FOUR HOURS OF INSURRECTION
Reconstructing the riot inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6

Martine Powers:
We have all seen what happened at the Capitol on January 6th -- shocking videos, photos, snapshots of a chaotic day. But there are still so many questions, like why weren't there more police? What were they doing in these videos we saw? Why didn't more people expect this violence? And what was happening behind the scenes? Today, we try to answer those questions. We're telling the story of the Capitol invasion from the outside and the inside. And we're bringing in voices from people who were there, people who have been working to better understand what happened, and people who you may not have heard from yet. Just a warning -- this episode contains explicit language, as well as the sounds and descriptions of violence. And the story of the day, of course, starts with the president.

Donald Trump:
The media will not show the magnitude of this crowd. Even when I turned on today, I looked and I saw thousands of people here, but...

Martine Powers:
Noon Wednesday, January 6th. The place where President Trump is speaking is known as the Ellipse. It's this grassy area south of The White House. And the crowd at this point is huge, even by Trump-rally standards. 8,000 people here to listen to the president's baseless claims about the election.

Donald Trump:
All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened, radical left Democrats, which is what they're doing, and stolen by the fake news media. That's what they've done and what they're doing. We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft involved.

Martine Powers:
A little less than 2 miles away, straight down the National Mall, Rebecca Tan is one of many Post reporters outside the Capitol. And the atmosphere there -- the best way to describe it is, it was a party.

Rebecca Tan:
They were playing country music. There were people in costumes. There was a woman dressed up as a Statue of Liberty. And there were women and children at this point.

Martine Powers:
Back up the Mall, by The White House, the president continues his speech.

Donald Trump:
Nobody, until I came along, had any idea how corrupt our elections were. And, again, most people would stand there at 9:00 in the evening and say, "I want to thank you very much." And they go off to some other life. But I said, "Something's wrong here. Something's really wrong. Can't have happened." And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.

Martine Powers:
And then, around 1:00 p.m., the president wraps up, and people are hyped.

Donald Trump:
Let's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I want to thank you all. God bless you and God bless America. Thank you all for being here. This is incredible. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Rebecca Tan:
As President Trump's speech ended at the Ellipse, we started seeing thousands of people coming from the Ellipse toward the Capitol, which is what the president had told them to do, encouraged them to do. It went from country music to sort of "U.S.A., U.S.A."
Man:
U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
Woman:
U.S.A.!

Martine Powers:
These people marching up the street had come from all over the country -- New York, North Carolina, Florida, even as far as California, in the case of a 35-year-old woman named Ashli Babbitt, whose name you might now recognize.

Ashli Babbitt:
There is a sea of nothing but red, white, and blue and patriots and Trump. And it was amazing to get to see the president talk. We are now walking down the inaugural path to the Capitol building, 3 million-plus people. God bless America, patriots.

Martine Powers:
And as these people start amassing around the Capitol, the mood starts to shift. Reporter Marissa Lang was there.

Marissa Lang:
I was drawn to this crowd of people in sort of the center on the east side of the Capitol, who seemed really rowdy. And this one woman was yelling and saying, "Get the kids out of here. Get these kids out of here." And so I kind of moved closer to that crowd to see what was going on. And she was the first person that I really heard voice the desire to storm the Capitol. She was saying, you know, "We're going to take the building. We're going to storm the Capitol. Get these kids out of here. If you're not serious about storming the Capitol, you need to leave." And you could just sort of feel that more people were being egged on and riled up by that message, and then sort of the physicality changed, right? Instead of just standing there cheering, they started to jostle the fences. They started to push. They started to sort of converge around the police line.

Rebecca Tan:
From the corner of our eyes, we see sort of individuals start to scale and then topple the fence, and this is sort of the first breakthrough of that first barrier. And once we have, you know, five, six people who have been over, then there's sort of a click in the crowd, and everyone starts to rush.

Marissa Lang:
As that happened, you can definitely tell that they realized they could get away with pushing this line. And before I knew it, they were streaming up the steps of the Capitol. I did see some police officers seemingly try to get in their way, seemingly try to hold these barricades together, but they were outnumbered, and once the crowd pushed past them, they kind of scatter and they let the crowd go up the stairs.

Rebecca Tan:
At the same time, we have these men, again, in camo gear, who are yelling, "Forward, forward," sort of like it's, you know, an army attack, you know, like something like "Game of Thrones" or "Lord of the Rings" or something like that.

