Episode 6: Hugs and Kisses

sorting out life stuff. I had spilled wine on a sweater during Christmas, even thought it was about time to take care of that, and that's why during my lunch break, I just went down to do laundry. I enter the laundry room with a thousand other things on my mind. And then as I exit the laundry room, there's a back gate that I put my key in the gate. It's an old building, so I have to lean against it and turn that key to make sure that the law engages. And as I turn away, something catches my eye.

It's a small device. It looks metallic, and I'm looking at this and I'm seeing that there's some plastic bits too. It's a pipe. It looks like six inches long, with caps on both ends, with red and black wires all tangled and clipped to the ends, and to what looks like a kitchen timer. What Carlin is describing is almost a cartoonish picture of a bomb. She rushes out to the street and brings back a guard. And I was afraid that maybe I was mistaken right, that this was

a joke, and I'm going to look silly. And the guard he leans over and he takes a look at the device, and he recoils immediately and says, holy sh it, it's a bomb. Minutes later, the area is swarming with police officers. The block is being cleared, Pedestrians are being moved away. Many of the officers making the area safe are from the Capitol Police, the police department charged with

keeping the US capital safe. They're being called out to the bomb threat because Carlin's apartment and laundry room are next to the r n C, or Republican National Committee, which is just half a mile from the capital. As officers descend on the RNC to clear the area in case of a possible blast, the depleted forces on the front line of the riot begin to falter. The line

is too thin. It just won't hold. The device that Carlin Younger found near her apartment was disarmed before it could wreak havoc on her apartment bill as was a second device found near the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee the r n C s opposite number. The authorities haven't arrested anyone for planning the bombs. What they do know is the devices distracted an appreciable amount of police

attention from the Capitol Building at a crucial time. A time in the Capitol Police where all that stood between democracy and disaster. This episode, I want to understand what happened at the Capitol through the eyes of the officers tasked with protecting it. They've borne the trauma of the big Lie, not only in the violence they experienced on January six itself, but also and how they've been treated afterwards.

For all the cop worship the right wing media ecosystem spouts every time there's a conversation about police brutality, after the insurrection, the rights tune changed dramatically. We've followed how the Stop the Steel narrative made its insidious way into the political mainstream. Now its proponents have closed ranks to discredit the officers who have spoken out about their experiences that day. Then there's the question of the Capitol's top grass.

Many officers suffered and sacrificed on the ground that day, but the Capitol Police has a budget of almost half a billion dollars to protect just two square miles. How could their initial efforts to contain the mob have failed so bad. From the teams at Coop's own media, I Heart Radio and novel, This is The Assault on America Episode six, Hugs and Kisses have reported for duty at the Capitol as usual, early on the morn of January six.

This is Officer Harry Dunn speaking at a congressional investigation into the Capital riot. Officer Done is a towering figure six ft seven and broad shoulder, the sort of guy you might want on your side and a riot, but his strength couldn't protect him from the mob headed his way on January six, and as his testimony makes clear,

he had no idea what was coming. We understood that the vote to certified President Biden's election will be taking place that day and protests might occur outside the Capitol, but we expected any demonstrations to be peaceful expressions of first amended freedoms, just like the scores of demonstrations we had observed for many years. When Donald Trump's election win was certified in two thousand seventeen, three protesters were arrested

after a peaceful demonstration, but nothing more than that. Officer Don's thirteen years of experience led him to expect a long day, but a routine one, a couple of rest, name calling, you know, unfriendly people, but nowhere near the level of violence or even close to it like that we experienced. He took up his position on the east front of the Capitol, on the steps up to the Senate Chamber. As the morning progressed, I did not see

or hear anything that gave me calls for alarm. But around ten fifty six am, I received a text message from a friend forwarding a screenshot of what appeared to be the potential plan of action. The screenshot board the caption January six rally point Lincoln Park and said the objective was the Capitol for officers done. This was the first warning sign that something was wrong. It was just

