By Catie Edmondson

Hours before law enforcement officers violently cleared protesters from a square outside the White House in June, a top military police officer sought out weaponry like powerful sound cannons and a device that "causes targets to feel an unbearable heating sensation," an Army National Guard major told lawmakers in written testimony.

The major, Adam DeMarco, an Iraq war veteran who serves in the District of Columbia National Guard and was called in to enforce the crackdown on protesters, told House lawmakers last month that he had received an email from a top law enforcement official at the Defense Department asking if the Guard was equipped with sound cannons or a nonlethal heat ray, known as the Active Denial System, or A.D.S.

"A.D.S. can provide our troops a capability they currently do not have," the officer wrote, according to Major DeMarco's testimony, reported earlier by NPR. "The A.D.S. can immediately compel an individual to cease threatening behavior or depart through application of a directed energy beam that provides a sensation of intense heat on the surface of the skin. The effect is overwhelming."

Major DeMarco also said that federal officials stockpiled "approximately 7,000 rounds" of live ammunition in the hours before the clash, transferring the munitions from as far as Missouri and Tennessee to the nation's capital.

The Guard ultimately did not have either device, Major DeMarco said. But the exchange, including the previously unreported disclosure that top military officials sought out controversial military-grade equipment, provides a window into the law enforcement response toward the peaceful demonstrators who had gathered outside the White House to protest the killing of a Black man, George Floyd, while in police custody in May in Minneapolis.

A Defense Department official told The Washington Post that the inquiries were "routine inventory checks to determine what equipment was available."