In a hearing on Thursday, the House select committee looking into the Capitol attack disclosed that members of Vice President Mike Pence’s Secret Service detail began to fear for their lives during the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and said farewell to their families.
Service at the capitol does not sound good right now, according to a 2:24 p.m. entry in a chat log from National Security staff monitoring developments at the Capitol, according to a witness who testified anonymously but was identified as a “national security professional” working at the White House the day of the attack.
“The members of the VP detail at this time were starting to fear for their own lives,” the unidentified witness told the committee in an interview played during the proceeding, adding there was a lot of yelling and “very personal calls” being made over the radio traffic.
“It was disturbing. I don’t like talking about it,” the security professional continued, “but there were calls to say goodbye to family members and so forth. It was getting – for whatever the reason was on the ground, the VP detail thought that this was about to get very ugly.”
The witness claimed that although Pence’s agents continued to provide “reassurances” inside the Capitol, the situation became increasingly chaotic as a crowd of former President Donald Trump’s supporters broke into the structure.
“They were just yelling,” the security professional said.
During the committee’s eighth public hearing on Thursday, which focused on the 187 minutes between when the former president finished his speech at the Ellipse and when he posted a tweet at 4:17 p.m. ordering rioters to leave the Capitol, the chat log from staff on Trump’s National Security Council was made public.
The log, which documented Capitol happenings in real-time, records a 2:13 p.m. event. “kicking in windows at the capital’s beginning. 2 windows have been kicked in,” and then “capitol is breached.”
A record reveals this after three minutes “VP being pulled,” and at 2:18 pm, it says: “determination in the next 2-3 mins or they may not be allowed to move. VP may be stranded in the Capitol.”
The journal records that “explosions on the rotunda stairs” were heard at 2:24 p.m. after “the Second Floor and Senate Door had now been broken” at 2:20 p.m. Service at the Capitol does not sound good at the moment, according to the last item in the committee’s record, which is also from 2:24 p.m.
The national security expert talked about how the final post described what the Secret Service was going through at the Capitol, saying that officers were “running out of alternatives and they’re growing scared.”
“It sounds like that we came very close to either Service having to use lethal options or worse. At that point, I don’t know. Is the VP compromised?” the witness said. “Is the detail – like, I don’t know. Like, we didn’t have visibility, but it doesn’t – if they’re screaming and saying things, like, say good-bye to the family, like the floor needs to know this is going to a whole another level soon.”
During previous hearings, the select committee went into detail about how Trump tried to persuade Pence to unilaterally annul the election results during the joint session of Congress that met on January 6. He did this by either rejecting state electoral votes or sending those votes back to the state legislatures to be replaced with new slates of electors.
The former president called his vice president a “wimp” in a furious phone call on the morning of January 6 after Pence declined to take such action, according to evidence, and later claimed in a tweet that he lacked “courage.”
In a taped statement to the committee, Sarah Matthews, a former White House deputy press secretary who quit following the attack, claimed that the tweet did nothing but incite the mob. She also gave a live testimony on Thursday on her time in the White House during the attack on the Capitol.
Following the president’s tweet, the throng inside the Capitol erupted and outnumbered law police, causing the Secret Service to relocate Pence from his ceremonial Senate office to a safe area within the Capitol complex as cries of “hang Mike Pence” rang out.
Photos taken by the panel and shown previously at a hearing showed Pence talking on the phone while in the guarded area and then viewing a taped video in which Trump tells the mob to go.
“Despite knowing the Capitol had been breached and the mob was in the building, President Trump called Mike Pence a coward and placed all the blame on him for not stopping the certification,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois, said Thursday of Trump’s tweet. “He put a target on his own vice president’s back.”