WASHINGTON (AP) – Under battle flags bearing the name of Donald Trump, Capitol attackers arrested a bloody policeman at a door, his face contorted and screams captured on video. They mortally wounded another officer with a blunt weapon and shot a third over the railing with the body at the crowd.
“Hang Mike Pence!” the rebels screamed as they pressed in, hitting the police with pipes. They demanded the whereabouts of mayor Nancy Pelosi, too. They hunted down any and all lawmakers: “Where are they?” Outside, there was an improvised gallows, with sturdy wooden steps and a noose. Tubular weapons and bombs were hidden nearby.
A few days later, the extent of the danger of one of the darkest episodes of American democracy is coming into focus. The sinister nature of the attack became evident, betraying the crowd as a determined force to occupy Congress’ internal sanctuaries and topple leaders – Trump’s vice president and Democratic House president among them.
This was not just a collection of Trump supporters with MAGA bling caught in a wave.
This revelation came in real time for Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., Who briefly took over proceedings in the House of Representatives when the crowd closed on Wednesday and spokeswoman, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, was taken to a safer room moments before everything happens confused.
AP Video
“I saw a crowd of people banging on that glass and shouting,” McGovern told the Associated Press on Sunday. “Looking at their faces, it occurred to me, they are not protesters. These are people who want to cause harm ”.
“What I saw in front of me,” he said, “was basically local fascism, out of control.”
Pelosi said on Sunday “the evidence is that it was a well-planned and organized group with leadership and guidance and direction. And the direction was to pick people up. ”She did not elaborate on this point in a” 60 Minutes “interview on CBS.
The scenes of anger, violence and agony are so vast that everything may still be beyond comprehension. But with countless smartphone videos emerging from the scene, many of them from the exultant insurrectionists themselves, and more lawmakers telling of the chaos that surrounded them, the outlines of the uprising are increasingly in relief.
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THE SCENE
The crowd received explicit marching orders from Trump and even more encouragement from the president’s men.
“Fight like the devil,” Trump urged his supporters at the rally. “We are going to do the trial by combat,” pleaded his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, whose attempt to reject election results in a court trial failed. It’s time to “start writing down names and blasting,” said Republican Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama.
Criminals forgiven by Trump, including Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, performed at rallies on the eve of the attack to tell the crowds that they were fighting a battle between good and evil and were on the side of good. On Capitol Hill, Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri saluted his fists with fists to the hordes outside the Capitol while standing up to challenge the election results.
The crowd was excited. Until shortly after 2 pm, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell was in charge for the final minutes of decorum in partnership with Pence, who was fulfilling his ceremonial role presiding over the process.
Both men supported Trump’s agenda and either excused or ignored his provocations for four years, but now they had no mechanism or will to subvert Biden’s won election. This placed them among the targets of the insurrectionists, no different in the minds of the crowd than the “socialists”.
“If this election were overturned by mere allegations on the losing side, our democracy would go into a deadly spiral,” McConnell said in his chamber, not long before things got out of hand in what lawmakers call the “People’s House”.
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THE ASSAULT
Thousands invaded the Capitol. They attacked the police and the metal barricades outside the building, pushing and hitting the police on their way. The attack quickly passed the police line in far fewer numbers; policemen ran over a man and punched him.
In the confusion outside, near the structure built for Joe Biden’s ownership on January 20, a man threw a red fire extinguisher at the head of a helmeted police officer. So he took a megaphone and threw it at the officers too.
The official’s identity could not be confirmed immediately. But Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who was injured in the chaos, died the following night; authorities say he was hit in the head by a fire extinguisher.
Shortly after 2 pm, the Capitol Police sent an alert telling workers in a commercial building to head for the underground transport tunnels that cross the complex. Minutes later, Pence was taken from the Senate chamber to a secret location and the police announced the blockade of the Capitol. “You can move around the building (s), but stay away from windows and outside doors,” said the email. “If you’re out, look for cover.”
At 2:15 pm, the Senate suspended its debate at the Electoral College and a voice was heard on the Chamber’s audio system: “The protesters are in the building”. The doors of the Chamber of Deputies have been barricaded and lawmakers within it have been informed that they may need to duck under their chairs or move to changing rooms off the floor of the Chamber because the crowd has invaded the Capitol Rotunda.
Even before the crowd reached the sealed doors of the Chamber of Deputies, the Capitol Police pulled Pelosi away from the podium, she told “60 Minutes”.
“I said, ‘No, I want to be here,'” she said. “And they said, ‘Well, no, you have to leave.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not leaving.’ They said, ‘No, you must go.’ ”And she did.
At 2:44 pm, while lawmakers inside the Chamber of Deputies were preparing to be evacuated, a gunshot was heard outside, in the speaker’s lobby, on the other side of the barricaded doors. That was when Ashli Babbit, wearing a Trump flag as a cape, was shot to death on camera while the rebels protested, his blood pooling on the white marble floor.
The California Air Force veteran had climbed a broken window into the speaker’s lobby before a police officer shot him down.
Back in the House chamber, a woman on the porch was seen and heard screaming. Why she was doing it only became clear later, when the video circulated. She was shouting a prayer.
About 10 minutes after the shooting, House legislators and staff members who had cringed during the attack, with terror etched on their faces, were taken from the chamber and the gallery to a safe room. The crowd broke into Pelosi’s offices while members of his team hid in one of his suite’s rooms.
“The employees went under the table, barricaded the door, turned off the lights and were silent in the dark,” she said. “Under the table for two and a half hours.”
On the Senate side, the Capitol Police circled the chamber and ordered all officials and reporters and any nearby senators to enter the chamber and lock it up. At one point, about 200 people were inside; an officer armed with what appeared to be a semi-automatic weapon stood between McConnell and the Democratic leader, Senator Chuck Schumer.
The authorities then ordered an evacuation and took everyone inside to a safe place, the Senate parliamentary team collecting boxes with the electoral bonding certificates.
Although Capitol attackers were sent on Trump’s exhortation to fight, they seemed in some cases surprised to have actually managed to get in.
When they broke into the abandoned Senate chamber, they wandered, rummaged through papers, sat at desks and made videos and photos. One of them went up to the dais and shouted, “Trump won that election!” Two others were photographed carrying flexible handcuffs normally used for mass arrests.
But outside the chamber, crowd hunting was still going on for lawmakers. “Where are they?” people could be heard screaming.
This question could also be applied to reinforcements – where were they?
At around 5:30 pm, after the National Guard arrived to complement the oppressed Capitol police force, a total effort began to remove the attackers.
Heavily armed officers brought in as reinforcements began to use tear gas in a coordinated manner to make people move towards the door, then scanned the corridors for stragglers. As it got dark, they pushed the mob farther into the square and onto the lawn, using officers in shock equipment with full shields and clouds of tear gas, flash-bangs and percussion grenades.
At 7:23 pm, authorities announced that people squatting in two nearby Congress office buildings could leave “if anyone wants to”.
Within an hour, the Senate had resumed its work and the Chamber followed, returning the Casa do Povo to the control of the people’s representatives. Lawmakers claimed Biden’s electoral victory the next morning, shocked by the catastrophic breach of security.
Deputy Maxine Waters, D-Ca., Told the AP on Sunday that it was as if the Capitol Police were “naked” against the attackers. “It turns out that it was the worst kind of insecurity that anyone could imagine.”
McGovern said: “I didn’t believe this could happen. These domestic terrorists were in the People’s House, desecrating the People’s House, destroying the People’s House ”.
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Associated Press writers Dustin Weaver in Washington and Michael Casey in Concord, New Hampshire contributed to this report. Reeves reported from Birmingham, Alabama.