Marissa Lang:
My first thought was, "Okay, we knew they were going to try this. We knew that they wanted to do this." And I thought for sure they'd get on the steps, maybe they'd make it up to that little terrace, and they would feel good about themselves, they would feel like they did the thing, and that's where it would end. I had no inkling that they would get the door open. And I think that the moment that I realized that things were totally off the rails was when they opened the door. I was wondering, "How did they get that far? Where are the police?" I thought for sure that there had to be someone on the other side of the door holding it together or waiting for them and arresting whoever tried to come in the gates, and that wasn't the case.

Martine Powers:
So, Carol, this is the question that so many people who saw what was happening outside the Capitol are wondering -- why weren't there more police stopping rioters from getting to the door of the Capitol?

Carol Leonnig:
Capitol Police had not believed that this protest was going to turn into a siege on the Capitol.

Martine Powers:
That is Carol Leonnig, national investigative reporter for The Post.

Carol Leonnig:
They had been watching the intel gathering from the FBI, from the D.C. Metropolitan Police. They'd been conferring with their partners, other federal agencies, and there was no indication to them that this was going to be an aggressive, war-like riot. However, what they didn't know is that the FBI, a day earlier, in their Norfolk office, had gotten a warning about exactly this -- a plan to battle and seize the Capitol.

Martine Powers:
At the same time, officials in D.C. were starting to get concerned -- the mayor's office, the city police department. Police reporter Peter Hermann had been hearing for days that they were worried about the possibility for big crowds and for violence.

Peter Hermann:
Law-enforcement agencies were also monitoring all the transportation, in terms of bus tickets. They noticed an increase in Amtrak tickets into D.C. and a big increase in hotel reservations, which all led them to believe, in the weeks leading up to this, that this was becoming much bigger than anyone had expected.

Martine Powers:
Those concerns got communicated to Steven Sund, the chief of the Capitol Police. This is the police department that is in charge specifically of the Capitol building and its other office buildings. Carol later interviewed him about the riot.

Carol Leonnig:
On Monday, Chief Sund, at the Capitol Police, is starting to become concerned, after talking to some of his partners, just about the size of the protest. You know, there had been a Make America Great Again protest -- In police language, they call it MAGA 1, MAGA 2, and this one was MAGA 3. So, there had been protests before, but this one on January 6th, he was starting to see signs that the group was going to be much larger than what they had seen in the past. And so on Monday, he talks with his two supervisors, the sergeants at arms for the Senate and the House, Paul Irving and Mike Stenger, and he asks them if he can activate the National Guard, put them on emergency standby just so that they can be sure that they are at the ready in case there is something that develops. But his two bosses, who are security professionals, former very high-ranking officials at the Secret Service, by the way -- they are operating in a kind of political world. Their bosses are the Speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader. And they are not thrilled about this idea of activating the National Guard. And they suggest that he not do that.

Peter Hermann:
There was concern from his bosses about the optics of soldiers standing on the Capitol grounds or with the Capitol in the backdrop and what that would look like, almost like the soldiers or the Army was taking over for the seat of power. But even more behind that, they were pointing to criticism they got back in June when they flooded D.C. streets with federal officers and National Guardsmen from various states. They were saying, "Well, basically, you know, we did this in June, and the mayor and everyone else complained and it led to all sorts of problems. It looked like a military takeover of the district. And so we're trying to avoid that. So we want to basically have a light footprint this time around."

Martine Powers:
But by 1:50 p.m. on Wednesday, it started to become clear that a light footprint had been the wrong choice.

Marissa Lang:
And then there was a stream of protesters just running into the doors of the Capitol.

Man:
Charge!

Martine Powers:
In the videos of this, you see people using riot shields to push back officers. You see people picking up metal bike racks to basically use as battering rams. More doors, more windows are broken open.

Rebecca Tan:
And then that sends a massively powerful symbol to the thousands of people behind them who may not have thought they were going to storm the Capitol but so swept up in the excitement of this happening that they join in. You know, we've seen those images from inside the Capitol of elderly men and women, who are not armed, yet in T-shirts and sweaters. They do not look like they were there to terrorize members of Congress, but they ended up having that effect.

Man:
To Capitol Command. I'm just advising you that the MPD has declared this a breach of the Capitol, as well as a riot at the Capitol. Also, they're requesting possible help.

Martine Powers:
At this point, Sund, the chief of Capitol Police, is watching all of this unfold from a command center two blocks away from the Capitol.