one text message, but it was unusually precise. It's said, amongst other things, that Trump has given us marching orders and to keep your guns hidden. It urged people to bring your trauma kits and gas masks to link up early in the day in six to twelve man teams. It indicated there would be time to arm up. Officer Dunne says that he had not been informed of any

such planning by his superiors in the Capitol Police. He didn't know, for instance, that the FBI had circulated a memo on the fifth of January warning of possible violence planned for that day. He didn't know that the FBI Washington Field office had received a tip off from a local historian who runs a website dedicated to the network

of tunnels underneath the Capitol. The website had been flooded with visitors from across the country in recent weeks, most of them reaching it from anonymous message boards and forums, the kind of places filled with far right hate and conspiracy theories. All officers done new, he says, was what his phone was telling him. Whenever see the text messages,

it made the hairs on my neck rise. Since our chain of command had not told us to prepare for any of these levels of violence, I was just like, okay, whatever they've been here. But as the day wore on officer dones, concerns only grew. From his vantage point on the east front, he could see a crowd growing in size and is more people flooded towards the Capitol. The voices crackling through on his radio confirmed what his eyes were telling him were not fifty hill on the west.

The situation was getting out of control. All now warned what this well perfect play riots, declaring it a riot, give that we're gonna have the red doctor at least this alf we go what we have? Oh hard, hold hard, It ain't back back up back in the agree and

all need to be good. You're gonna change you n now it was obvious that there was a direct threat to the Capitol, and quickly put on a steel chest plate which weighs proximately twenty pounds, and carrying my M four rifles, sprinting around the north side of the Capitol to the west terrace and the railing of the inaugural stage, where I had a broad view of what was going on. I was stunned by what I saw and what seemed

like a sea of people. Capitol police officers in Metropolitan Police Officers mp D were engaged in desperate hand to hand fighting with rioters across the West Lawn. I witnessed the rioters using all kinds of weapons against officers, including flagpoles, metal bike racks that they had torn apart, and various kind of projectiles. Officers were being bloodied in the fighting, Many were screaming, and many were blinded and coughing from

chemical irritants being spread in their faces. The chemical irritants are probably why the voices on the radio call for DSL, which we think is the team that handles chemical munitions. But the most distressing radio call, the one every Capitol police officer fears was still to come. I heard attention, all units has been breached. The capital has been reached. When the rioters enter the capital, the worst fears of

the police are realized. An angry mob, determined to find lawmakers from both parties is now loose in the building. The Capitol police are in an impossible position. The first kind of big ohst Ship moment was this voice that comes on on the loudspeaker. There's a security alert warning people to stay away from windows and doors from you know, I'm thinking, Oh, that's I've never heard that before. Igor Bobbic is a senior politics reporter for the Huffington's Post.

Like officer Harry Dunn, he had been expecting a routine day at work on January six. You know, nothing really goes wrong. Typically when members of Congress vote to certify presidential election results, It's been done for hundreds and hundreds of years. When igors not roaming the building trying to get quotes from lawmakers, he's usually typing out stories in a small press office above the Senate Chamber. That's where he was on January six when he began to realize

that this might not be a typical vote certification. I remember I was up above the Senate Chamber looking down through these little little windows to the ground of the Capitol right outside, and I remember seeing Trump supporters waving flags way way, way too close to the building. Was very unusual. They were looking up at me, they saw me, and I was looking down at them and they were waving to me, and I was like, wow, they're so close.

They can even see me, you know. I was taking photos of them, they were taking photos of me, and it was like, this is strange. Are It was bizarre? But Igor still had no notion of how serious the situation was becoming. These warnings are going off progressively more concerning, But I'm still watching the debate going on in the Senate. So they have counterproposed just ignoring the lingering questions. We

need to do something. The final warning, the one that hits home for Igor, comes from the Senate chamber itself, and I will stand in recess until the call of the chair who fosters thank you. So as soon as I heard those words, I had gotten up and I started running down these these steps to figure out what the hell is going on, because there's only a couple of reasons why they would do this. One of those reasons, of course, is that intruders are now inside the building.

