The mob of Trump supporters pressed through police barricades, broke windows and battered their way with metal poles through entrances to the Capitol. Then, stunningly, they breached the “People’s House” itself, forcing masked police officers to draw their guns to keep the insurgents off the chamber floor.
“I thought we’d have to fight our way out,” said Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., a former Army Ranger in Iraq, who found himself captive in the House chamber.
What unfolded at that point, at times on national television, was a tableau of violence and mayhem that shocked the nation, the most severe breach of the Capitol since the British invaded during the War of 1812 and burned it down.
An armed standoff ensued in the House chambers, with police officers drawing their weapons. A pro-Trump protester casually monkeyed around at the dais of the Senate. Intruders in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s suite overturned desks and smashed photos. Others ripped artwork in Senate hideaway offices.
“This is what the president has caused today, this insurrection,” Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said as he and other senators were hustled off to a secure location.
Some of the protesters gawked at the grand and storied building they had unlawfully flooded while others looked at it with contempt.
“I don’t trust any of these people,” said Eric Martin, 49, a woodworker from Charleston, South Carolina, as he marveled at the opulence of the Capitol and helped a friend wash pepper spray from his eyes. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
But if some only stared at the Capitol, others resorted to violence. A woman inside the building was shot and later died, the District of Columbia police said, and multiple officers were injured. A suspected explosive device was found around noon near the headquarters of the Republican National Committee, then rendered safe. By Wednesday evening, the scene outside the Capitol had calmed, after Capitol Police, supplemented by FBI agents and Homeland Security officers with members of the National Guard on their way, pushed protesters from every corner of the Capitol to the majestic Rotunda, then persuaded them to leave.
Before that was mayhem. At one point, as lawmakers and staff were rushing out of a Senate chamber under assault, aides rushed back to grab boxes containing the Electoral College certificates, making sure that the vandals could not literally steal the results of the election.
It began around 1 p.m., when a mass of Trump supporters, some in camouflage and armed with baseball bats, left the National Mall and, encouraged by President Donald Trump, ascended on the Capitol complex. Leaders exhorted the crowd through megaphones, “This is our house” and “Move forward!”
The few police officers standing on the steps of the Capitol were overwhelmed. Their flash bang grenades only invigorated the protesters. Around 2:30 p.m., an entrance near the West side of the Capitol descended into chaos as a stream of Trump supporters wearing Make America Great Again apparel pressed passed police barricades.
On the East Side of the complex, people banged on the glass windows. Crowds charged past the front columns, and some pressed their faces into the glass. Others in camouflage used poles to batter an entrance to the building, breaking it open. The crowd then rushed through, passing through metal detectors as one man blared a Trump speech about the “stolen” election through a speaker.
As debate progressed in the House chamber over a Republican protest of Arizona’s Electoral College votes for President-elect Joe Biden, few lawmakers knew of the commotion. But Capitol Police officers were quietly locking down the building, instructing everyone in the hallways to shelter in place and preparing reporters for the possibility of sheltering in the chamber.
Soon, a nervous energy pulsed through the chamber. The police began to close the gallery doors, which had remained open to allow for better ventilation as lawmakers filled the chamber. Congressional leaders were quickly ushered out, as staff aides urged lawmakers in the gallery and on the floor to remain calm.
“This is because of you,” Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., yelled from the gallery at his Republican colleagues.
Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., and a former Pentagon official, was on her way to the House chamber when she heard screaming, breaking glass, and what sounded like a flash bang. She returned to her office, locked the door, offered shelter to a colleague and began working the phones.
One of her first calls was to Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to plead for help from the National Guard.
“I said, ‘Mark, I absolutely understand that you are between a rock and a hard place. But we need help here. There are weapons,’” she said.
In the House, just after 2:30 p.m., a police officer stepped on the dais and informed lawmakers that they might need to duck under their chairs.
“We now have individuals that have breached the Capitol building,” he said, warning them to be prepared to relocate to the cloakrooms. “They are in the Rotunda.”
Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., a veteran, jumped on the arm rests of chairs and began directing members to move calmly and quickly from the chamber. The chamber filled with frantic shouting as lawmakers struggled to unfold the plastic bags that they were instructed to put over their heads in case of tear gas. Police officers and floor staff began yelling for lawmakers to exit.
