Lawmakers Were Feet and Seconds Away From Confrontation With the Mob in the Capitol
10 min read 
With rioters ransacking the Capitol, Rep. Jim Himes hunkered in the visitors’ gallery overlooking the House chamber. He watched colleagues below rush to exit the floor, heard the reverberation of a single shot from somewhere close and waited his turn to evacuate.
A trio of Capitol Police officers with guns drawn then led Mr. Himes and about two dozen colleagues—the last lawmakers in the chamber—across the long gallery, maneuvering through narrow rows of seats and over brass handrails. The officers were agitated and shouting at one another, he said, because they didn’t know which of the doors leading to the hallway to pick.
“They had no idea which door didn’t have a mob behind it,” he said.
The mob’s rampage last Wednesday was a rare and deadly assault by American citizens on the halls of Congress, leaving two killed, three others dead and widespread damage. The toll could have been much worse.
In the hour after they breached the building, the rioters—some carrying nooses, bats, pipes, chemical irritants and zip ties that can be used to handcuff people—were feet or seconds away from the lawmakers they sought to confront, hoping to stop them from ratifying the election of Democrat
and keep President Trump in power.
The mob flooded into ornate, high-ceilinged halls normally populated by tourists. Some headed down a labyrinth of narrow corridors and marble staircases in the 228-year-old building. Congressional staff members and some lawmakers hid under tables in offices barricaded with furniture as rioters tried to break in.
Congressional staffers barricaded themselves after rioters stormed inside the Capitol.
Photo:
olivier douliery/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Three Capitol Police officers have since been suspended—one seen taking selfies with rioters and another accused of directing them—and as many as 17 are under investigation.
Still, near entrances to both chambers, some outnumbered Capitol Police officers tried to slow down the mob to buy vital minutes as lawmakers inside fled.
On the Senate side, a lone officer ran up a stairway pursued by rioters, according to video posted online by a HuffPost reporter. At the top of the stairs, along a short corridor, a main entrance to the Senate stood unguarded. The officer shoved the lead rioter in the chest, an apparent bid to get his attention, then led the crowd in another direction. Senate staff scrambled to seal the doors to protect the lawmakers and others inside.
“We were very close to actually having members of Congress killed,”
Rep. Adam Kinzinger,
an Illinois Republican, said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “Had that whole thing been breached there would have been people in really bad shape.”
Members of Congress were evacuated from the House chamber on Wednesday.
Photo:
Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg News
After the mob broke into the Capitol just before 2 p.m., they fanned out. Some yelled about tracking down lawmakers, chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” or “Where’s Nancy?” according to video footage. Speaker
(D., Calif.) was presiding over the House while Vice President Mike Pence was in the Senate.
About 2:15 p.m., Mrs. Pelosi handed the gavel to
Rep. Jim McGovern
(D., Mass.) so he could stand in as presiding officer after security personnel whisked her and other members of House leadership away. At the time, it felt like a minor disturbance, Mr. McGovern said. He noticed Mrs. Pelosi had left her cellphone and assumed that meant she would be right back.
Less than 20 minutes later, a member of Mrs. Pelosi’s staff told Mr. McGovern to adjourn the session. Capitol Police instructed him to tell the roughly 100 lawmakers, staff and press present to take out gas masks from under their chairs. Tear gas had been deployed in the Rotunda. Shouts echoed through the building. “Verify every door is locked!” someone yelled.
Mr. McGovern could hear banging on the doors. Still, he assumed only a few intruders had made it into the building and that the situation was under control. “Maybe it’s three or four people in the hallway making a lot of racket,” he recalled thinking.
Then Mr. McGovern, one of the last lawmakers to evacuate the House floor, stepped into the hallway of the Speaker’s Lobby, a narrow passage with several doors to the floor of the House.
Down the corridor, roughly 10 yards away, more than a dozen rioters on the other side of a set of wooden and glass doors hammered on the glass and screamed. A pile of overturned furniture reinforced the doors from the inside and, Mr. McGovern said, several police officers in the lobby had their guns drawn.
