Oh good, they found this guy. I wanted to see his ass busted.

A man photographed lounging with his foot on the desk in House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office in Washington as part of a pro-Trump mob that breached security and rampaged through the US Capitol was arrested on Friday.

“Foot” is kind of euphemistic for it.

That’s not just a foot, it’s a big heavy hard boot, it’s Orwell’s boot stamping on a human face forever. That’s a man brandishing his boot in the office of a powerful woman. That photo conveys so many messages it would take hours to list them all.

Richard Barnett, 60, of Gravette, Arkansas, was taken into custody in that state and, along with the West Virginia state representative Derrick Evans, who was also arrested, faces federal charges stemming from the siege of the Capitol on Wednesday, federal prosecutors said.

Barnett was arrested on federal charges of entering and remaining on restricted grounds, violent entry and theft of public property, according to a Department of Justice official, NBC reported.

…

The FBI has issued appeals for the public’s help in identifying those who took part in the riot, who face arrest and court.

“Just because you’ve left the DC region, you can still expect a knock on the door if we find out you were part of the criminal activity at the Capitol,” said Steven D’Antuono, the FBI Washington field office’s assistant director in charge, at a telephone news briefing on Friday.

That is, just because you’ve left that doesn’t mean you won’t hear from us, or even though you’ve left you’ll still hear from us.

Barnett shared his thoughts with the New York Times that day.

Barnett recounted stealing an envelope from the Democratic House speaker’s desk.

“I didn’t steal it,” Barnett told the reporter. “I put a quarter [25c] on her desk, even though she ain’t fucking worth it, and I left her a note on her desk that says, ‘Nancy, Bigo [his nickname] was here, you bitch.’”

And here he is saying it.

Barnett leads a pro-gun rights group in Arkansas and according to the Washington Post had identified as a white nationalist in a Facebook post days before the riot took place.

He also hates women.

Derrick Evans, a newly elected Republican member of the West Virginia house of delegates, part of the state legislature, was taken into federal custody, with a reporter for the local NBC affiliate WSAZ sharing a video of the event.

On Wednesday, Evans reportedly filmed himself storming the Capitol, shouting: “We’re in! Keep it moving, baby!”

“Reportedly” plus here’s the video.

Representing West Virginia.

More medium-size rodents fleeing the sinking gangster:

Donald Trump’s grip on the US presidency appeared increasingly tenuous on Saturday as Democrats advanced plans to impeach him for a second time, political allies continued to abandon him, and Twitter banned his account, removing his most powerful way to spread lies and incite violence.

Adding to the pressure in the aftermath of Wednesday’s deadly riot in the US Capitol building by Trump supporters, one Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, openly called for the president’s removal.

“I want him to resign. I want him out. He has caused enough damage,” she said, punctuating the wave of disgust that followed Trump’s goading of a mob seeking to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden.

And in this context “seeking to overturn his election defeat” means “seeking to overthrow the government.”

Five people died, including a police officer who confronted rioters and a rioter shot by law enforcement. Multiple arrests have been made, among them a Florida resident photographed walking off with the lectern of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi.

The US attorney’s office said a 70-year-old Alabama man was charged with possession of molotov cocktails and assault weapons after his pickup truck was discovered packed with homemade bombs and guns.

This isn’t some after-school prank. This is enraged white supremacists trying to disable the legislature and install a dictator.

Loser Don tried to get around his banishment from Twitter by using the official POTUS account, but he failed because oddly enough Twitter understands that Trump tweeting as POTUS is still Trump, and they zapped the tweets immediately.

This is built in. Loser D can of course use another outlet, or perhaps use another IP address to set up a new Twitter account, but he can’t do it as himself, because Twitter won’t let him, and doing it as someone else is no use to him. He already has plenty of slavish someone elses who will praise him from now until the earth falls into the sun, and what he wants is to speak in his own glorious albeit vocabulary-deprived voice. He can’t do that on Twitter any more, not nohow.

