JAN. 6
CAPITOL RIOT
‘Shocked and stunned and horrified’: How Joe
Biden processed Jan. 6
A lot is known about how Congress and Trump spent that
day. Little about the then president-elect.
By LAURA
BARRÓN-LÓPEZ and CHRISTOPHER CADELAGO
01/05/2022
05:01 PM EST
Updated:
01/05/2022 05:21 PM EST
As rioters
stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, threatening the lives of Vice President
Mike Pence, lawmakers, and police there, most of then-President-elect Joe
Biden’s senior advisers were isolated from their boss.
Covid
precautions had forced them to scatter in Washington and elsewhere across the
country. And so they watched mostly separately on television as the pro-Donald
Trump mob raged through the Capitol on a mission to overturn the lawfully cast
votes of the electorate that had resulted in their boss’ win.
Biden White
House officials, lawmakers and close presidential allies in interviews describe
a chaotic day, filled with phone calls and last-minute audibles as they
fine-tuned the speech he would give from 100 miles away. They quickly
internalized that the day would have a lasting imprint on their work: from the
remarks Biden gave that day to the agenda he would go on to pursue once in
office.
“What
flowed from him on the 6th was something he was speaking to for a long, long
time. It was not a difficult thing to bring together,” Mike Donilon, a senior
adviser to the president, recalled in an interview with POLITICO. “I believe —
I think he believes — that there was a through-line and that the threat that he
saw when he announced at the time — that everything that made America America
was at stake.”
“What we
believe, what we stood for, our democracy, was all on the line,” he added.
While much
of the focus has been on how Trump’s White House and members of Congress spent
the day, little is known about how Biden and his team processed, in real time,
the riot that was taking place. The day, like many during the transition, was
supposed to be a fairly quiet one for Biden, with an event scheduled before a
Covid-safe audience of journalists at The Queen music hall, a short drive from
his Wilmington, Del., house.
Biden spent
the morning at home, preparing to talk about the economy — a speech that
ultimately would be scrapped and replaced by the one about the crisis at the
Capitol. He was with his wife, future first lady Jill Biden. They had the TV on
in the background to monitor the election certification process in Congress.
As activity
began, starting with a rally attended by Trump that soon moved over to the
Capital, Biden’s top advisers couldn't believe what they were seeing: breached
barriers and rioters pushing their way through throngs of police officers. But
in those moments, one of them said they also felt determined to get the
president-elect on the phone with senior staff to make sure he was tracking
every angle of the disorder that was unfolding. Everyone was aligned on the
magnitude of the day.
On a quiet
road near the president-elect’s house, the small pool of reporters assigned to
cover the Biden transition event in downtown Wilmington were waiting in an
idling bus. One by one, they pulled up clips of clashes between rioters and
police. “Was that blood?” one recalled asking the others.
Biden’s own
entourage decided to just get the cars and go to The Queen, knowing he would
need to address the events. After the press bus rolled up to the venue, they saw
the now-iconic video and images of officer Eugene Goodman luring an angry mob
away from the Senate floor entrance. But it was still difficult to process the
full scope of what was happening across Washington.
After
feeling isolated most of the morning in her Washington, D.C., home, Kate
Bedingfield, then Biden’s communications director and deputy campaign manager,
got on a call with other senior staff and the president-elect. On the call,
Biden told them he felt it was important for people to hear from the incoming
president. He wanted to convey that “this is not who we are, and that the
defense of democracy is really woven into the fabric of our country,” said
Bedingfield, now White House communications director.
“I remember
the president being both shocked and stunned and horrified by the images that
we were seeing in the Capitol, but also very clear eyed and resolute about
wanting to speak to this,” Bedingfield said. Biden and his staff discussed
structuring the themes of the speech he would be giving that day around the
core message of his presidential campaign — the “battle for the soul of the
nation.”
“We were
sort of seeing it play out in an almost unimaginable way on screen in front of
us that day,” Bedingfield added. “He really wanted to call it out and to speak
to it directly. And he felt that in the void of presidential leadership that we
were seeing that day from his predecessor, that it was incredibly important for
him to speak to the country about what was happening.”
Biden was
initially briefed on the phone by Ron Klain, a longtime adviser who would
become his White House chief of staff. He left his house about 2:20 p.m. and
arrived at The Queen minutes later. By that time things had escalated
significantly and he went right into the hold to keep watching. Then, he went
dark.