On the other side of the doors, a line of three officers without helmets, shields or other protective equipment faced the mob, video footage from the scene has shown. A rioter in a bomber hat punched on the window panes in the door between the shoulders of the officers, who didn’t physically engage with the growing crowd.
“I looked at these people pounding on the glass with their bare fists, cracking it, even with their bare hands,” Mr. McGovern said. “I just saw such hate in their eyes as I’m looking at them and they’re looking at me.”
Mr. McGovern and about a dozen others escaped out another door. Before he did, he said somebody in the House Sergeant at Arms office, which oversees security, assured him in person that those remaining in the gallery—the last in the House chamber—would be taken care of. “They said everybody’s being evacuated, there’s a plan,” Mr. McGovern said.
Capitol Police stood guard as protesters tried to break through a door into the House chamber.
Photo:
J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
If so, it wasn’t obvious to those with Mr. Himes, a Democrat from Connecticut, in the gallery. The group, including some reporters, had been watching the proceedings from above because House leaders had limited the number of lawmakers on the floor due to the threat of the coronavirus.
Now, they were crouching down in between the seats. A group of rioters tried to ram through an entrance into the House floor below. Meanwhile, the crowd at the doorway to the Speaker’s Lobby banged on the glass and urged the three officers to step aside, according to multiple videos from the scene.
“We backed you guys in the summer,” shouted a man in a red Trump cap, an apparent reference to protests set off by the killing of
George Floyd
in Minneapolis police custody last May. “When the whole country hated you, we had your back.”
As the face-off continued, a four-person unit of police officers in tactical gear, armed with rifles and wearing helmets, slowly climbed the stairs. As they appeared behind the rioters, at around 2:43 p.m., one of the officers standing in front of the barricaded door said to his colleagues, “They’re ready to roll.” The three officers moved aside.
For the next 30 seconds or so, the crowd banged on the door and smashed the glass with a helmet and stick, according to video footage. Seconds later, one in the mob—an Air Force veteran from California named Ashli Babbitt—attempted to jump through the shattered glass and was shot by a Capitol Police officer from inside the doorway, according to the footage.
Capitol Police officers near the site where Ashli Babbitt was shot as she and other rioters attempted to breach a barricaded door into the Speaker’s Lobby.
Photo:
Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg News
House Chamber in the U.S. Capitol
Speaker’s Lobby: Rep. James McGovern and House staff exit the chamber into the Speaker’s Lobby as rioters smash glass and try to break through the doorway.
House Gallery: Lawmakers, including Rep. Jim Himes and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, and reporters took shelter in the House gallery, which overlooks the chamber floor.
Chamber Door: Rioters tried to break into the House floor through a barricaded doorway encircled by security officers.
Speaker’s
Lobby
(below
gallery)
Speaker’s Lobby Door: A Capitol Police officer shot Ashli Babbitt as she and other rioters attempted to breach a barricaded door into the Speaker’s Lobby.
Gallery Hallway: Rep. Jim Himes and other lawmakers are led into a Third Floor hallway as Capitol Police, with guns drawn, hold rioters on the floor.
Speaker’s Lobby: Rep. James McGovern and House staff exit the chamber into the Speaker’s Lobby as rioters smash glass and try to break through the doorway.
House Gallery: Lawmakers, including Rep. Jim Himes and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, and reporters took shelter in the House gallery, which overlooks the chamber floor.
Chamber Door: Rioters tried to break into the House floor through a barricaded doorway encircled by security officers.
Speaker’s
Lobby
(below
gallery)
Speaker’s Lobby Door: A Capitol Police officer shot Ashli Babbitt as she and other rioters attempted to breach a barricaded door into the Speaker’s Lobby.
Gallery Hallway: Rep. Jim Himes and other lawmakers are led into a Third Floor hallway as Capitol Police, with guns drawn, hold rioters on the floor.
Speaker’s Lobby: Rep. James McGovern and House staff exit the chamber into the Speaker’s Lobby as rioters smash glass and try to break through the doorway.