President Donald Trump continued tweeting Friday evening using the government-owned @POTUS account, despite having his @realDonaldTrump account permanently suspended by Twitter earlier in the day.

“As I have been saying for a long time, Twitter has gone further and further in banning free speech, and tonight, Twitter employees have coordinated with the Democrats and Radical Left in removing my account from their platform, to silence me,” Trump wrote in a series of tweets that are no longer visible on the social media service.

The tweets were removed from the service almost immediately. It’s unclear what steps Twitter took in the handling of the @POTUS account.

The last sad cry of a broken psychopath.

They watched it.

Correction: this is the pre-speech warm up team.

Twitter finally did it.

Twitter permanently suspended President Donald Trump’s account on Friday, citing “the risk of further incitement of violence.”

Not to mention further lies and abuse and bullying.

The company banned the president’s account after years of public pressure and several attempts to limit the reach of his account in recent days. Hundreds of Twitter employees signed a letter urging Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to ban the president for using the platform to incite violence in the wake of the Capitol siege.

“In the context of horrific events this week, we made it clear on Wednesday that additional violations of the Twitter Rules would potentially result in this very course of action,” Twitter said in a blog post. “Our public interest framework exists to enable the public to hear from elected officials and world leaders directly. It is built on a principle that the people have a right to hold power to account in the open.”

But when the power in question is a psychopath that doesn’t work.

In the post, the company cited Trump’s two most recent tweets as an explanation for the removal.

In one, Trump wrote: “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”

In the next, he tweeted, “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”

Taken together, the company determined, they were “likely to inspire others to replicate the violent acts that took place on January 6, 2021, and that there are multiple indicators that they are being received and understood as encouragement to do so.”

It seems like a no-brainer, but the evil people are doing what they do.

“Disgusting. Big Tech wants to cancel all 75M @realDonaldTrump supporters,” tweeted Jason Miller, a senior advisor to Trump’s 2020 campaign.

Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations, tweeted: “Silencing people, not to mention the President of the US, is what happens in China not our country. #Unbelievable”

And armed insurrectionist attacking the heart of government is what happens in Belarus and our country.

Updating to add:

They said no thanks.

According to the Associated Press, the Capitol Police knew about the potential threat of the riot days before it took place, but rejected offers of help from the National Guard and the FBI. Officials said that they wanted to avoid using federal force against Americans, as they had done this summer.

Uh………………………….

So when it’s Black Lives Matter, it’s deadly force time, but when it’s pasty-faced fascists, it’s hello nice to see you please don’t steal anything worth more than $5000.

The choice to turn down help amid warnings of an insurrection is as revealing as it is disturbing: Why did law enforcement assume that they’d encounter violence from protesters marching for Black lives in June, but think that a largely white crowd of pro-Trump extremists and conspiracy theorists would remain peaceful? The difference in the Capitol Police’s response shocked many who bemoaned the double standard. But police brutality against Black Americans and police inaction toward white Americans is not some surprising anomaly; it is the status quo.

I wonder if part of the reason for that is the buried but lurking knowledge that Black Americans have such very compelling reasons to be furious. Buried guilt, in short. It was a generations-long crime, and there was never any kind of reckoning with the crime, let alone reparations. We alive now didn’t start it or cause it but we do still profit off it, like it or not. I wonder if law enforcement is just more afraid of Black Americans partly because of that crime.

In December, a 111-page investigative report about the New York Police Department revealed that last year’s Black Lives Matter protests had been grossly mishandled by officers. The report, conducted by a city oversight agency, confirmed what millions of Americans had seen after the killing of George Floyd on May 25: Police responses during peaceful protests were characterized by “excessive enforcement” and the violation of First Amendment rights. Yet one month before Floyd’s death, on April 30, the country had watched as white protesters, some of them heavily armed, swarmed the Michigan state capitol to object to stay-at-home orders, resulting in little incident from Michigan State Police troopers and only two arrests.

