Today, Explained - The Capitol police speak

Episode Date: July 28, 2021

Capitol police officers testified on Tuesday in the building they defended on January 6. Seamus Hughes, a former congressional investigator, explains whether their testimony will make a difference. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos for them. The last time we talked about January 6th on the show, a lot of Democrats wanted a full-on 9-11 style commission. And a lot of Republicans did not. So what we ended up with was a House Select Committee.

It's got a bunch of Democrats and two Republicans who are already being thrown under the bus for cooperating across the island. On Tuesday, this select committee had its first public hearing. The police officers who put their lives on the line to defend American democracy finally had a chance to speak to their country. On today's show, we're going to listen to excerpts of what they had to say and figure out whether it'll change anything. You're unsurprisingly going to hear some strong language and descriptions of violence. Protect the children. Here we go. It's an honor to have four of these heroes sitting before us today. We welcome them for appearing here and more importantly for your heroism on January 6th.

Thank you very much, Chairman Thompson. Thank you to all my colleagues on this committee and thank you to each of the witnesses appearing before us today. Every American, I hope, will be able to hear your testimony today and will watch the videos. The videos show the unbelievable violence and the inexcusable and intolerable cruelty that you all faced, and people need to know the truth.

Thank you, Representative Cheney. I will now introduce our witnesses. We're joined today by Sergeant Aquilino Goneo of the United States Capitol Police. We're also joined by Officer Michael Fanone of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C. Officer Daniel Hodges is a member of the Civil Disturbance Unit 42 in the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, where his responsibilities include riot response. U.S. Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn

is a 13-year veteran of the United States Capitol Police and a member of its First Responder Unit. As the morning progressed and the crowd of protesters began to swell on the east side of the Capitol, many displaying Trump flags. The crowd was chanting slogans like Stop the Steal and We Want Trump.

But demonstration was still being conducted in a peaceful manner. Then I heard urgent radio calls for additional officers to respond to the west side. And an exclamation, a desperate voice that demonstrators on the west side had breached the fence. You could hear the tone of the individual officers' voices. They were scared. In Iraq we spent their armed violence because we were in a war zone but nothing my experience in the army or as a law enforcement officer prepare me for what

we confronted in January 6. The verbal assaults and disrespect we endured from the rioters were bad enough. I was falsely accused of betraying my oath, of choosing my paycheck, choosing my paycheck over my loyalty to the U.S. Constitution. Even as I defended the very democratic process that protected everyone in the hostile crowd. While I was at the Lower West Terrace at the Capitol working with my fellow officers to prevent the breach and restore order, the rioters called me a disgrace, and shouted that I, I, an army veteran and a police officer, should be executed. Eventually, it was my turn in the meat grinder that was the front line. The terrorists had a wall of shields that they had stolen from officers, as well as stolen batons,

what other armaments they brought. Even during this intense contest of wills, they tried to convert us to their cult. One man shouted, we all just want to make our voices heard, and I think you feel the same. I really think you feel the same. All while another man attempts to batter us with a stolen shield. Another man, like many others, didn't seem to appreciate that this wasn't a game. He fought his way across the lawn, up the steps, through the western terrace, all the OC and CS gas, and at the front line of this final threshold was asking us to hold on because he has asthma. The two sides were at a stalemate at a metal door frame that sat in the middle of the hallway. At the front line, I inserted myself so the frame was at my back in an effort to give myself something to brace against and provide additional strength when pushing forward.

Unfortunately, soon after I secured this position, the momentum shifted, and we lost the ground that got me there. More and more insurrectionists were pouring into the area by the Speaker's Lobby near the Rotunda, and some wearing MAGA hats and shirts that said, Trump 2020. I told them to just leave the Capitol, and in response they yelled, and some wearing MAGA hats and shirts that said Trump 2020. I told them to just leave the Capitol, and in response they yelled,

no man, this is our house. President Trump invited us here. We're here to stop the steal. Joe Biden is not the president. Nobody voted for Joe Biden. I'm a law enforcement officer, and I do my best to keep politics out of my job. But in this circumstance, I responded, well, I voted for Joe Biden.

Does my vote not count? Am I nobody? That prompted a torrent of racial epithets one woman in a pink maga shirt yelled you hear that guys this nigger voted for joe ever, ever called me a nigger while wearing the uniform of a Capitol Police officer. In the days following the attempted insurrection, other black officers shared with me their own stories of racial abuse on January 6th.

One officer told me he had never, and in his entire 40 years of life, been called a nigger to his face, and that streak ended on January 6th. Yet another black officer later told me he had been confronted by insurrectionists in the Capitol who told him, put your gun down and we'll show you what kind of nigger you really are.