House Gallery: Lawmakers, including Rep. Jim Himes and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, and reporters took shelter in the House gallery, which overlooks the chamber floor.
Speaker’s
Lobby
(below
gallery)
Chamber Door: Rioters tried to break into the House floor through a barricaded doorway encircled by security officers.
Speaker’s Lobby Door: A Capitol Police officer shot Ashli Babbitt as she and other rioters attempted to breach a barricaded door into the Speaker’s Lobby.
Gallery Hallway: Rep. Jim Himes and other lawmakers are led into a Third Floor hallway as Capitol Police, with guns drawn, hold rioters on the floor.
Speaker’s
Lobby
(below
gallery)
Speaker’s Lobby: Rep. James McGovern and House staff exit the chamber into the Speaker’s Lobby as rioters smash glass and try to break through the doorway.
House Gallery: Lawmakers, including Rep. Jim Himes and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, and reporters took shelter in the House gallery, which overlooks the chamber floor.
Chamber Door: Rioters tried to break into the House floor through a barricaded doorway encircled by security officers.
Speaker’s Lobby Door: A Capitol Police officer shot Ashli Babbitt as she and other rioters attempted to breach a barricaded door into the Speaker’s Lobby.
Gallery Hallway: Rep. Jim Himes and other lawmakers are led into a Third Floor hallway as Capitol Police, with guns drawn, hold rioters on the floor.
From their perch one floor up, Mr. Himes and his colleagues heard the gunshot that killed Ms. Babbitt, though it was muffled. He said at first he couldn’t tell if it was gunfire or the firing of a tear-gas round.
Rep. Jackie Speier (D., Calif.)—who in 1978 was shot investigating a cult whose members’ mass suicide became known as the Jonestown massacre—said she heard the gunshot as she lay with her cheek on the cold marble floor, taking shelter behind seats in the gallery’s second row.
“There was almost a sense of resignation that overcame me because I was crouched down not on the first level, where there was a wall of sorts, but on the second level where the only thing between me and a gunman was the back of a chair, so some fabric and some wood. And I realized that this could in fact be the end,” Ms. Speier said in remarks Monday to the Commonwealth Club of California.
When officers arrived, they escorted the group to the far end of the gallery. Had they picked the wrong door to exit, Mr. Himes said, “it was possible in that moment that they might find a mob, and then there’s a possibility that somebody gets shot, or a member gets thrown off the gallery.”
Instead they found rioters face down on the ground, subdued by the police.
Capitol Police held protesters at gunpoint in the west stairway hall, near the House chamber.
Photo:
Andrew Harnik/Associated Press
Dozens of lawmakers and staff already had fled the House chamber, joined by earlier groups fleeing from the visitors’ and press galleries. That created a bottleneck as they crowded into a single stone stairwell, said
Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney
(D., N.Y.).
Mr. Maloney estimates that the House was evacuated 30 to 60 seconds before it would have been overrun. “Had that one exit not been open,” he said, “we would have been trapped on the House floor.”
Moving down the stone stairway, with the sound of rioters growing louder, staffers and police urged the lawmakers, some in their 70s, to move faster. Some grabbed wooden posts holding hand sanitizer dispensers to defend themselves if they encountered the mob. Mr. Maloney urged Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.), whose face was well-known from his role as lead prosecutor in Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial last year, to move to the head of the line to lessen the chance of being spotted. Mr. Schiff declined to do so.
From the breach of the building, an hour or so passed before all the lawmakers in both chambers had been evacuated to secure locations. Police backed by reinforcements took another hour to push the intruders from the building, though they continued to face off with rioters until dusk.
Mr. Himes said he was shocked by the security failure.
“I’ve been hanging around this building for 12 years,” said Mr. Himes, who was first elected in 2008, “and I’ve always assumed there’s a big red button that gets pushed, and everything is sealed and nobody gets anywhere. And that turns out not to be true.”
Write to Ted Mann at ted.mann@wsj.com, Dustin Volz at dustin.volz@wsj.com, Lindsay Wise at lindsay.wise@wsj.com and Chad Day at Chad.Day@wsj.com
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