As Igor runs down the stairs to find out what's happening, he hears angry voices echoing up the marble stairwell. He starts filming on his phone as he runs, and immediately stumbles into a now famous scene. As I round the corner and counter a loane black police officer trying to hold back a mob of fifteen or twenty or so people who have gotten into the building. You might remember this image a black officer standing before a group of angry capital invaders who looked like they might rush him

at any moment. His left arm is outstretched and he's pointing at the rioters, signaling for them to turn around and leave. This loan officer is an Army veteran named Eugene Goodman. You see him pick up a baton that he had dropped and go back and try to kind of wave it at them to get him to stay back, and they're clearly refusing to listen. The rioters are shouting at Officer Goodman, getting in his face, pressuring him to let them passed. There's a lead rioter there in the

video that you can see. He's got a beanie and a beard who kind of takes charge and starts menacing this officer and was, you know, shaking his head. No way, I'm not leaving like you. You better do something to stop me. That's going to be burned in my head because the way he was doing this. This man in the beanie, who was also wearing a black quan on shirt over his gray hoodie, is by far the most aggressive in the crowd. We now know that he's an

Iowa called Douglas Austin Jensen. We also know curiously that Mr Jensen has no idea which building he's currently storming. Here's a clip that Jensen filmed of himself earlier in the day. He's standing outside the Capitol Building with his hand pressed against the wall. This is me such the fucking White House. This is why we're here. Douglas Jensen's videos for January six contain multiple references to the White House. So you know, as you can't see the videos, I'll

just be absolutely clear. He's not at the White House. He's at the Capitol. That's what would go. Actually it isn't, but I digress. Faced with this mob, at least one of whom is in the wrong building, Officer Goodman realizes that he can't hold them back alone. You sort of see Officer Goodman retreating up the back of the steps, speaking into his radio on his shoulder. You know, he's screaming, second floor, second floor, we have a breach. I'm retreating

back with him. As we go back up the steps to the second floor, where you see Goodman kind of look left and make sure that the nearest entrance to the Senate Chamber is guarded or not, and then you see him pull away the mob in the opposite direction towards the backup m This is a crucial moment. At the top of the stairs, with a column of hyped up rioters bearing down on him, Officer Goodman has to make a split second decision. Does he go right or left?

In the video you see his head rapidly turned to the left and looked down the corridor. The door to the Senate Chamber appears to be unguarded, so he acts. Officer Goodman pushes Douglas Jensen, the confused, aggressive rioter, now right in Goodman's face. Jensen, pushed, seems disoriented for just a second. Goodman retreats to the right, away from the chamber.

Jensen seems to recover and follows Goodman. Miraculously. The column of rioters behind do the same, following Jensen and the retreating Officer Goodman moving away from the senators who are mere meters away. This critical fast thinking by him might have been the difference between them getting into the Senate chamber itself because of that. At that moment, I don't believe it was secured the door with you know, all

this senitors and all the other staff inside. If the rioters had broken into the Senate chamber at that point, whilst many of their most hated targets were still inside. It's difficult to believe that the meeting would have been a peaceful one. Thankfully, Officer Goodman appears to have bought just enough time for the safe evacuation of the Senate. He's a remarkable guy. All he's wanted to do ever since was go back to work. You know, he's keep your head down kind of guy who really shuns away

from the limelight. He's still there every day right now. I running into him in the halls and we, you know, we kind of share this this moment, this crazy moment together, and every time I see him and every time he sees me were I'm sure it runs through his mind as well. When watching the video of Eugene Goodman, it's hard not to be struck by the image of a white mob chasing a black man through the halls of

the nation's capital. And the truth is that the day was just littered with racist symbols, from Confederate flags to Peppy the Frog images to just straight up newses. There was even a guy in a Camp Auschwitz hoodie, and as you'd expect, the police on the front lines bore the brunt of the crowds over racism. Officer Harry Dunn from earlier in the episode was subjected to a torrent of racial abuse. His story is not an easy listen. It begins in the heart of the capital. After Officer

Done has been fighting on the front line. I was physically exhausted and it was hard to breathe and to see because of all the chemical spray in the air. More and more insurrectionists were pouring into the area by the Speaker's lobby near the road Sundam and some wearing Maga hats and shirts that said Trump. I told him 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 to steal. Joe Biden is not the president.