Carol Leonnig:
He's there watching by video feed and getting radio transmission from his incident commanders on the scene. And as he sees this, he realizes, "We aren't going to win this one. We aren't going to be able to hold this line." They had created this huge perimeter far, far out onto First Street, and he knows it's not going to work.

Martine Powers:
And so Sund calls the acting chief of the D.C. Police Department, Robert Contee, and he says, "We need help now."

Carol Leonnig:
I'm paraphrasing here, but he essentially says, "Anything I got, I'll send it your way. I can send you 100 right now, and more will come."

Ramey Kyle:
I came down to assess the situation and see if we were going to make arrests, and I really -- I couldn't believe my eyes, what was going on. All our officers and Capitol Police officers had formed a line. There was a bicycle rack all the people in the crowd were pushed up against.

Man:
Start pulling them this way! Pull them forward!

Ramey Kyle:
It was literally a war zone.

Martine Powers:
That's D.C. Police Commander Ramey Kyle. You'll also hear Officer Daniel Hodges and Officer Mike Fanone. They were all on the west side of the Capitol, the part facing the National Mall, where the inauguration is held.

Ramey Kyle:
We had officers engaged in hand-to-hand combat across the fence line. They were throwing water bottles, pieces of metal that they had, I guess, broken off from somewhere with the inaugural-stage construction site. I started noticing that the members in the crowd are actually stealing our bike racks. I was fairly certain that we were going to be overrun. It was only a matter of time.

Man:
Hell yeah! We're all at the [bleep] They broke through. It's on.

Ramey Kyle:
We literally fought all the way back to those stairwells. We hit the stairwells. The officers go back up. We get up here to the top. I'm being told it's called the west terrace door. All the officers that were there -- they kind of refer to it now as the "Tunnel of Death."

Martine Powers:
This tunnel is really a hallway that leads inside the Capitol.

Ramey Kyle:
So we went inside. We closed the doors, locked them. I believe, at the time, that we were the only door that was in jeopardy of being breached. I had no idea that there was these other doors. I really thought that it was upon us and those officers in that hallway -- that we were the last line of defense for the Capitol.

Man:
He's breaking the window!

Ramey Kyle:
I don't know if it was just me being naive, but I always thought that these doors and these windows and stuff were bombproof, bulletproof. However, it seemed like within 45 seconds to a minute, the individuals outside were able to break those doors.

Man:
We're going around the corner.

Ramey Kyle:
We basically lined up officers shoulder-to-shoulder in that narrow tunnel, four to six rows deep. No matter what, we were going to be the cork in this hole that kept them from entering.

Daniel Hodges:
And we made another stand there. At that point, I had gone inside and put on my gas mask. CS gas and OC spray, pepper spray, was flying at that point.

Ramey Kyle:
They're throwing things at us. They're shooting bear mace at us. And, of course, like, being in that tunnel, if they shoot bear mace, everybody's getting it. It basically coated the entire vestibule. We couldn't see anything. Totally pitch-black.

Mike Fanone:
I walk in there and I looked at my partner, Jimmy Albright, who came with me, and I was like, "Man, what the [bleep] did we get into?" The only thing that I could really see was the backs of 20 officers, maybe 30 officers that looked like they were involved in some kind of, like, medieval-style combat, body against body, just crushing, like a barbaric scene.

Crowd:
U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

Daniel Hodges:
As officers fell back, I would work my way to the front. And, eventually, I got to the very front there, where you saw me in the corner next to the door. And I just tried to hold them back as best I could. And, eventually, just the sheer numbers and all of them pushing in unison wedged me in the door.

Man:
Move him back, move him back, move him back!

Daniel Hodges:
My arms were pinned, and I couldn't really defend myself at that point. So, the the guy in front of me took that opportunity to rip my mask off, rip my riot baton away from me, started beating me in the head with it. You know, I didn't want to be the one guy to start shooting, because I knew that they had guns. We had been seizing guns all day, all yesterday. And the only reason I could think of that they weren't shooting us is that they were waiting for us to shoot first. And if it became a firefight between a couple hundred officers and a couple of thousand insurrectionists, then we surely would have lost.

Bill O'Leary:
The day started with my biggest concern being whether the snack bars would be open into the wee hours of the morning, because with all of the objections planned, the joint session of Congress was expected to go until like the middle of the night.

Martine Powers:
That's Bill O'Leary. He was stationed in the House of Representatives press gallery on that Wednesday. He's a photographer for The Post.

