‘We need to exit here. We need to exit quickly.’
I thought I would witness a farce but not an immediate tragedy on January 6. It was sad to witness both.
A t about half past midnight, as senators walked back from the House to the Senate to vote on Missouri senator Josh Hawley’s objection to the certification of Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes, Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska.) stopped and talked about the day’s events.
“You could hear the sounds. You can hear it getting closer on both sides [of the Senate chamber],” Murkowski said of the mob that had fought police and smashed windows in order to break inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday afternoon. “You sit on that Senate floor, with those galleries all around you, and you feel like a sitting duck.”
At first, the situation seemed concerning but not frightening. The sergeant at arms told senators that they were secure. About 15 minutes later, that changed.
“We need to exit here. We need to exit quickly,” the sergeant at arms said.
“And that’s where it gets a little scary because everyone is trying to move at the same time,” said Murkowski. She saw fellow Alaska senator Dan Sullivan a few steps ahead of her and hooked him by the arm. “I just said, ‘I’m gonna lean on a Marine.’ We went hand in hand, running.” They were the first senators to make it to the undisclosed secure location.
The senators were informed at their secure location that “officers had been injured and a woman had been killed.”
“This is a place where you have always felt safe, always felt safe,” Murkowski said. “Anybody who says they weren’t scared — I think maybe they were too busy helping others.”
Murkowski’s assessment seemed pretty accurate to me. I spent Wednesday afternoon locked inside a not-very-secure location in the Capitol — the Senate periodical press gallery, a small room on the top floor of the building across the hall from the Senate chamber.
At about 2:15 p.m., shortly after Vice President Pence was evacuated from the Senate floor, a police officer shouted that Capitol reporters and staffers needed to get inside a room and lock the door. I sprinted back to the periodical press gallery, and a few minutes later a voice announced over a loudspeaker that there was a “security threat inside the building.” Two other reporters (Politico’s Burgess Everett and Marianne Levine), two staffers, and I barricaded the periodical press gallery door with a couch and some chairs. The sound of an approaching mob grew louder.
It was unclear at first whether those in the Capitol were facing an active-shooter situation. There was an accurate report of gunfire at the other end of the building. (We learned much later in the day that a protester who was climbing through a smashed out window in the House Speaker’s Lobby was shot and killed by Capitol police.) A photo posted on Twitter showed several Capitol police on the House floor who had drawn their pistols and pointed them at a shattered window.
In the Senate periodical press gallery, we sat on the floor behind a desk in the dark and listened to the deep and repetitive BANG BANG BANG of rioters somewhere in the distance trying to break through a locked door (perhaps to the Senate chamber).
There didn’t seem to be any police nearby, as rioters could be heard shouting and roaming freely. If the mob broke through our door, I thought the five of us would probably be okay. They wanted the senators, right? Then it occurred to me that — as a member of the press sitting inside a room marked “press” — even QAnon believers would be smart enough to identify me as a credentialed “enemy of the people.” I thought of the lunatic who burst into the D.C. pizzeria with an AR-15 in 2016 and discharged his weapon as he sought to liberate children that he believed were being held captive and raped by prominent Democratic officials.
After a couple of hours, law enforcement cleared the building and then escorted the press to a Senate office building through basement tunnels. We passed scores of police — MPD, FBI, DHS, even Fairfax County Police — who had rushed to the Capitol. It was a relief to see them. Many were (understandably) not wearing masks, including the officer escorting us who had been exposed to pepper spray and was coughing. As a dozen of us crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in an elevator with the officer, I wondered if the Capitol had experienced a COVID super-spreader event that day. The New York Post’s Steven Nelson later told me that the rioter who discharged a fire extinguisher in the Senate had first demanded that the reporter remove his mask (and identify the name of his publication) before spraying it at him and other reporters.
Earlier in the day, as I had walked toward the Capitol before the joint session of Congress began to certify the results of the Electoral College, I thought I was going to witness nothing more than what you might call electoral coup-splay. Outside the building, there would be protesters dressed up as wannabe revolutionaries who believed President Trump’s conspiracy theories about the “landslide victory” that had been stolen from him. Inside the building, there would be a majority of House Republicans and a quarter of the Senate GOP caucus pretending to try to overturn the results of the Electoral College.
In other words, I thought I would witness a farce — one with dangerous long-term implications — but not an immediate tragedy on January 6, 2021. As an American, it was sad, and even a little scary, to witness both at the same time. But it felt good to return to the Capitol later that evening and witness a majority of Congress — undeterred by a mob — fulfill its constitutional duty.