Nobody voted for Joe Biden. Officer Donne decided to reply to the rioters directly. I responded, well, I voted for Joe Biden. Does my vote not count? Am I nobody? Officer Donn's response was met with slurs and abuse from the crowd. One woman in a pink Maga shirt yelled, do you hear that? Guys? This nigger voted for Joe Biden. Then the crowd, perhaps around twenty people joined in screaming, boom, fucking nigger. No one had ever ever called me a nigger.

While wearing the uniform of a Capitol Police officer. Officer Donne spent hours fighting rioters on January six. He choked through chemical irritants and wiped blood from his knuckles, and continued to defend the capital. But when the violence was finally over, it was the racial abuse that stayed with him. Once the building was cleared, I went to the rotunda to recover with other officers and share our experiences from

what happened that afternoon. I sat down on the bench in the rotunda with a friend of mine who was also a black Capitol Police officer, and told him about the racial slurs I endured. I became very emotional and began yelling, how the blank could something like this happen? Is this America? I began sobbing. Officers came over to console me. In the days following the siege, Officer Done spoke to more friends of his other officers who served

on January six about their experiences. He discovered that many of them had their own stories of racial abuse to share. One officer told me he had never and then his his entire forty years of life been called a nigger to his face, and that streak ended on January six. Another, a black officer, later told me he had been confronted by insurrections in the capitol who told him puts her gun down, and we'll show you what kind of nigger you really are. I told you this is not easy listening,

and it's not easy to tell either. Officers like Harry Dunn have paid a price for speaking out about what they went through during the riot. On July, Officer Dunn was one of four officers who stepped onto the global stage to testify about the insurrection. They were speaking before the House Select Committee charged with investigating the riot. Also testifying that day was Sergeant Acalino Ganell. The writers called me trader, a disgrace and shouted that I an army veteran.

A police officer along with him was Officer Daniel Hodges. One man tried and failed to build a rapport with me, shouting are you my brother? Another takes a different tax, shouting you will die on your knees, and the fourth officer who testified was Officer Michael Phenone, a plain clothes officer who's self deployed to help defend the Capital. I was electrocuted again and again and again with a taser. I'm sure I was screaming, but I don't think I

could even hear my own voice. It's no small feed for these men to stick their head above the parapet and give their testimony on live television. For one thing, they could be certain that the right wing media machine would shoot them out, and indeed it did. And for best performance in an action role, the winner is Michael Phenone. Here's Laura Ingram on Rupert Murdoch's Fox News handing out acting awards to the officers for their testimony before the

Senate hearing. The award for blatant use of partisan politics when facts fail, the angle award goes to Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn. This type of coverage is part of a wider campaign to belittle those who speak out and underplay the violence of the riot. Donald Trump himself referred to the crowd as being full of love, hugs and kisses,

kissing the guard. Some politicians made the point that rioters stayed within the rope lines and the rotenday between the stanchions and ropes taking videos and pictures, or that the siege was no different from any other sight seeing trip. You would actually think it was a normal tourist visit. Claims like this are ludicrous, but they have consequences. Here's a voicemail that officer Michael Finnone received on his personal cell while he was literally in the act of giving

his testimony. You're so fully hit your little bagge bucker, You're alive. Fuck why would they would have killed all you gum bag. It might be tempting to write the caller office mentally unwell, but the sad fact is that everything he said was perfectly sensible from the standpoint of someone who regularly consumes even mainstream right wing media today. The rhetoric of popular figures with massive platforms was almost certainly a major factor in driving him to make this call.