Bill O'Leary:
I started in 1984, which, among other things, makes me the oldest person in the photo department. So, on that day, I wanted to be as far away from COVID-spreading mobs as possible and requested the Hill as an assignment because it would be so safe.

Man:
Madam Speaker, the vice president and the United States Senate.

Bill O'Leary:
It started off exactly as expected -- fairly dull and perfunctory.

Martine Powers:
This was just as Trump was finishing his speech, before the mob started attacking the Capitol.

Mike Pence:
Madam Speaker, members of Congress, pursuant to the Constitution and the laws of the United States, the Senate and House of Representatives are meeting in joint session.

Bill O'Leary:
Just about at 1:00 on the dot, with the calling of each state in alphabetical order, Vice President Pence would ask...

Mike Pence:
Are there any objections to counting the certificate of vote of the state of Alabama that the teller has verified appears to be...

Bill O'Leary:
And if no one objected, then he would say, "Okay, this is certified," and they'd read the number of electors.

Roy Blunt:
The certificate of the electoral vote of the state of Alabama seems to be...

Zoe Lofgren:
Mr. President, the certificate of the electoral vote of the state of Alaska...

Amy Klobuchar:
The certificate of the electoral vote of the state of Arizona...

Bill O'Leary:
And within 15 minutes, the first objection popped up.

Mike Pence:
Are there any objections to counting the certificate of vote of the state of Arizona that the teller has verified appears to be regular in form and authentic?

Bill O'Leary:
There was an objection from Representative Gosar.

Paul Gosar:
I rise up both for myself and 60 of my colleagues to object to the counting of the electoral ballots from Arizona.

Bill O'Leary:
And that was seconded by Senator Ted Cruz.

Ted Cruz:
An objection presented in writing and signed by both a representative and a senator complies with the law.

Bill O'Leary:
That forces the session to interrupt itself, and each chamber has to separate and debate it themselves.

Mike Pence:
...and report its decision back to the joint session. The Senate will now retire to its chamber.

Ruben Gallego:
So, Arizona was the first contested state. I was down there talking to my colleagues, preparing our defense.

Martine Powers:
That's Congressman Ruben Gallego, a Democrat from Arizona and a former Marine. He was on the floor of the House.

Martine Powers:
And what were the first indications to you that something was off or that things were starting to escalate?

Ruben Gallego:
When they took away the leadership. You know, I didn't see Pelosi get whisked away, but I saw Hoyer get whisked away, and that clearly told me that something was about to go down.

Martine Powers:
At 2:17, Speaker Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer are escorted out of the room by a bunch of men in suits. And just as that's happening, you hear this yell come from the back of the room.

Man:
The house will be in order. Okay.

Man:
This is because of you!

Woman:
Shut up!

Veronica Escobar:
So, a colleague of mine shouted that, and other colleagues were shushing him.

Martine Powers:
That's Congresswoman Veronica Escobar, a Democrat from Texas. The shout she heard was from a fellow Democrat. He's saying to the Republicans, "This is because of you." And you can hear one of the Republicans yell back and tell him to shut up.

Veronica Escobar:
And I yelled over and I said, "I'm with you, buddy," because I felt the same way. I felt exactly the same way. It was because of them.

Bill O'Leary:
A reporter showed me -- He pointed me his phone, and it was -- The image I saw were hundreds of people crawling over the scaffolding. And that was a little disconcerting, because I know where that scaffolding is. It's right next to the front door, deep inside the boundaries, and there were lots of people.

Ruben Gallego:
A Capitol Police sergeant, I believe, came in, and he tried to speak calmly, but I could tell he was breathing heavily. He says, at first, "People have broken in. They've broken through the barriers." That doesn't really scare us. I mean, we've seen that happen before, different type of protesters. And then somebody else came in and started saying that we needed to lock the doors and everyone lock ourselves in. And, at this point, we're still trying to continue with the debate. I don't think any of us want us to stop, especially for a bunch of thugs and terrorists. Some members of Congress are shouting at the Republicans. We started hearing pounding on the front door of Congress.

Bill O'Leary:
And then an announcement comes over that said, "Everybody, under your seat, there's a bag. Open that bag and put on the escape hood."

Martine Powers:
These are basically like light gas masks. They actually live under every seat in the House and the Senate all the time, kind of like the life jacket under the seats in a plane. And they've got little motorized fans to pump in filtered air.

Bill O'Leary:
And, so, there was a confusing little moment when, like, representatives are looking at each other and they're pulling out these shiny plastic bags with what -- It looks to me like if you took a dry-cleaning bag and pulled it over yourself. There was a lot of "What do I do with this?" kind of energy going on.

