his confirmation hearing Monday that investigating the riots would be a top priority.

Congress needs to know, quickly, how failed security preparations and delays in the response led to “a mad, angry mob invading this temple of our democracy,” Senate Rules Committee Chairwoman Amy Klobuchar said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Klobuchar, D-Minn., said senators will be especially focused on the timing of the deployment of the National Guard, which eventually arrived to help the overwhelmed police, how security agencies shared information ahead of the attack and if the command structure of the Capitol Police Board, which includes the House and Senate sergeants-at-arms, contributed to the failures. She said there may be legislation to address any inadequacies.

“We are on a fast track here simply because decisions have to be made about the Capitol,” Klobuchar said.

Klobuchar said Tuesday’s hearing will be the first of at least two public examinations of what went wrong that day as the Senate panels undertake a joint investigation into the security failures. A second hearing, expected to be held in the next few weeks, will examine the response of the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.

While there is broad agreement that security measures were inadequate that day, officials have pointed the blame at each other for the causes and disputed each others’ accounts. The day after the riot, Sund said that his force “had a robust plan established to address anticipated First Amendment activities.” It soon became clear that while the Capitol Police had prepared for protests, they were vastly unprepared for a violent insurrection — and many were beaten as they tried in vain to keep rioters from entering the building.

Interim Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman, who has temporarily replaced Sund, last month apologized for failing to prepare despite warnings that white supremacists and far-right groups would target Congress. But she also said that Sund had asked the Capitol Police Board, which oversees the department, to declare a state of emergency beforehand and allow him to request National Guard support, but the board declined. The Defense Department has said it asked the Capitol Police if it needed the Guard, but the request was denied.

A third member of the Capitol Police Board denied Pittman’s claim hours after her testimony was released. J. Brett Blanton, who serves as the architect of the Capitol, said that Sund did not ask him for help and that there was “no record of a request for an emergency declaration.”

Lawmakers hope to resolve some of those discrepancies by questioning the witnesses together on Tuesday. Klobuchar said she is pleased that they are all appearing voluntarily and hopes that the hearing will have a “constructive” tone.

“It was a horror what happened, we all know that,” she said. “But if we are going to have solutions and a safer Capitol going forward, we have to identify what went wrong, what the issues were, and the answers we’ll get are part of that solution.”

By JOHN RABY

AP News – The U.S. stood Sunday at the brink of a once-unthinkable tally: 500,000 people lost to the coronavirus.

A year into the pandemic, the running total of lives lost was about 498,000 — roughly the population of Kansas City, Missouri, and just shy of the size of Atlanta. The figure compiled by Johns Hopkins University surpasses the number of people who died in 2019 of chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke, Alzheimer’s, flu and pneumonia combined.

“It’s nothing like we have ever been through in the last 102 years, since the 1918 influenza pandemic,” the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

The U.S. virus death toll reached 400,000 on Jan. 19 in the waning hours in office for President Donald Trump, whose handling of the crisis was judged by public health experts to be a singular failure.

The nation could pass this next grim milestone on Monday. President Joe Biden will mark the U.S. crossing 500,000 lives lost from COVID-19 with a moment of silence and candle lighting ceremony at the White House.

Biden will deliver remarks at sunset to honor the dead, the White House said. He’s expected to be joined by first lady Jill Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff.

The first known deaths from the virus in the U.S. happened in early February 2020, both of them in Santa Clara County, California. It took four months to reach the first 100,000 dead. The toll hit 200,000 deaths in September and 300,000 in December. Then it took just over a month to go from 300,000 to 400,000 and about two months to climb from 400,000 to the brink of 500,000.

Joyce Willis of Las Vegas is among the countless Americans who lost family members during the pandemic. Her husband, Anthony Willis, died Dec. 28, followed by her mother-in-law in early January.

There were anxious calls from the ICU when her husband was hospitalized. She was unable to see him before he died because she, too, had the virus and could not visit.

“They are gone. Your loved one is gone, but you are still alive,” Willis said. “It’s like you still have to get up every morning. You have to take care of your kids and make a living. There is no way around it. You just have to move on.”

Then came a nightmare scenario of caring for her father-in-law while dealing with grief, arranging funerals, paying bills, helping her children navigate online school and figuring out how to go back to work as an occupational therapist.

Her father-in-law, a Vietnam vet, also contracted the virus. He also suffered from respiratory issues and died on Feb. 8. The family isn’t sure if COVID-19 contributed to his death.

“Some days I feel OK and other days I feel like I’m strong and I can do this,” she said. “And then other days it just hits me. My whole world is turned upside-down.”

The global death toll was approaching 2.5 million, according to Johns Hopkins.

While the count is based on figures supplied by government agencies around the world, the real death toll is believed to be significantly higher, in part because of inadequate testing and cases inaccurately attributed to other causes early on.

Despite efforts to administer coronavirus vaccines, a widely cited model by the University of Washington projects the U.S. death toll will surpass 589,000 by June 1.

“People will be talking about this decades and decades and decades from now,” Fauci said on NBC’s “Meet The Press.”

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Associated Press Writer Heather Hollingsworth in Kansas City, Missouri, contributed to this report.