Yes. I remember saying, probably far too many times, imagine if those guys had been black.

The mob attacks on the Capitol are not so much “unprecedented” as they are consistent with America’s history of white backlash to racial equality and white entitlement to political, economic, and social control. It is not a coincidence that on the same day of the riot, the first Black and Jewish Americans were elected to Senate seats in Georgia. Wednesday’s violence claims no legitimate grievances. It is merely the perpetual retaliation to racial progress, as evidenced by the insurrectionists’ parading of Trump flags, Confederate flags, Gadsden flags, Blue Lives Matter flags, and neo-Nazi symbols. This was not an uprising against a tyrannical government; it was an uprising against a multicultural government. And the police reaction—calm, measured, tolerant—to that uprising suggests that when it comes to engaging in violence against the state, white perpetrators have nothing to lose.

Unless they stick a taser down their jeans.

Updating to add:

H/t Roj Blake

Accounts differ. CNN’s account of how Kevin Greeson died inside the Capitol:

Greeson had a history of high blood pressure and suffered a heart attack amid the excitement, his family said in a statement to CNN. He was an advocate of Trump and attended the event to show his support.

“He was excited to be there to experience this event,” the statement said. “He was not there to participate in violence or rioting, nor did he condone such actions.”

Well that’s not true. He was inside the Capitol. He was, necessarily, participating in the violence and rioting that enabled the rioters to be inside the Capitol.

Also…

Word is he was carrying a taser the way he’s carrying those pistols, and he was trying to wrestle a painting of Tip O’Neill off the wall and accidentally tasered himself in the testicles, an oops resulting in death. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of this story.

At any rate, his family doesn’t seem to have known him very well.

They’re hustling.

A growing corps of House Democrats, furious over the invasion of the Capitol on Wednesday by a mob inspired and encouraged by President Trump, is pushing to rapidly impeach the president a second time — hoping to force Trump from office even a few days early rather than allow him to leave on his own terms.

Removing Trump by constitutional means is a tall order for the 12 days remaining in his presidency, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has not made a formal determination to move forward with a second impeachment, even as she consulted Friday with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff about curbing Trump’s ability to launch nuclear weapons.

That ability should be not so much curbed as removed entirely.

“We have a great sense of unity that we have a moral obligation to act,” said Rep. Daniel Kildee (Mich.), a Democratic deputy whip. “If we can shave any number of days of the threat this president represents off the calendar, we will have done public good, but there’s also another important aspect of this. . . . It would be a more accurate view of history if this president suffered the ultimate penalty for his crimes against his country, no matter how many days are removed from his tenure.”

That. That’s actually really important. He absolutely should not be able to get away with it unscathed. There needs to be that giant blot on his record.

Two draft articles of impeachment have been circulated among House Democrats that cite Trump’s incitement of the mob and his delayed decision to encourage it to disperse as high crimes and misdemeanors necessitating removal.

“We just suffered the most massive, violent invasion of the U.S. Capitol in American history since the War of 1812,” said Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), author of one of the drafts. “It is unthinkable to me that we would allow this simply to be, you know, one more unfortunate faux pas by the president. He has counseled and invited an attack on the Congress of the United States itself.”

…

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) told “CBS This Morning” on Friday that he could “consider” any impeachment articles forwarded by the House.

“He swore an oath to the American people to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution,” Sasse said. “He acted against that. What he did was wicked.”

Now get 16 more Republican senators to agree.

Takes some nerve.

WE must work together – says one of Trump’s loyal lapdogs. It’s not the Democrats who raised “the temperature” by enabling the treasonous mob boss who tried to incite a coup two days ago.

Anyway he’s already taken it back.

Failed useless impotent loser tries to bully world by shouting.

Meanwhile he has five deaths on his hands – five people died because of his coup attempt. Four were coup-attempters and one was a cop resisting them.

But he’s not interested in that. He doesn’t care about that. He doesn’t feel any shame or guilt about that. He has other fish to fry.