To be candid, the rest of the afternoon is a blur. But I know I went throughout the Capitol to assist officers who needed aid and help expel more insurrectionists. I was trying to push guys off of me, create some space. All the while, I recognized the fact that there were individuals that were trying to grab a hold of my gun. I remember one of them distinctly lunging at me time and time again, trying to grab my gun.

And I heard people in the crowd yelling, get his gun, kill him with his own gun, and words to that effect. I thought about using my weapon. I believe that there were individuals in the crowd whose intentions were to kill me, and I came to that conclusion because of the fact that, separated from these other officers who were only trying to defend the Capitol, I no longer posed any type of threat, nor was I an impediment to them going inside of the building. But yet they tortured me.

They beat me. I was struck with a taser device at the base of my skull numerous times. And they continued to do so until I yelled out that I have kids. And I said that hoping to appeal to some of those individuals' humanity, and fortunately, a few did step in and intervene on my behalf. They did assist me back towards the mouth of the tunnel entrance, and other officers were then able to rescue me and pull me back inside. But at that point, I was unconscious.

And based off the body-worn camera footage, it's believed that I was unconscious for approximately four minutes. The sea of people was punctuated throughout by flags, mostly variations of American flags and Trump flags. There was Gadsden flags. It was clear the terrorists perceived themselves to be Christians. I saw the Christian flag directly to my front.

Another read, Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president. Another, Jesus is king. One flag read, don't give up the ship. Another had crossed rifles beneath the skull and blazoned with the pattern of the American flag. To my perpetual confusion, I saw the thin blue line flag, a symbol of support for law enforcement more than once, being carried by the terrorists as they ignored our commands and continued to assault us. The acrid sting of CS gas or tear gas and OC spray, which is mace, hung in the air as the terrorists threw our own CS gas canisters back at us and sprayed us with their own OC, either they bought themselves or stole from us. I knew I couldn't sustain much more damage and

remain upright. At best, I would collapse and be a liability to my colleagues. At worst, be dragged out into the crowd and lynched. Unable to move or otherwise signal the officers behind me that I needed to fall back, I did the only thing that I could do and screamed for help. Thankfully, my voice was heard over the cacophony of yells and the blaring alarm. The officer closest to me was able to extricate me from my position, and another helped me fall back to the building again. I had found some more water and decontaminated my face as best I could.

I don't know how long I waited in the halls for, but soon after, I got back on my feet and went to where the fight was again. Until reinforcements arrived, every able body made a difference. At the hospital, doctors told me that I had suffered a heart attack and I was later diagnosed with a concussion, a traumatic brain injury, and post-traumatic stress disorder. As my physical injuries gradually subsided and the adrenaline that had stayed with me for weeks waned, I've been left with the psychological trauma and the emotional anxiety of having survived such a horrific event. And my children continue to deal with the trauma of nearly losing their dad that day. What makes the struggle harder and more painful is to know so many of my fellow citizens,

including so many of the people I put my life at risk to defend, are downplaying or outright denying what happened. I feel like I went to hell and back to protect them and the people in this room. But too many are now telling me that hell doesn't exist or that hell actually wasn't that bad. The indifference shown to my colleagues on the committee. Thank you to our witnesses. I never expected a day to be quite as emotional for me as it has been.

I've talked to a number of you and gotten to know you. I think it's important to tell you right now, though. You guys may like individually feel a little broken. You guys all talk about the effects you have to deal with. And, you know, you talk about the impact of that day. But you guys won. You guys held. You know, democracies are not defined by our bad days. We're defined by how we come back from bad days. How we take accountability for that. And for all the overheated rhetoric surrounding this committee, our mission is very simple. It's to find the truth, and it's to ensure accountability.

In a minute, how this committee might fulfill its mission. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained,

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Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. We're back, and we wanted to know if and how this House Select Committee can accomplish anything. So we asked Seamus Hughes. He's the deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University now. But before that, he spent a lot of time in Congress. I started my career as an congressional investigator. I spent about five years

in the Senate Homeland Security Committee. So what did you take away from this hearing yesterday? So I was looking at why did they do that hearing first? Why do they have those four officers in their dress uniforms talking about the events of the day, the emotional testimony, the bigotry they had to deal with, that type of thing. And the story they were trying to tell is very clear, which is this was not just a simple protest. It was something greater than that. And they want to get to the root of that to kind of undercut this narrative that this is just a normal day, right? And in many ways, it actually sets you up for future hearings. You do these testimonies, you set the stage, and that allows you time to build up a narrative and investigations of, say, the FBI or Department of Defense or any number of departments and agencies.