He huddled
with advisers as his U.S. Secret Service detail flanked the small stage. With
him were Annie Tomasini, then the traveling chief of staff who is now director
of oval office operations; Bruce Reed, longtime adviser and a top policy guru
in the White House; personal aide Stephen Goepfert; and Ashley Williams, now
deputy director of oval office operations. They were later joined in person by
Klain, and Biden spoke by phone with others including Donilon, Bedingfield and
Cedric Richmond, another senior adviser who at the time was still a member of
Congress and later joined the White House.
It wasn’t
until after 4 p.m. that he would finally address the public, with aides
offering last-minute heads up to press that the president had been mulling over
his words.
“There was
always an argument [that the 2020 election] was much more about an economic
case, or a case about health care, or a case about wealthy folks having too
much say; there was a whole debate in the party and the country,” Donilon said.
“And a lot of people didn't think the soul of America argument was really at
the center of the debate."
When Biden
appeared, he was dressed in a blue suit and tie. He walked slowly to the podium
alone, taking off a black mask and apologizing not just for the delay, but for
the reason he was so late. He would speak for roughly eight minutes in total,
saying that American democracy was under unprecedented assault — “unlike
anything we’ve seen in modern times.”
Watching
the scenes at the Capitol, which he called the “citadel of liberty,” Biden said
he was reminded of a line from former President Abraham Lincoln’s annual
address to Congress in 1862, during the Civil War: “We shall nobly save, or
meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”
“The work
of the moment and the work of the next four years must be the restoration of
democracy, of decency, of honor, of respect, the rule of law,” he added. “Just
plain, simple decency.”
Biden was
back home before 5 p.m., as the Capitol complex was still being cleared. He
continued to watch the events with the incoming first lady. The sergeant at
arms declared the building secure just after 5:30 p.m, and Biden continued to
speak over the phone with a wide range of people, including advisers and
elected officials.
Aides say
at no point were they worried the vote would not be certified, citing
lawmakers, staff and police in Congress who worked expeditiously to carry it
out. Congress finally certified the election in the early morning hours of Jan.
7.
Two weeks
after the riot, Biden would expand on the themes of his Jan. 6 speech, saying
in his inaugural address that the mob came to take down democracy, but it
failed that day and would fail each time it happened again.
Late in the
process of drafting his inaugural speech, advisers said he’d added a line about
the country being in a moment where citizens had an obligation to defend the
truth, ensuring that false and dangerous revisionist history doesn’t overtake
actual events.
“That we
had an obligation as a country to stand up for the truth,” is how Donilon puts
it.
White House
officials contend Biden’s work to date has been informed by the events of Jan.
6 — designed to demonstrate to Americans and the world that democracy can still
succeed and function effectively. But Democratic lawmakers say the ultimate
test will be whether Biden and Congress can pass protections for voting and the
election system threatened on that day.
As the
anniversary of the riots approaches, Biden has taken more concrete steps toward
that goal. In December, after nearly a year of pressure from civil rights
advocates and some top House leaders, he endorsed a filibuster carveout to
allow for a pathway to passage of voting rights restoration and elections
legislation that would shield officials and expand ballot access.
Activists
still want more. Rev. Al Sharpton, president of the National Action Network,
said that in the president’s speech on the Jan. 6 anniversary, Biden “ought to
say that the same spirit that led people to a physical insurrection on the
Capitol is now being actualized in 19 states that have changed election laws
based on a big lie because there was no need to change election laws in those
state.”
“He ought
to connect the spirit of people that stormed the Capitol to people that will go
back to states rights to break down the union,” added Sharpton.
Biden
understands that shielding voting protections and the elections process is
foundational to preserving that democracy, White House aides say. On Tuesday,
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will give speeches in Atlanta to press
the urgent need to pass voting rights legislation and prevent partisan state
officials from undermining the vote counting processes, officials said. And in
the interview, Donilon vowed that the president “will get that done.”
Sen. Tim
Kaine (D-Va.), who had a lengthy conversation with Biden before the holiday
break, said he expects the president’s speech on Jan. 6, to be the public face
of what will then become a “one-on-one campaign that he and others in the White
House will be doing” to reach Democratic senators ahead of a mid-January vote.
“He's got
to puncture the big lie, but also offer the antidote to the big lie,” said
Kaine, referring to Trump’s lies about the 2020 election being stolen. “And I
think the antidote is [to] guarantee more people convenient participation,
protect the systems that implement elections, and then carry out the electoral
count to make sure that people can trust them.”
“This will
be as big as the vote on the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” Kaine said. “And
I think Joe Biden knows that.”
JAN. 6
CAPITOL RIOT
They stormed the Capitol. Now they’re running for
office.
At least 57 individuals who played a role in the day’s
events — including some who were arrested on charges related to the Capitol
attack — are running for office in 2022.
