The week
Panic buttons in Ayanna Pressley’s office were ‘ripped off’ before the Capitol rebellion, the chief of staff said
For Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Last week’s attack on Capitol Hill became even more frightening when she arrived at her office. As the Boston Globe reports, Pressley had “two reasons to be afraid” when President Trump’s supporters broke into the Capitol building last week: “She has alopecia, an autoimmune disease” that puts her at high risk of contracting COVID- 19, and she is a member of the progressive “Squadron” that has long been a target of Trump supporters. Death threats have prompted Pressley and his team to perform security exercises routinely over the years, so they had a plan when the attackers started entering the Capitol, Pressley’s chief of staff, Sarah Groh, told the Globe. Pressley, Pressley’s husband, and employees barricaded his office doors, while Groh found gas masks and started looking for the special panic buttons around the office. But, frighteningly, “all the panic buttons in my office have been ripped off – the entire unit,” Groh told the Globe. The team was unable to find out what happened to the buttons, as they used them in the same office before. Eventually, Pressley was taken to other safe rooms with other members of Congress, where she and other Democrats began planning impeachment articles against Trump. But she left one of them when she found herself surrounded by “traitorous members of Congress, white supremacists and anti-maskers who sparked the crowd in the first place,” Pressley tweeted on Tuesday. violent white supremacist crowd included traitorous members of Congress, white supremacists and anti-maskers who incited the crowd, I left. Furious because more of my colleagues each day are seeing positive results. >> – Ayanna Pressley (@AyannaPressley) January 12, 2021Read more scary meetings of Massachusetts representatives on The Boston Globe.More stories from theweek.com Democrats realize the danger that run inside? America’s encounter with reality What it always dealt with in ‘Blue Lives Matter’