The BBC is also asking pointed questions about the abject failure to stop the attempted coup on Wednesday.

Criticism centres on preparation by police and their failure to anticipate possible violence, despite evidence that radical pro-Trump supporters and other groups were openly discussing their plans online.

And despite the fact that it is apparently standard procedure to police-up heavily for a protest or march that could get violent. This one wasn’t even a case of “could get”; the coup plotters were openly shouting that it would get violent.

The Washington Post, citing sources close to the matter, says that Capitol Police charged with guarding the building and its grounds did not make early requests for help from the city’s main police force or the National Guard nor set-up a multiagency command centre to coordinate response to any violence.

And yes we are going to point out how different this is from the way the BLM protests were treated last summer.

Even hours into Wednesday’s violence, protesters were filmed being escorted or guided out of the building without arrest – even appearing to be helped down the Capitol stairs and having doors held open for them to exit. Another viral clip appeared to show a police officer posing for a selfie with a man inside.

…

Aside from the clear lack of preparation, confusion mounted during the violence about when and if other security forces were being deployed to help.

According to the Washington Post, Pentagon officials had placed strict operational limits on the DC National Guard ahead of protests and remained concerned about the “optics” of armed military personnel at the Capitol.

Defence officials on Thursday sought to defend the speed in which they authorised and mobilised Guardsmen to respond to the violence.

Multiple US media outlets, citing senior sources, have suggested that President Donald Trump allegedly showed reluctance for the National Guard to be used to quell the unrest.

Naturally. He wanted the “unrest”; he summoned and cheered on the unrest. He was hoping the unrest would overturn the election for him.

Some radical supporters have responded with disbelief and frustration at the concession video shared by President Trump on Thursday following the violence.

Don’t worry! He’s taking it back already!

Also? He’s not going to attend your damn party.

Trump may have had high-level help from federal officials who blocked the normal procedures for a potentially violent DC protest.

The supporters of President Donald Trump who stormed the Capitol on Wednesday to stop the ratification of President-elect Joe Biden’s election victory were attempting a violent coup that multiple European security officials said appeared to have at least tacit support from aspects of the US federal agencies responsible for securing the Capitol complex.

Insider spoke with three officials on Thursday morning: a French police official responsible for public security in a key section of central Paris, and two intelligence officials from NATO countries who directly work in counterterrorism and counterintelligence operations involving the US, terrorism, and Russia.

People who know what they’re talking about, in short. Business Insider underlines that they didn’t present any evidence, but argued from their experience of what is normally done in parallel situations that was not done in this one.

The French police official said they believed that an investigation would find that someone interfered with the deployment of additional federal law-enforcement officials on the perimeter of the Capitol complex; the official has direct knowledge of the proper procedures for security of the facility.

The security of Congress is entrusted to the US Capitol Police, a federal agency that answers to Congress.

It is routine for the Capitol Police to coordinate with the federal Secret Service and the Park Police and local police in Washington, DC, before large demonstrations. The National Guard, commanded by the Department of Defence, is often on standby too.

And we know Trump’s people love violence, and we know Trump loves their violence, and we know Trump’s people know that, so we can surely assume that the Capitol Police and Park police and local police and National Guard all know that. It’s not as if it’s a secret. But the coordination seems not to have happened. (If it did happen they must have done it wrong.)

“You cannot tell me I don’t know what they should have done. I can fly to Washington tomorrow and do that job, just as any police official in Washington can fly to Paris and do mine,” the official said. The official directs public security in a central Paris police district filled with government buildings and tourist sites.

“These are not subtle principles” for managing demonstrations, “and they transfer to every situation,” the official said. “This is why we train alongside the US federal law enforcement to handle these very matters, and it’s obvious that large parts of any successful plan were just ignored.”

The National Guard, which was deployed heavily to quell the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, did not show up to assist the police until two hours after the action started on Wednesday, according to The Associated Press.

I guess I was thinking it was incompetence as opposed to…systematic collaboration.

