VISUAL
INVESTIGATIONS
Inside the Capitol Riot: An Exclusive Video
Investigation
The Times analyzed thousands of videos from the Jan. 6
attack on the U.S. Capitol Building to understand how it happened — and why.
Here are some of the key findings.
Here are
some of the major revelations.
Multiple
Points of Attack
We
pinpointed at least eight locations where rioters breached and entered the
Capitol building — more than were previously known. The scenes revealed the
extent of the rioters’ disregard for the law as they surged violently around
the building’s perimeter and, eventually, inside.
The police
were outnumbered and responded differently at various breach points, allowing
rioters to break through doors using weapons like crowbars or, in some places,
to simply walk through as the police stepped aside.
The
multiple breaches also revealed the Capitol’s vulnerability. Despite locked
doors and, in certain places, thick windows, rioters without specialized
equipment were able to break in instantly in some places.
A Delay
Turns Deadly
In the
Senate, proceedings to certify the election results were halted almost
immediately when a building-wide lockdown was called after the first breach by
rioters. But we found that it took much longer for the House of Representatives
to do the same. This delay appeared to have contributed to a rioter’s death.
Instead of
evacuating, members of the House sheltered in place and resumed their work even
as rioters overran the building. Speaker Nancy Pelosi was rushed to safety, but
Representative Jim McGovern took her place presiding over the session. He told
us that Capitol building security staff had said it was safe to resume.
Eventually,
the House session was halted and members began streaming out of a rear door guided
by security personnel. Rioters had arrived at almost the same moment, just on
the other side of a hallway door with glass panels. They became incensed at the
sight of the evacuating lawmakers — a situation that could have been avoided if
the lawmakers had left before the mob arrived.
Ashli
Babbitt, a Trump supporter and follower of the QAnon conspiracy theory, tried
to climb through one of the door’s broken windows toward the lawmakers. A
plainclothes Capitol Police officer charged with protecting the House shot her
once through the upper chest. The wound was fatal.
The Makeup
of the Mob
One of the
biggest questions hanging over the aftermath of Jan. 6 was whether the riot was
planned and carried out by organized groups.
By
identifying and tracking key players throughout the day, we found that most —
even some at the forefront of the action — were ardent, but disorganized Trump
supporters swept up in the moment and acting individually.
The first
person to enter the Capitol building, for example, was a 43-year-old husband
and father from Kentucky named Michael Sparks. He has no known affiliation with
any organized groups. Ray Epps, an Arizona man seen in widely-circulated videos
telling Trump supporters on multiple occasions to go into the Capitol, also
seemed to have acted on his own.
Yet we also
found that the crowd did include members of groups who seemed eager for a
confrontation, like well-organized militias and far-right groups including the
Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. This proved to be a combustible mix. In the
videos we analyzed, they can be seen with baseball bats and body armor, and
coordinating with one another using radios. On several occasions, a calculated
move by a more organized actor — for example, a Proud Boy identifying a
weakness in the police line near a set of stairs — set off a surge by the mob.
Evidence
collected by the F.B.I. suggests that the Proud Boys in particular were aware
that they had inflamed the mob of ordinary people — and may have intended to do
so in advance. Just before the assault, one Proud Boy leader wrote on a group
chat on Telegram that he was hoping his men could incite the “normies” to “burn
that city to ash today” and “smash some pigs to dust.” Then, after the riot,
another Proud Boy leader wrote on Telegram: “This is NOT what I expected to
happen. All from us showing up and starting some chants and getting the normies
all riled up.”
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By
synchronizing footage from both sides of the Capitol building, we were able to
establish how crowds on each side interacted with one another.
We tracked
the movement of a group of rioters from the west side of the Capitol — which
faces the National Mall and absorbed most of the attendees arriving from Mr.
Trump’s speech — to the opposite eastern side.
The eastern
crowd had remained largely behind the barricades, but all that changed with the
arrival of rioters from around the side of the building. This more violent
group was the trigger that put the entire mob over the edge, spurring them to
push easily through a line of officers and surround the Capitol on every front.
Echoing the
President
Most of the
videos we analyzed were filmed by the rioters. By carefully listening to the
unfiltered chatter within the crowd, we found a clear feedback loop between
President Trump and his supporters.
As Mr.
Trump spoke near the White House, supporters who had already gathered at the
Capitol building hoping to disrupt the certification responded. Hearing his
message to “walk down to the Capitol,” they interpreted it as the president
sending reinforcements. “There’s about a million people on their way now,” we
heard a man in the crowd say, as Mr. Trump’s speech played from a loudspeaker.
The call
and response didn’t stop there. We found evidence of his influence once the
violence was well underway. In one moment, a woman with a megaphone urged rioters
to climb through a broken window by asking them to “stand up for our country
and Constitution” — echoing the language in an earlier tweet from Mr. Trump. In
another, as the police were pushing to clear the mob off the building, a rioter
screamed at officers: “I was invited here by the president.”
Taking Back
the Capitol
One
unanswered question when we began this investigation was how the police managed
to reclaim the Capitol building from the mob. We found that once officers
increased their numbers, armor and crowd-control weapons, clearing the rioters
happened quickly and effectively.
The footage
revealed that officers cleared several locations in less than an hour after
being reinforced by local Metropolitan Police, Virginia State Police and other
local and federal agencies that arrived with more manpower and authorization to
use more powerful crowd-control weapons.
It’s a
stark contrast to what we saw during the Black Lives Matter protests in the
summer of 2020, when federal officers were on scene from the start, already
equipped with riot gear and authorized to use higher levels of force. Law
enforcement’s relatively quick success in clearing the Capitol building once
reinforcements arrived shows how the rioters might have been stopped far
earlier with a different level of preparation — possibly preventing fatalities,
countless officer injuries, over $30 million in damages.
There was
another difference between the Capitol riot and those connected to this
summer’s racial justice protests: Very few people who broke into the Capitol
were arrested at the scene. Most were allowed to leave the building, forcing
the F.B.I. to track them down later and take them into custody — a process that
is still continuing today.
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