FORTY-FIVE
Pence, who arrived at the Capitol wearing a navy blue mask, had been presiding over the joint session of Congress when he was removed from the Senate floor at 2:13 p.m. by Secret Service agents. They moved him into the vice presidential office near the Senate on the second floor, where he was joined by his wife, Karen, and his daughter, Charlotte, who had come with him to the Capitol.
As word came that rioters were swarming the building and running through the hallways toward the Senate chamber, Tim Giebels, one of the Secret Service agents on his detail that day, told him he needed to move to a secure location downstairs, near the vice president’s motorcade. Once there, Giebels kept hearing more updates. The rioters were everywhere in the Capitol. No one was in control.
“I’m not leaving,” Pence said. He knew the Secret Service would whisk him away if he stepped inside his vehicle. It would look like he was fleeing.
“We’ve got to go now!” Giebels said, and suggested Pence sit in the vehicle.
“I’m not getting in,” Pence said. He said he would stand there and make calls with the motorcade humming, ready to go if the crisis worsened.
Pence spoke by phone with McConnell and other leaders who said they needed the National Guard to move faster. The Capitol needed to be secured. McConnell asked, where were the troops?
“I will call them and call you back,” Pence said.
Keith Kellogg, in the West Wing as the riot unfolded, noticed the president watching television in his private dining room next to the Oval Office.
Images of the Capitol rioters were beginning to appear on the screen. They were not just wandering around inside the building. They were climbing walls, clashing with police, and screaming threats in the marble hallways. This was no longer a protest. It was being called an insurrection by some lawmakers and others there.
Holy shit, Kellogg thought. What is happening?
As rioters stormed throughout the Capitol, many of them were checking their phones, and keeping tabs on Trump. The crowds inside were swelling. More windows were broken.
Trump tweeted at 2:24 p.m. He slammed Pence for not having “the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”
Kellogg went to see Trump in the president’s dining room. He had just traded notes with Pence’s team at the Capitol.
“Sir, the vice president is secure,” Kellogg told Trump.
“Where’s Mike?” Trump asked.
“The Secret Service has him. They’re down in the basement. They’re okay and he’s not going to get in the vehicle.
“He knows,” Kellogg said, “that if they put your ass in the vehicle, they’re going to take you somewhere.
“Mr. President,” he added, “you really should do a tweet.” On Capitol Hill, “nobody’s carrying a TV on their shoulder. You need to get a tweet out real quick, help control the crowd up there. This is out of control.
“They’re not going to be able to control this. Sir, they’re not prepared for it. Once a mob starts turning like that, you’ve lost it,” he said.
“Yeah,” Trump said.
Trump blinked and kept watching television.
Kellogg looked around and realized the West Wing was nearly empty. Meadows was in his office, but Trump was essentially alone. National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien was in Florida. Kushner was not there.
Kellogg went to find Ivanka Trump.
Police officers had weapons drawn inside the House of Representatives, pointed at the doors as protesters banged on the heavy wood, screaming loudly.
Congressman Joe Neguse, a 36-year-old Democrat from Colorado, texted his wife, Andrea. She told him the mob was in Statuary Hall, steps way. He told her he loved her, loved their daughter, everything would be fine.
But Neguse and others around him, crouched on the floor, were not so sure. The chamber was in lockdown. Police told lawmakers to retrieve gas masks and shouted out instructions. Get down. Masks on!
As members opened the gas mask packages, they made a blaring noise. A ringing. A cacophony of rings and yelling filled the House chamber.
“Prepare to take cover!”
Neguse could hear the rioters banging on the doors.
Officers swept over to several groups of House members. Head out! Follow us!
They were evacuated to a secure location.
Paul Ryan, the former House speaker, was alone at his home office in the Washington area. His television was on. He had a pile of work on his desk. These days, he was on boards, teaching. Zoom calls.
He eyed the screen. A riot? At the Capitol? He turned up the volume. He immediately recognized the faces of the Capitol Police officers. Oh my God, he thought. I know these guys. Not just from his former detail, but from his decades as a staffer turned congressman, beginning in 1992 and ending in 2018.
He saw a bearded rioter take a plexiglass police shield and hoist it in the air, then smash it into a window of the Capitol. Glass shattered. Another smash. More shards. Another smash. The window was now broken open. Rioters roared menacingly and jumped up, then climbed inside.
I assumed Trump’s fight was an act, Ryan thought. Trump would have his rally and tell his supporters he didn’t lose. It would be post-election spin. I didn’t think it would go this far.
But it was happening. He kept seeing the faces of cops he knew. It was hard to absorb. He called up friends who were House members and staffers. Some of them told him they were fending off rioters in stairwells. Statuary Hall, which he crossed ten times a day as speaker, was being overrun.
“I hope you’re safe,” Ryan told them. He said he felt guilty about not being there.
“Donald Trump fomented this, he revved them up,” Ryan angrily told several friends. “He sent them up there. He filled their heads with this. He chose to believe crackpot advisers. He could have listened to Pat Cipollone or Bill Barr but listens to Rudy Giuliani.”
Ryan later sat down at his computer. He typed out an email to a small group of Capitol Police officers who were part of his security detail. He said he and his wife, Janna, “were sickened and distraught” over the violence toward officers and the desecration of the Capitol.
Ryan looked up at the television again and watched the scene. He rubbed his eyes. My God, he said, catching himself by surprise.
The rioters kept shouting, climbing. Police officers were being hit with metal poles.
Ryan began to bawl.
He called his assistant and told her to cancel his meetings for the rest of the day. “I don’t have the bandwidth for anything else,” he said.
“Where is the president?”