The French police official detailed multiple lapses they believe were systematic:

Large crowds of protesters needed to be managed far earlier by the police, who instead controlled a scene at the first demonstration Trump addressed, then ignored the crowd as it streamed toward the Capitol.

“It should have been surrounded, managed, and directed immediately, and that pressure never released.”

Because the crowd was not managed and directed, the official said, the protesters were able to congregate unimpeded around the Capitol, where the next major failure took place.

“It is unthinkable there was not a strong police cordon on the outskirts of the complex. Fences and barricades are useless without strong police enforcement. This is when you start making arrests, targeting key people that appear violent, anyone who attacks an officer, anyone who breaches the barricade. You have to show that crossing the line will fail and end in arrest.”

“I cannot believe the failure to establish a proper cordon was a mistake. These are very skilled police officials, but they are federal, and that means they ultimately report to the president. This needs to be investigated.”

“When the crowd reached the steps of the building, the situation was over. The police are there to protect the building from terrorist attacks and crime, not a battalion of infantry. That had to be managed from hundreds of meters away unless the police were willing to completely open fire, and I can respect why they were not.”

The third official, who works in counterintelligence for a NATO member, agreed that the situation could only be seen as a coup attempt, no matter how poorly considered and likely to fail, and said its implications might be too huge to immediately fathom.

…

“The broader damage around the world will be extensive in terms of reputation, and that’s why Putin doesn’t mind at all that Trump lost. He’s got to be happy to take his chips and count his winnings, which from the Trump era will be a shockingly quick decline in American prestige and moral high ground.

That’s a done deal.

H/t Holms

He’s surrendered…until he takes it back.

A new martyr for free speech! Not really martyr, since he’s not dead, but you know. Martyrish.

He wasn’t really representing his constituents by pretending to believe Trump’s lies about the election; he wasn’t leading a debate about voter integrity, because that’s not what the pretend debate was about; it does look like sedition to try to overturn an election by lying about voter fraud; big publishing companies are not “the Left.”

And, crucial point, it’s not “canceling everything we don’t approve of” to resist efforts to steal an election.

Pro Publica notes that it was all out there in plain sight.

For weeks, the far-right supporters of President Donald Trump railed on social media that the election had been stolen. They openly discussed the idea of violent protest on the day Congress met to certify the result.

“We came up with the idea to occupy just outside the CAPITOL on Jan 6th,” leaders of the Stop the Steal movement wrote on Dec. 23. They called their Wednesday demonstration the Wild Protest, a name taken from a tweet by Trump that encouraged his supporters to take their grievances to the streets of Washington. “Will be wild,” the president tweeted.

Oh did he; let’s see.

“Be there, will be wild!” Four people dead wild enough?

Thousands of people heeded that call.

For reasons that remained unclear Wednesday night, the law enforcement authorities charged with protecting the nation’s entire legislative branch — nearly all of the 535 members of Congress gathered in a joint session, along with Vice President Mike Pence — were ill-prepared to contain the forces massed against them.

On Wednesday afternoon, a thin line of U.S. Capitol Police, with only a few riot shields between them and a knot of angry protesters, engaged in hand-to-hand combat with rioters on the steps of the West Front. They struggled with a flimsy set of barricades as a mob in helmets and bulletproof vests pushed its way toward the Capitol entrance. Videos showed officers stepping aside, and sometimes taking selfies, as if to usher Trump’s supporters into the building they were supposed to guard.

Taking selfies??!

A former Capitol policeman well-versed in his agency’s procedures was mystified by the scene he watched unfold on live television. Larry Schaefer, a 34-year Capitol Police veteran who retired in December 2019, said his former colleagues were experienced in dealing with aggressive crowds.

“It’s not a spur-of-the-moment demonstration that just popped up,” Schaefer said. “We have a planned, known demonstration that has a propensity for violence in the past and threats to carry weapons — why would you not prepare yourself as we have done in the past?”