By BRITTANY
GIBSON
01/05/2022
01:47 PM EST
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/05/jan-6-protesters-run-for-office-526545
The Jan. 6
storming of the Capitol is remembered as one of the darkest and most shameful
episodes in American history.
But at
least 57 individuals who played a role in that day’s events — either by
attending the Save America rally that preceded the riots, gathering at the
Capitol steps or breaching the Capitol itself — are now running for elected
office.
Rather than
disqualifying them from public service, the events of Jan. 6 appear to have
served as a political springboard for dozens of Republicans who will be on the
ballot this year for federal, state and local offices.
It’s
difficult to state with precision just how many of those who participated in
the rally on the Ellipse, marched to the Capitol or stormed the building will
be on the ballot in 2022 — in many states, candidate filing deadlines are
months away.
But a
POLITICO review of Department of Justice case reports, social media posts, news
accounts and interviews with attendees found that last year alone, 11 Jan. 6
protesters were elected to offices ranging from state legislature to city
council to school board.
This year,
more than two dozen are running for Congress, state legislature or statewide
office — including at least two protesters who actually entered the Capitol. At
least five Jan. 6ers are gearing up for gubernatorial races, among them Doug
Mastriano, a Pennsylvania state senator and a leading voice in the national
movement to discredit the 2020 election results.
At least
three candidates this year face charges related to the Jan. 6 riots.
Few of them
express any contrition for their involvement in a day that ended up with an
assault on the nation’s temple of democracy, 140 injured police officers and
more than 700 arrests.
“They’re
going to try and twist it and bend it to fit the narrative that I’m a terrible
human being, that I’m an insurrectionist and I know that’s coming,” said Ryan
Kelley, who is running for governor of Michigan, in an interview with POLITICO.
“But at the end of the day, sorry guys, I didn’t do anything unlawful or
illegal. You just didn’t like what happened that day and they just want to push
that insurrection narrative.”
Kelley,
like the majority of Jan. 6 protesters who will be on the ballot this year, did
not enter the Capitol or fight with police officers. And the rally in support
of President Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election was not his
first.
Kelley led
rallies in Lansing, Michigan, in November 2020 to protest the presidential
election results and is a co-founder of American Patriot Council, an organization
that demonstrated against Covid restrictions at the Michigan Capitol Building
in April 2020. That April demonstration drew national notice when armed
protesters tried to enter the floor of the chamber and then occupied the
gallery above.
The organization’s
other co-founder, Jason Howland, was photographed inside the U.S. Capitol on
Jan. 6. Howland is currently running for state legislature in Michigan. He did
not respond to several requests for comment.
“As I
travel around the state, I’m an insurrectionist to some people,” said Kelley.
“You know, to other people, it’s like, ‘That’s why I’m voting for you. Because
you walk the walk and you were out there fighting for us.’”
Over time,
perceptions about the Capitol riots have evolved, with partisan gaps surfacing
on the issues of culpability, motivation and severity of the violence. But
Democrats are determined to hold this class of candidates accountable for their
role in a national day of infamy, and keep voters focused on the violent nature
of the attack on the Capitol.
“This
wasn’t like they were out at the completely nonviolent Women’s March. They were
an angry mob with people that were chanting ‘Kill Mike Pence.’ And people that
wanted to kill [Rep.] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; people tried to crush police
officers with barriers. And they did nothing to stop or redirect that energy,”
said Jessica Post, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.
The DLCC
took the lead in identifying and shaming Jan. 6 protestors who also hold public
office with a pop-up website that lists their names, as well as the names of
all 600 elected officials who signed on to an open letter asking Congress not
to certify the election results.
The Jan. 6
candidates expect campaign opponents will associate them with the worst violence
of the Capitol attack. Teddy Daniels, who is running for Congress in
Pennsylvania’s 8th District, said he and other candidates feel they’ve been
unfairly labeled as seditionists, insurrectionists and traitors.
“Let me
tell you, I took four bullets in Afghanistan with an American flag on my
uniform. And to come back and because I was in D.C. on January 6, the Left and
the mainstream media wants to call me a traitor to my country,” said Daniels, a
veteran who was present for Trump’s speech but did not enter the Capitol. “It’s
fuel in the tank.”
Democrats
are keen to point out the irony of their remarks in the wake of their
involvement in the events of Jan. 6.
“[I]f
people participated in this [Jan. 6] and they’re running in 2022, it just shows
how disingenuous this continues to be. If you think American democracy is broken,
and free and fair elections are not being held, [then] it’s ridiculous that you
think it’s appropriate to put your name on the ballot.”
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