Don't the election from Trump and you know that you've come back combe it hit at you more. Faced with messages like this from the public and little support from the Republican lawmakers whose lives they protect, some Capital police officers feel betrayed by the political class. Sergeant Aquilino Gannell immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic when he was twelve. He enlisted in the U. S Military at the age of twenty and deployed to Iraq in

two thousand three. Sergeant Gannell had a stark message for Republican lawmakers attempting to discredit him and his fellow officers. Why would I risk my life for them when they don't even care. They don't care what happened to the public. They don't care what happened to the officers, or they care is their job their position. They don't have the courage to put their job on the line. That's not putting the country first. We are willing to risk our

life police, make it worth it. The election results were officially certified by Vice President Mike Pence at three forty two am on January seven, after a brutal punishing day. Democracy was still technically intact, but this victory came at a significant cost. Around a hundred and forty officers have reported injuries from January six, and while the psychological toll can only be guessed at, we do know that four officers who defended the capital have since taken their own lives.

We've spent a lot of this series analyzing the forces that drove the rioters to the Capital. Obviously these stopped the steel campaign and its enablers are where the final buck stops when it comes to people who endangered the lives of Capital police officers. But that's not the own factor that made January six such a disaster. Once the mob reached the Capitol walls, it is staggering how quickly they were able to breach the defenses of the US

government's epicenter. How did the capital security strategy fail so badly? I had the television on. I was sitting in Chicago watching it with my wife on January six. Terry Gainer was transfixed by the news footage, like the rest of us. But unlike the rest of US, Terry isn't just an armchair expert. I turned to my wife and I said, I don't see very many police officers on the East Front. He knows more than a little about the decisions that

go into insurrection. Proving the US Capital January six from a policing point of view, was the joint responsibility of the U S Capitol Police, which I once commanded the Sergeant of Arms office, which I once led, and the rescue in large part by the atropal and Police Department of Washington, where I served as the head of Operations. So as Terry watched the riot escalate, this attack felt personal.

When you saw them move up where the inauguration platform was being breached on the West Front was kind of a oh my god moment. I felt sick to my stomach that this was going to happen, because again, I spent twelve years of my life They're trying to prevent this type of thing, and it was heart crushing. A raging fist fight between rioters and officers and the Capitol building itself has got to be close to the worst

day possible for the Capitol Police's top brass. Days after January six, the three highest ranking officials in the Capital security team all resigned, the chief of the Capitol Police and the Sergeants at Arms for the House and the Senate. Since then, a task force of mostly ex law enforcement officials carried out a security review and recommended a slew of changes at the Capitol. Terry was on that panel.

He knows what resources are available at the Capitol, how decisions getting made there and what it feels like to be responsible for the officers who risked their lives. On January six, I asked him what went wrong? It clearly

was a breakdown and sharing intelligence. While the Capitol Police has an intelligence section, they're really relying on intelligence being gathered by the FBI and all the other numbered agencies in the United States, which is also getting information from across the globe, and there wasn't enough sharing of that, and so that was a breakdown, the same damn way we had a breakdown before nine eleven, where everybody missed some of the intelligence of what ben Laden was going

to do. Then there's the issue of numbers. The Official Security Review found that the Capitol Police were understaffed, insufficiently equipped, and inadequately trained to cope with the insurrection. It recommended hiring another eight hundred and fifty four officers immediately, bringing the total number up to three thousand or so. The Capitol Police officers had some two to two hundred and fifty officers every day out because of COVID or quarantining.

That meant for most of the year, officers were working twelve hours a day, six or seven days a week. And frankly they were exhausted, so what about backup? The National Guard have gotten a lot of heat for not providing reinforcements quickly enough. On January six, Stephens sunned, the then chief of the Capitol Police, says that he did try to call in the National Guard two or three

days before January six. It seems that the answer was no. The House Sergeant of Arms and Senate Sergeant of Arms and essence said the members didn't like the optics of that, and when the Guard were finally called in on January six itself, they didn't turn up until three hours later. Terry pins the blame for that one on a different

protest altogether. On June one, pr mastermind Donald Trump made headlines across the nation when he summoned the National Guard to blast a gathering of Black Lives Matter protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets in Lafayette Square. Then he held a photo shoot with a bible in the vacated square. The police were criticized heavily for their brutality that day. That left a negative taste in the military's mind, the