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was calling into the White House, asking aides to connect him with the president.
McCarthy’s office on the second floor of the Capitol was being vandalized. His office windows were shattered. His detail had rushed him out.
Trump came on the line.
“You got to get out and tell these people to stop. I am out of the Capitol. We’ve been run over,” McCarthy said. He was intense. “Someone just got shot.”
McCarthy had heard a shot fired. At 2:44 p.m., Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt was shot and killed by a police officer inside the Capitol as she and others tried to breach a door near lawmakers.
“I’ll put a tweet out,” Trump said.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” McCarthy said. “You’ve got to tell them to stop. You’ve got to get them out of here. Get them out of here. Now.”
Trump did not seem to grasp the gravity of the situation. He never asked about McCarthy’s safety. And one remark stood out: “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”
Kellogg found Ivanka Trump. I need you to go talk to your dad about the riot at the Capitol, he said. She could reach her father in ways others could not. She could talk to him as a daughter.
Ivanka went into the Oval. When she came out a few minutes later, Kellogg immediately recognized the look on her face. He had seen it with his own daughter. She had just had a tough conversation.
For weeks, Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, had watched as Trump indulged in the legal theories and congressional plots offered by his allies. They had used a light touch with Trump, with Kushner telling aides that it was Trump’s presidency, and he alone should be the one to decide how to finish it.
Kushner did not want to be the point person for an intervention. He told others to respect Trump and give him space. Kushner had traveled to the Middle East in November, and again in late December.
As Kellogg and others watched, Ivanka went in two more times to see her father.
“Let this thing go,” she told him.
“Let it go,” she said.
Trump never called Pence that day.
Marc Short, who was with Pence, later called Meadows to provide a clipped status report.
“The vice president is working with the leadership to make sure we get back to vote,” Short said.
“Probably the right thing to do,” Meadows said. “Anything else we can do for you?”
Short was deeply frustrated with Meadows. “Anything else we can do for you?” Was he kidding? Where was the urgency?
At 3:13 p.m., Trump sent out a tweet: “I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order—respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!”
Inside the White House press office, Trump adviser Sarah Matthews cringed. She and other Trump aides had been glued to their computers, knowing the president was down the hall being told to tweet. But when she read it, she told colleagues his tweet would do little to stop the riot. It was a gentle wave-off, not a demand.
“The situation is out of control,” Matthews said. She walked down to the lower press office, closer to the briefing room. “This is really bad.”
Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin, a 44-year-old Michigan Democrat, reached Chairman Milley by phone at 3:29 p.m. Before her election to Congress, Slotkin had been a CIA analyst who worked in Iraq for three tours and later been a top Pentagon official during the Obama years.
Slotkin knew Milley well. They had a bond of trust, of familiarity.
“Mark, you need to get the Guard down here,” she said sharply. She was agitated and alert. Baghdad mode. The Capitol was under siege, and she and her congressional colleagues were hiding in their offices.
“I know it,” Milley said. “We’re working on it.”
“I know I was yelling at you for what happened in June,” Slotkin said, referring to the Lafayette Square episode. “But now, we need you and we need you here now. And we need you here with the military. And get everything you can down here right now.”
“Elissa, I get it.”
“I know how hypocritical this sounds,” she said. She had decried the military’s involvement with the Floyd protests in Lafayette Square.
“You’re right,” Milley said. “It does a little bit. But we’ll be there.”
“You’re in a ridiculous spot,” she said.
“Congresswoman, we’re going to get there with as much stuff as we can as fast as we can.”
“Is it true Trump said no?” Slotkin asked. Had the president refused to send in the National Guard? That possibility was flying around Capitol Hill.
“I purposely did not go to Trump,” Milley told her. “I went to Pence. I informed Pence we were sending the Guard. Pence welcomed that.”
“It was smart you didn’t involve Trump,” Slotkin said. “Good on you for not involving Trump.”
“I don’t think Trump would necessarily say no,” Milley said.
“Why not?” Slotkin asked.
Milley explained that several days earlier, at an unrelated national security meeting, he had told Trump they were going to be sending some Guard to support the Capitol Police and Washington, D.C., police on January 6. And Trump had been supportive saying, “Good, good, do what you need to do.”
But Milley told Slotkin, “I think he wanted this. I think that he likes this. I think that he wants that chaos. He wants his supporters to be fighting to the bitter end.”
Milley then quickly qualified that judgment by adding, “I don’t know.”
Biden shelved plans to talk about the economy that day and put together a short speech. He took the stage at his transition site in Wilmington at 4:05 p.m. Huge blue screens were behind him, digitally projecting “Office of the President Elect” in white letters. His voice was hushed, almost a whisper, as he began to speak.
“At this hour, our democracy is under unprecedented assault,” he said, “unlike anything we’ve seen in modern times. An assault on the citadel of liberty, the Capitol itself.
“This is not dissent. It’s disorder.” His voice began to rise, angry. “It’s chaos. It borders on sedition.”
Biden pleaded with Trump to “go on national television now” and “fulfill his oath and defend the Constitution and demand an end to this siege.”
After he finished, he turned and walked toward the backstage area, away from the bright lights shining on his lectern. A reporter shouted, “Are you concerned about your inauguration, sir?” Another reporter yelled out, “Have you spoken to McConnell today?”
Standing in the shadows near the back, Biden turned and raised his right hand to make a point. His face was barely visible on screen. His voice was loud.
“I am not concerned about my safety, security, or the inauguration,” he said. “The American people are going to stand up. Now.” He paused.
“Enough is enough is enough!” Biden said, seeming to punch the air, his binder in hand. He turned around again, dipped his head, and left the room.