A wooden chest was pushed in front of the main doors to the chamber. Security officers drew their guns, pointing and yelling at the door, as lawmakers, staff and reporters cowered in the top levels of the chamber. There was a bang, and everyone was told to get down.
Shortly after 2:45, the evacuation resumed. With the police in the lead, guns drawn, the lawmakers entered a scene of havoc, Crow said. Some police officers rushed to barricade other doors to block protesters. Others pinned some demonstrators to the ground to allow the lawmakers pass.
“We heard yelling through the halls,” said Crow, who said he brought up the rear to ensure all the members made it to safely. As the police led the members down stairwells and into the subterranean maze of tunnels to a secure location, Crow said he called his wife in Colorado, who had been watching the scene on television.
But the mob continued to stream in. A young man in a red baseball hat was helping people through a broken window. Inside, two large wooden desks were on their sides, broken. Two large panels of glass were crushed on the colorful tile floor.
In a surreal scene of chaos and glee, hundreds of rioters roamed the halls, taking photos and breaking into offices. No police officers were in view. In a room where there were photos of mountains and maps of Oregon on the wall, a man in a leather jacket ripped a scroll with Chinese characters. A young man put a framed photo of the Dalai Lama in his backpack.
“We’re claiming the House, and the Senate is ours,” shouted a sweaty man in a checked shirt, stabbing his finger in the air.
Not far away in the first-floor Crypt, the heart of the Capitol building, the police appeared to be overwhelmed. One stood wiping tear gas from his eyes.
When a man came up to him and asked where the bathroom was, he said softly, “We just need you guys to get out of here safely.”
An officer with the U.S. Capitol Police tried to reason with the crowd.
“You guys just need to go outside,” he said to a man in a green backpack. When asked why they weren’t forcing the mob out, the officer said “we just got to let them do their thing for now.”
Most of the crowd in the Crypt just milled around. A young man in a red Trump hat smoked a cigarette. Several men shouted and screamed. A man in a backpack with two American flags jumped up and down underneath a chandelier, screaming, “Whose house,” with the crowd answering, “our house.” The sound boomed and reverberated around the tile and marble, as the police officers looked on.
Around 3:30 p.m., about 25 police officers had entered the Crypt and started asking people to move back. A few minutes later, dozens more, wearing riot gear and some in gas masks, ejected the roughly 150 protesters in the Crypt. But not before one man marched through the halls of Congress with a Confederate flag while another protester rose a Trump flag from the balcony of the Capitol.
Protesters repeatedly emerged from the building bearing trophies that they had ripped off walls. A few carried “Area Closed” signs that they had grabbed and then stormed past. But it was objects stolen from Pelosi’s office that was especially popular.
One man emerged from the risers set up on the steps of the Capitol, holding up a piece of a wooden plaque that marked the entrance to Pelosi’s office, which he had clearly torn off the wall.
He held it up like a trophy, as hundreds of people on the steps below cheered wildly. “Not our speaker!” shouted one woman. “Get her out!” shouted another man.
Another man, Richard Bigo Barnett, 60, stood outside the capital, his shirt ripped open and his chest bared to the cold, bragging about how he had gotten into the speaker’s office. He was brandishing a personalized envelope with the speaker’s letterhead.
“I left a quarter on her desk for it,” he said, adding, “I wrote her a nasty note, put my feet up on her desk.”
Others turned their vitriol on the police.
“We backed you,” one man shouted at the line of police outside. “Traitors!”
By 7 p.m., the presence of police officers and federal agents had drastically increased along the National Mall. Officers pushed back against aggressive protesters as they prepared for more potential overnight unrest.
Back at the Capitol, lawmakers prepared to resume their session counting electoral votes that would end the Trump presidency.
“We want to go back,” Crow said. “And finish the business of the people to show that we are a democracy, and that the government is stronger than any mob.”
By Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Sabrina Tavernise and Emily Cochrane. Matthew Rosenberg, Jennifer Steinhauer and Adam Goldman contributed reporting.
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