Martine Powers:
The other kind of absurd thing about these masks is that they actually make this sound like a high-pitched buzz.

Bill O'Leary:
Imagine if a dentist's drill is whirring in your ear while you're being evacuated from a hazardous situation. That's kind of what it -- That's what it sounded like to me, anyway.

Martine Powers:
And, so, in the middle of this very scary situation, the room sounds like it's filled with a bunch of kazoos.

Ruben Gallego:
And at this point, now people are getting really animated and excited, and the pounding on the front door of the House of Representatives is getting increasingly stronger.

Bill O'Leary:
When the bags came out, they're not intuitive. It's just a folded-up piece of plastic. Representative Ruben Gallego jumped up on a couple of chairs and started instructing his fellow congress-men and -women how to open the bag, how to use it.

Martine Powers:
And, remember, Gallego is a former Marine. He's been trained in using gas masks, he's gone through drills with real tear gas, and he sees some of his colleagues literally start to hyperventilate, and he's afraid that one of them might actually pass out.

Ruben Gallego:
I think people were about to really freak out. And we just -- You can't have freak-outs in a very tense situation.

Man:
We can get order, we can resume.

Bill O'Leary:
On the floor, there were staff members and, I think, even a few representatives starting to drag furniture from parts of the room -- desks and benches -- and were piling it up to fortify the main door to the chamber, you know, the door where the president walks through every State of the Union. That's the door that they were assembling outside, when there were a quick sequence of pops, two in a row. Some of my colleagues are convinced that these were gunshots, but I'm still not convinced of that.

Martine Powers:
They could have been stun grenades or flash bangs. They could have been breaking glass.

Bill O'Leary:
But it caused everyone's temperature to rise. People began to duck. Guns get pulled. And everything just sort of froze at that point.

Veronica Escobar:
What was burned and will forever be in my brain is the image of those Capitol Police officers behind that piece of furniture, pointing their guns through the broken glass of the door with faces on the other side. And they were what was standing between us and that mob. That's when I thought, "We may never make it out of the chamber."

Woman:
They want us down.

Martine Powers:
There's more shouting. There are more rioters outside the door. This is when Capitol Police are basically like, "We need to go now."

Bill O'Leary:
The security forces on the floor started moving people out of the chamber and down the stairway.

Ruben Gallego:
As one last ones to leave to make sure we didn't miss anybody, because that's also a very dangerous thing...

Martine Powers:
Congressman Gallego walks out into the speaker's lobby and towards a staircase.

Ruben Gallego:
And as I looked left, that's when I saw a barricaded door, you know, the rioters, the terrorists, the seditionists pounding on the door. I was afraid they were going to break through. And there were still members trying to get down into the tunnels. And I really thought, "We may have to fight our way out of this" or fight them off enough until security got there. As I proceeded down the stairs, you could tell that Capitol security had set up a kind of safety corridor to move us through, though it was very hasty, I would tell you. At one point, I get to a hallway, and Capitol Police is grabbing, like, two young guys with rifles and telling them, "Stand here, and if anybody comes, shoot them," right? I mean, the fact that they have to -- They're not covering all the sectors for our evacuation is very -- That was very scary when I heard that.

Martine Powers:
Very early in the insurrection, as all the members of Congress were still gaveling in, it had already become clear that police at the Capitol needed more help. But that help was slow to arrive.

Carol Leonnig:
At 1:10, Chief Sund radios to his bosses, "I need emergency declaration now for the National Guard." And you may remember that that's what he asked for on Monday, and they denied him. So now he's saying, in the emergency, "I need the National Guard." It takes an hour for his supervisors, the two sergeants at arms, to run it up the flagpole, amid a battle outside, to get approval. At 2:10, Chief Sund talks to General Walker by phone and says, "I need your help. I have the emergency declaration. Please send those National Guard officers that you said you could send." But there's a problem. General Walker believes he needs approval from the Pentagon across the water. The mayor is panicking and wondering, "What in the world is happening on the Capitol Hill?" Her aide gets a call going between General Walker, Chief Sund, and the Army secretary's office. At 2:26, on that conference call, Chief Sund says, to the Army secretary's representative, Lieutenant General Piatt, "I am making an emergency, urgent, immediate request for assistance. I need boots on the ground now." Lieutenant General Piatt hems and haws. He says, according to multiple people on the call, "I'm not sure I like the visuals of a National Guard standing a police line outside the Capitol."