So you have a little bit more lead time to do those document requests. Okay, so it sounds like you're talking about how this works in theory, but do the Democrats and Republicans on this committee actually know what they're going to do next? Well, in the start of the investigation, you never know what you're going to do next. You have a general framing, and we saw from the hearing yesterday that they clearly had structured it in a way that showed the videos to get to the questions. I think the Dems and the Republicans were both well-prepared to tell a story that there was violence that day. The next step is a framing. Are you going to focus on governmental failures that day? Were the Capitol Police properly prepared? Was the FBI taking a threat of domestic terrorism seriously enough? Did DOD provide National Guard troops in time,

right? Or do you look at, say, technology companies and their role for conspiracies and allowing for people to organize on their platforms? You don't really know where you want to go on that, but you know you have to pick something. Because if you go down one rabbit hole, you're going to miss the other three. And so you need to structure it in such a way that makes sense. It's interesting you say that because it sounds like on some level, that's what some Republicans who would like to disparage what happened on Capitol Hill yesterday, disparage this particular hearing, would like to see happen. Why were we ill-prepared for that day and how can we make sure that it will never happen again? But unfortunately,

Speaker Pelosi will only pick on people onto the committee that will ask the questions she wants asked. But some of the Capitol Police officers and DCPD who testified yesterday were explicitly asking that there be consequences, that blame be issued in some direction. Do you think that's the wrong way for this bipartisan committee to go? Well, ideally for a commission like this, you're not looking necessarily for individual blame. You're looking for systemic issues. Was there not enough intelligence shared with state and local officials? Did the National Guard not respond in time? There are legitimate concerns about protection, Capitol Police's ability to deal with a crowd of that magnitude. But the Senate Homeland Security Committee and

the Senate Rules Committee spent a good amount of time in their report looking at protection and the days leading up to the riot as it relates to Capitol Police. So in many ways, that issue has been largely looked at by the Senate. And so the other question is, what story do you want to tell now that you didn't know before you started the investigation? Yeah, that's something that kind of confuses me because it feels like there's already been a number of hearings on these issues that you're talking about. What went wrong? How do we fix it? There was even just yesterday something like $2 billion appropriated to at least partially beefing up security and funding Capitol Police. What do we still need to know?

Here's what we need to know now. If you look at the FBI director's testimony immediately following January 6th, he talks about this idea of a Norfolk memo. The Norfolk report, and I guess I just... There was an office in Virginia that alerted the FBI to what they saw online, and they gave that information to Capitol Police.

...was quickly passed to all of our partners in three different ways almost immediately. And that's all well and good, except for if that's the only thing that's out there, if the FBI only produced a Norfolk memo, then that's a systemic failure of analysis within the units. Because many people outside, including myself and other academics, had seen the system blinking red. And so if there's only a memo, then there's something wrong at the FBI. And this hearing might help clarify whether there's something wrong at the

FBI? Well, you're hoping that the hearing on Tuesday ratchets up the pressure on departments and agencies. Before that, the FBI, DOD, or other places may not necessarily be so willing to share information. But now after you see that those videos, those four officers talking about their experiences, it kind of forces the hand. One of the biggest barriers to accomplishing anything here will, of course, be the polarization in Congress? Tuesday's testimony was somehow divisive. Who served on this committee was divisive. Its aims are divisive. Is it possible to get anything done when even an attack on Congress can't come close to unifying Congress? Politics is always going to be the background noise in this type of investigation. It's true of any investigation that Congress does. So the only question becomes, can you keep your head down, grind it out,

and do just the facts, ma'am type of investigation? And that's going to be very difficult. They're on an uphill battle. And that's why this framing, the first hearing mattered so much, because it sets the stage for the future investigations. Do you think it moved the needle at all? And if not, is it even possible to move the needle in a Congress this polarized? Yeah, I'm not a big believer in the idea that we can change people's minds right now that are kind of stuck in their worldview.

But that doesn't have to necessarily be the only goal for an investigation like this. One of the goals should be a documenting history. And so I think the committee should ignore as best they can the politics of the day and look at the future and what kind of history are they going to be writing. Even though there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary, including hours and hours of videos and photographic coverage, there is a continuous shocking attempt to ignore or try to destroy the truth of what truly happened that day, and to whitewash the facts into something other than what they all mistakenly reveal. An attack on our democracy by a violent domestic

extremists and a stain on our history and our moral standing here home and abroad. on. Thank you.