"WASHINGTON — A group of uniformed officers on Tuesday implored Republican members of Congress to stop downplaying the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol as they described in striking detail what one said felt like a “medieval battle” with insurrectionists.
“I remember thinking there was a very good chance I would be torn apart, shot to death with my own weapon,” Michael Fanone, a D.C. police officer, told a House select committee tasked with investigating the events of that day.
“What makes the struggle harder and more painful is to know so many of my fellow citizens, including so many of the people I put my life at risk to defend, are downplaying or outright denying what happened,” Fanone said. “I feel like I went to hell and back to protect them. But too many are now telling me that hell doesn’t exist, or that hell wasn’t that bad.”
Their pleas came hours before a group of former President Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters in the House, including U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert of Tyler, were set to hold a press conference outside the Justice Department casting insurrectionists now in jail as political prisoners — the latest example of Republican lawmakers downplaying the violence that left five people dead.
GOP lawmakers have cast the panel as a political device for Democrats to keep the events of that day front and center ahead of the 2022 midterms, even as they’ve resisted efforts to form a bipartisan commission and declined to take part.
“Unfortunately, Speaker Pelosi will only pick people onto the committee that will ask the questions she wants asked,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said before the hearing. “That becomes a failed committee and a failed report, a sham that no one can believe.”"
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If McCarthy wanted an independent, 9/11-style commission to investigate the insurrection, why did he prevent that from happening when Pelosi was ready to move forward with it?
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"The officers who delivered emotional testimony in the committee’s first hearing described being dragged to the ground and beaten as they struggled with rioters trying to take their batons, shields and guns.
Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn, who is Black, described the crowd repeatedly shouting a racial slur at him. [The Trump-supporting racists repeatedly called him a you-know-what.] Others said they were called traitors as rioters shocked them with Tasers and squirted them with pepper spray and other chemical irritants. Six months later they said they are still recovering from injuries and trauma from that day.
“What we were subjected to that day was like something from a medieval battle,” said Aquilino Gonell, a Capitol police sergeant.
Gonell, an Army veteran, said it was the first time he “was more afraid to work at the Capitol than my entire deployment in Iraq.”
Gonell said he couldn’t sleep that night because irritants sprayed on him that day reactivated after he took a shower and burned his skin. Gonell described injuries on both of his hands, his left shoulder, left calf and right foot. He said he had to have surgery on his foot and was just told he will need surgery on his left shoulder, as well. He expects to need physical therapy for more than a year."
'I went to hell and back': Capitol Police testify as House begins inquiry into Jan. 6 riot
Reply With QuoteOriginally Posted by Micawber
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