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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