By Chrisal Hayes, Bart Jansen, Nicholas Wu, Savannah Berrmann, Ledyard King and William Cummings | USA Today
Richard Barnett, the Arkansas man who was photographed with his feet propped on a desk in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office on Jan. 6, had a 950,000-volt stun gun tucked into his waistband, Rep. Stacey Plaskett, D-Virgin Islands, revealed.
House impeachment managers showed security footage of staffers rushing to safety, locking themselves in rooms just minutes before rioters into Pelosi’s offices.
Plaskett played audio from one of Pelosi’s aides pleading for help in a phone call after staff members barricaded themselves in a conference room.
“They’re pounding on the doors trying to find her,” the staffer whispered into the phone.
A Pelosi aide later said they could hear the mob rummaging through her offices and yelling, “Where are you, Nancy?”
Plaskett argued the mob of rioters intended to harm Vice President Mike Pence and Pelosi, threatening violence against both as they ransacked the Capitol.
“President Trump put a target on their backs and sent his mob to hunt them down,” she said.
— Courtney Subramanian
New security footage of Pence evacuating the Senate, officer telling Romney to run to safety
Rep. Stacey Plaksett, D-V.I., one of the Democratic House prosecutors, showed new security footage detailing some close calls from the Capitol breach.
One video showed Vice President Mike Pence as he was spirited out of the Senate chamber on Jan. 6. Pence was seen turning his head around as he was taken out of the chamber at the same time rioters smashed their way into the Capitol.
“The mob was looking for Vice President Pence because of his patriotism, because the vice president refused to do what the president demanded and overturn the election results,” Plaskett said.
Pence, in his role as the president of the Senate, had been presiding over the chamber on Jan. 6 as it counted electoral votes.
Plaskett also showed videos of rioters calling for Pence’s death that day, and a video from another rioter calling Pence a “treasonous pig.”
“They were talking about assassinating the vice president of the United States,” Plaskett said.
Another video showed Officer Eugene Goodman, who has gone viral for video of him redirecting rioters from the doors of the Senate chamber, running and passing Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, in the hallway and directing him to turn around.
Romney turns and starts running to safety.
— Nicholas Wu and Savannah Behrmann
Plaskett: Trump, for many months, cultivated violence
Del. Stacey Plaskett. who represents the U.S. territory of the Virgin Islands, laid out evidence to argue former President Donald Trump “welcomed and amplified” his supporters plans for Jan. 6 by whipping them up and praising them for violent behavior in the weeks leading up to the attack.
Plaskett pointed to one incident in Texas in which a caravan of Trump supporters deliberately tried to run a bus carrying Biden-Harris campaign workers off a highway. One truck adorned in Trump flags eventually crashed into a Biden-Harris campaign volunteer’s car. Trump “made light” of the event, Plaskett said, by retweeting the video with a fight song and exclaiming “I LOVE TEXAS!” After the FBI announced an investigation into the incident, Trump tweeted: “In my opinion, these patriots did nothing wrong.”