local police, the public. That just was terrible situation. And now you get into January six, and everybody's a little reticent about being drawn into the anigans of the president and the way he manages things. So the military, having been burned in June of that year, said Okay, we're gonna set up a special process for the National Guard. If you want to use the National Guard in the District of Columbia, you have to go through the Secretary

of the Army to the Secretary of Defense. In essence, more bureaucracy, And when the call came on January six, the response was delayed by bureaucratic fretting. Meanwhile, the capital was falling. What was very clear was the Army had set up a system that would protect itself from getting sucked in to the president's politics, but did not help when the Capitol Police and the members of Congress needed

to help. Most the senior officials in charge of security on January six paid for these failures with their jobs, but the fact that the capital was blindsided on January six wasn't us down to them. Terry believes that it's evidence of a longer term failure of preparedness. I actually end up blaming myself, is a former chief of the

Capitol Police. Or is the former Senate Sergeant of Arms or the people who followed me that We didn't think and say, what happens if five thousand people attacked the capital. What happens if a president of the United States who does nothing but really so hate and discontent for four years can get a group of citizens to get so involved with themselves today to act like mad dogs. We didn't train for that. I never thought that could happen.

Quite frankly, we never thought someone would get inside. Within a month of the Capital riott, five US Capitol Police officers were under investigation for their actions. On January six, X had been suspended with pay. Some of these were the men you saw in viral videos shaking hands with rioters. A number of those folks were surely people whose courage simply failed in the face of a vicious mob. Others

truly sympathized with that mob's aims. On October one, US Capitol Police officer Michael Riley was arrested for obstruction of justice. He had allegedly told a person criminally charged for their participation in the riot to delete incriminating Facebook posts. Officer Riley is alleged to have deleted posts of his own that we're incriminating as well. It's going to be some time before we know the full extent to which a number of Capitol Police officers betrayed their oaths and comrades

out of sympathy for an insurrection. But Officer Riley and the dozens of other police who participated directly in January six are evidence of a deep rot at the heart of American law enforcement. Terry Gaynor believes more training and equipment and manpower might have prevented the Capital riot. That may be true, but the Capitol Police budget in twenty twenty was more than four hundred and sixty million dollars.

That's nearly twice the budget of the Portland Police Force, Whoife personally watched dispersed crowds of thousands with much more violence than was ever used on the Capital rioters. I've no doubt that the Capitol Police could have dispersed that crowd with the equipment in their inventory, had the threat indicators before January sixth been taken seriously. When I think about this, my mind is inevitably drawn to the story

of the Antifa bus in Northern California. The gist of it is that viral Facebook rumors led police in the summer of twenty to believe that a bus full of violent Antifa rioters was heading down the coast from Oregon to burn Towns in rural California. Police officers and even air assets were dispersed to search for the bus for days.

These completely unfounded rumors were taken more seriously than tens of thousands of posts by Trump supporters openly declaring their intent to attack the US capital and overturn a democratic election. When a left wing activist from Florida, Daniel Baker, made several vague posts about trying to gather armed leftists together to defend against an insurrection after January six, he was arrested, charged, and sentenced to three and a half years in prison.

On November four, prosecutors did recommend to three and a half year sentence for insurrectionist Scott Fairlam, who punched a police officer and had two previous convictions for assault. This is seen as equivalent to the crimes of a leftist who assaulted no one and has no criminal record, but

who made a dumb post on the Internet. The bravery of officers Phinone Goodman and Gunnell cannot and will never make up for the fact that law enforcement across the United States has a systemic is that favors anti democratic far right militants. January six was the product of years of neglect and refusal by law enforcement to take right wing extremism seriously, and in the wake of the Capital riot, there is absolutely no evidence that this situation has changed.

In the next episode, we'll talk more about the cops at the Capitol on January six, who failed to quit themselves with the courage of Harry Dunn or Eugene Goodman. This is the story of the cops on the wrong side of the fight. Of course, I bought a ga and earlier this year, and I put cameras around my house. Join me for episode seven, The Lost Cause.