Chaotic scenes of pro-Trump rioters breaching the U.S. Capitol, where lawmakers in the House and Senate were meeting to certify President-elect Joe Biden's presidential victory, shocked millions of Americans on Wednesday. Inside the building, legislators were confronted with unexpected terror and anarchy erupting just steps away from the Capitol's chambers and offices.
"I think people need to understand how close hundreds of members of Congress came to being seriously harmed, if not killed, on the House floor," Representative Mondaire Jones told Gothamist/WNYC.
The freshman Congressman, who is in his first week of serving the 17th District (Rockland County and part of Westchester County), is demanding an investigation into the failures of the Capitol Police to secure the building, including understanding "who is responsible for those security breaches, and who ought to be accountable for those security breaches."
On Wednesday, thousands of people who believe President Donald Trump's lies about election fraud attended a rally outside the White House to protest the 2020 election results. Trump, who had promised, in a December 19th Tweet, "Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!", appeared around noon, stirring up the crowd with more false claims that he actually won the election.
"Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy," Trump told his supporters. "After this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down to the Capitol."
Trump did not walk with protesters, but, just after 2 p.m., a mob of the extremists stormed the Capitol, fighting their way past Capitol Police.
"We were in the midst of a completely frivolous objection by House Republicans to the Arizona presidential results and... the Speaker, the Majority Leader—the very top of the leadership tier—were escorted off the House floor very quickly," Jones described.
There were still two hundred-some people, including staffers and reporters, on the House floor and in the gallery, Jones said. "The doors were locked and, eventually, there was a loud banging on the door behind me."
"The banging was from mobs of dozens of domestic terrorists. And the only thing separating those domestic terrorists from the House floor where I was located was a handful of law enforcement officers."
"It is the kind of thing that causes your life to flash before your eyes. That's what happened with me, and I know I wasn't the only person who had that experience, because I've have conversations since," he said.
"I never saw the law enforcement agencies engaging with the mob directly—they were keeping the doors from being opened as we were under siege," Jones said.
Capitol Police officers inside the chamber barricaded the entrance. Rep. Patrick Fallon (R-Texas) wrote on Facebook that he and other Texas House members "broke off furniture to make clubs to defend the US House of Representatives."
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-New Jersey) said he was "running off the floor of the House with a gas mask in my hand because an angry mob was outside trying to break down the door." He also heard shots. "I think it was likely tear gas, windows being shattered," he said.
Some House members shared photos of themselves wearing the masks, called "escape hoods," which the LA Times described as "loose-fitting respirators hoods." (The Capitol received 20,000 of the masks in 2002, after the September 11th attacks and anthrax mailings—enough masks for all staffers, police officers, and tourists.)
After House members and staffers were evacuated out of the chambers, Jones said they "were escorted underground through the tunnels to another location where we stayed for another several hours as Capitol Police and other law enforcement agents attempted to expel the people who were able get into the Capitol."
Soon after, rioters managed to get into the empty House chamber. A Getty photographer captured an image of one with what appeared to be a gun and zip ties on his belt.
Jones said he was frustrated by what he believes was a lax and half-hearted attempt to maintain order by the Capitol Police.
"By now we've seen footage on social media of Capitol Police officers taking selfies with these terrorists," Jones said. "We have seen footage of what appeared to be members of the Capitol Police force opening a gate that allowed the violent mob to get closer to the Capitol building."
"It's not difficult for anyone who's been paying attention to what's happened with the Black Lives Matter protests and what precipitated those protests—the unjustified murders of people like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor—to imagine a situation where if these protesters were Black, they would have been gunned down hundreds of yards away from the Capitol building."
"It's a completely disparate treatment," he continued, "and I'm calling for an immediate and exhaustive assessment of why the security breaches came about, who is responsible for those security breaches, and who sought to be accountable for those security breaches.
Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) had similar questions. Ryan chairs the House Appropriations Committee's Legislative Branch Subcommittee, which oversees spending on the House, plus the Congressional Budget Office, Library of Congress, Government Accountability Office, and, yes, the Capitol Police. Ryan told Politico, "There were some strategic mistakes from the very beginning... I think it’s pretty clear that there’s going to be a number of people who are going to be without employment very, very soon. Because this is an embarrassment — both on behalf of the mob and the president, and the insurrection and the attempted coup, but also the lack of professional planning and dealing with what we knew was going to occur."
Former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton called the violation of the Capitol Building a "colossal failure" by the Capitol Police. Speaking on the Today Show, he said law enforcement agencies "should have known...based on the history of many of the groups that come to the Trump rallies as well as the social media they were monitoring."
Bratton said officers are able to tell which groups, like militias, are more prone to violence and disruption. "I think those people in the law enforcement clearly understood in the run up to the event understood there was going to be an extraordinarily strong potential for the demonstrators to leave the rally and head to the Capitol," he said. "And that was a failure of imagination, and that was actually a failure of professional responsibility."
Conservative social media apps like Parler and Gab had been filled with posts encouraging revolution and violence. On Wednesday, the apps were used to share tips on "which tools to bring to help pry open doors."
Rep. Maxine Waters tweeted that she had asked the Capitol Police about security plans for Wednesday earlier this week, and said she was told the plaza would be secured.
The Capitol Police has 2,300 officers and civilian employees; the D.C. police, called the Metropolitan Police Department, has 3,800 officers for the city, whose population is about 685,000 people.
Retired FBI executive David Gomez also called the Capitol Police "unprepared for the sheer size of the protest" in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, adding that other federal law enforcement arms did not respond quickly "either out of deference to President Trump or because of a lack of experience with dealing with riots, which isn’t their primary mission."
"The National Guard should've been in place weeks ago," Joseph Giacalone, a former NYPD sergeant who now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told the Daily Beast. "Every county around D.C. should've been requested to send one sergeant and a contingent in riot gear. If you don’t want that kind of show of force, that’s fine—you have everybody sitting in vans or buses within a half-mile of the Capitol ready to go."
The Journal also reported that the Department of Defense allocated 350 National Guard members for the event, mostly for traffic control, because they "wanted to avoid the optics of having any U.S. military personnel on the steps of the U.S. Capitol."
The actual clearing of the Capitol was led by the MPD, and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser imposed a 6 p.m.-until-6 a.m. curfew for Wednesday night and the next 14 days, a timespan that includes the inauguration. Over 1,000 D.C. National Guard members were eventually deployed, as well as 500 from Maryland. Virginia Governor Ralph Northam sent some of his state's National Guard members, as well as 200 state troopers; New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy also sent 50 state troopers and offered National Guard member. Governor Andrew Cuomo is sending 1,000 members of New York's National Guard.
The woman who was shot by Capitol Police while trying to breach the House chamber died of her injuries, according to the MPD. The MPD also said another woman and two men died from "separate medical emergencies" on Capitol grounds.
"We had all the time in the world to understand the threats leading up to today," Jones said. "It's really difficult and in fact implausible to imagine a situation where we didn't know enough to have adequate resources to prevent the breach today.