Pro Publica asked the Capitol Police that question but got no reply.

The easily overpowered police force guarding the Capitol on Wednesday posed a stark contrast to the tactics deployed by local police during this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests. Then, the city felt besieged by law enforcement.

…

The contrast shook Washington’s attorney general, Karl Racine, who seemed to be almost in disbelief on CNN Wednesday evening.

“There was zero intelligence that the Black Lives Matter protesters were going to ‘storm the capitol,’” he remembered, after ticking down the many police forces present in June. “Juxtapose that with what we saw today, with hate groups, militia and other groups that have no respect for the rule of law go into the capitol. … That dichotomy is shocking.”

BLM protesters were not going to storm anything, so call out the military. Trump-loving white supremacists were openly planning to storm the Capitol, so call out no one at all, just treat it like any other day.

David Carter, director of the Intelligence Program at Michigan State University, said that sometimes, the best intelligence in the world doesn’t translate into adequate preparedness. Perhaps the security officials responsible for protecting the Capitol simply could not envision that a crowd of Americans would charge through a police line and shatter the glass windows that stood as the only physical barrier to entering the building.

“I go back to the 9/11 commission report,” Carter said. “It was a failure of imagination. They didn’t imagine something like this. Would you imagine people were going to break into the Capitol and go into the chambers? That failure of imagination sometimes makes us drop the ball.”

But we’ve had the Malheur takeover, we’ve had Charlottesville – this didn’t even require imagination, just remembering would have been good enough.

Yesterday:

In another part of the forest –

A couple of things. One, picking cotton is not a synonym for slavery. Sharecroppers picked cotton; laborers picked cotton. Warnock wasn’t saying his mother was a slave, he was saying she was poor, and had to do hard painful (the bolls tear up your hands) work to make a meager living.

Two, no, slavery did not end in America 157 years ago. Slavery was reinstated in the South (without being called that) after Reconstruction was terminated. Jim Crow laws were passed that made it a crime for black people to be unemployed, along with a bunch of other trivialities that didn’t apply to white people. Guess what the sentence was! Picking cotton! Or harvesting turpentine in the pine forests, which was also miserable lethal work. Cotton growers “leased” prisoners, and if the prisoners died of overwork and starvation and filth, there were always plenty more.

Three, what kind of miserable spiteful reactionary shit is that?

Normally I would think this is “merely” political rhetoric – bad political rhetoric, hyperbolic, rabble-rousing (not in a good way), reckless, but not unmistakably incitement to violence. That’s probably wrong, it’s probably because this kind of frenzy has been normalized, I’ve probably been conditioned to think that just as others have…or then again maybe it’s just standard free speech thinking.

At any rate, at this moment in history, I don’t think it’s mere.

Politico has a collection of on the scene reporting on what it was like inside the Capitol yesterday. (In one word: scary.)

Marianne LeVine, Senate reporter: Then there was an announcement the building wasn’t secure. Intercom, probably Capitol police. We decided to barricade the doors with couches and chairs. We turned off the lights and we hid behind the desks.

Marianne LeVine: We started hearing noise. We could hear they’d gone into the Capitol. We heard a lot of stampeding and cheers and people. We could hear chants of, “Four more years!” and all that.

Burgess Everett: We could hear people shaking the walls. At this point, people are on the Senate floor and all over the Capitol that shouldn’t be. We don’t even know this because we turned everything off because we’re trying to make it seem like nobody is in this room. We don’t know who the heck is in there. … I just heard banging and yelling, and police screaming and radio. I mean, it just sounded like bedlam.

Stephen Voss:On the north side of the Capitol is a security door. It was very chaotic there. About a dozen rioters had forced themselves through the door but then were pepper sprayed and pushed out; they fell on top of each other in a pile. The Capitol police tried to close the door, but a rioter had jammed a flagpole into the top of the door to keep it open. The police kept trying to close the door and eventually bent the flagpole. This went on for about 45 minutes. At one point the rioters used a metal barricade to try to ram the door. The door glass eventually broke but the police managed to keep the rioters out.

Olivia Beavers: That’s when you notice this sizable shift on the floor below, especially on the Democratic side, which I could see more clearly because I was closer, that, “Oh shit, something is going on.”

Sarah Ferris: Hundreds of lawmakers, who had been seated on the floor or in the upper galleries, began turning to whisper to each other, some raising their voice as they asked what was going on, others frantically checking their phones.

Olivia Beavers: What we could see was the looks on the faces of the members: “Is this really happening?”

The police distributed gas masks, then started evacuating people. The galleries are sectioned off so the reporters had to climb over railings to get out.

Sarah Ferris: I climbed over several rows of chairs, landing in the very front where I could duck behind a short railing. Above me, I saw Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, who recently had hip surgery and has been walking with a cane, and I realized she couldn’t get down to the front, so I shuffled a bit and made room for her.

Thank you Sarah Ferris. That’s our Seattle Congresswoman.

Sarah Ferris: The chamber below us was now virtually empty. The remaining members and press were now lumped together in the upper gallery.

Melanie Zanona: There were members who were calling their loved ones. It was just a very scary few minutes there.

Sarah Ferris:Beside us, I heard a loud, desperate prayer from Congresswoman Lisa Blunt Rochester. She gripped hands with Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, who was nearly sprawled onto the floor between two seats, and Congresswoman Val Demings, who sat on the other side.

Melanie Zanona: And so police officers put a big wooden credenza in front of the door and created a barricade and they drew their guns. And we heard just like bang, bang, bang on the doors. We didn’t know what it was at that point.

Sarah Ferris: We heard bangs on the main chamber floor outside, then what sounded like gunshots.

Melanie Zanona: The other police officers where we were up in the balcony said everyone duck for cover. And so I had my hood up. Some people had their hoods on. Some didn’t. I had my hood on. I was just crouched behind a chair up in the balcony. Next to another reporter, just like holding each other’s hands and just crouched waiting there. And I heard what sounded like a gunshot.

Sarah Ferris: A hundred feet in front of us, a half-dozen police officers armed only with handguns stood in front of what looked like a large piece of furniture that had been pushed in front of the main chamber door. I cannot overstate how terrified we all were, not knowing what was coming next.

Olivia Beavers: I had this really clear shot of the police with their guns drawn pointed at these holes in the glass. I had a perfect view of the protesters trying to get in. You could tell there were people on the other side [of the door] but you couldn’t see them.

It went on for about an hour. There was a lot noise, shouting and banging, and they couldn’t tell what was going on. Nothing good, clearly, but no specifics.

Olivia Beavers: Congresswoman [Norma] Torres comforted me, and we told each other we were going to get through this.

Melanie Zanona: At one point, this one member, Rosa DeLauro, reached over and touched my back and said, “Are you OK?” And I said, “Yeah I’m fine—you know, holding it in.”

Then they were led away.

Olivia Beavers: Walking down the stairs, that’s when the shakes began to hit my body. We were a couple of flights down and my legs started to go. I was trying to ask members: “Were there gunshots?”

Sarah Ferris: Packed into a back staircase, descending deeper into the Capitol, I heard Congresswoman Terri Sewell ask, “Does anyone know where we are going?” Nearby, Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger shouted down, “Is there a Capitol police officer leading us?”

Melanie Zanona: Mike Quigley, of Illinois, tried to bring a little levity to the situation, and he looked over at one of the new members. I don’t know who the freshman was, but kind of made a joke: Welcome to Congress. You know, just making note of how absolutely insane the situation was.

Olivia Beavers: We were ushered to a safe room. I got to the door and I was stopped by an officer. “No reporters allowed in.” Abigail Spanberger was next to me. She said, “What do you mean? They’re being evacuated with us.” But they wouldn’t let us in. That’s when a member stepped forward and said he’d take six of us to his office. He had experience in the military and he was very calm.

All in a day’s work.