'This is because of you!' Adam Schiff recalls furious Dems screaming at Republicans as the Jan. 6 attack unfoldedOct. 6 marks another anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol and the House committee investigating the attacks are having hearings, issuing subpoenas and doing some questioning behind closed doors.
Writing about his experience Wednesday, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) recalled the shouting matches that broke out as the Capitol came under siege. He noted how everyone began to put on their plastic masks and that Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) had to tell folks to breathe slowly because the fan didn't circulate air quickly enough to ensure people hyperventilating wouldn't pass out.
"This is because of you!" Schiff said Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) yelled from the gallery at Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), who was speaking when the chamber was stopped.
"Shut up!" the GOP members shot back.
"Call Trump, tell him to call off his revolutionary guards," Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) yelled.
"Phillips wasn't wrong," wrote Schiff. The attack was caused by what has become known as "the big lie," he said, the belief by Republicans that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election and was entitled to the White House. Despite exhaustive efforts, Republicans haven't been able to provide evidence to back up any of their allegations.
"Because of the pandemic, Phillips, Cohen, and other members had been required to wait in the gallery before their chance to speak, and they were the most exposed," Schiff explained. "Down on the House floor, we could barricade ourselves in, but upstairs there are multiple doors to the gallery and little to prevent the rioters from entering."
Some members were crying, afraid for their lives, hiding in the front row. There's a notorious photo of Rep. Jason Crow (D-WI), an Army Ranger, reached to hold the member's hand.
Just a "normal tourist visit"
Representative Jason Crow comforting Representative Susan Wild in the House chamber on Jan. 6. Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call, via AP Images
Members congress shelter in the House gallery as protesters try to break into the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Schiff recalled people screaming to lock doors and officers not knowing which. Police found a route out to get everyone to safety and Schiff said he stayed behind to let others go ahead. His young staffer was concerned and asked why he wasn't leaving. He wasn't panicked, but that's when the loud "thud" sounds came against the doors.
"You need to get out!" Schiff recalled a police officer shouting. "Move!"
"You can't let them see you," he said that a Republican member said to me.
"He's right," another Republican member said. "I know these people, I can talk to them, I can talk my way through them. You're in a whole different category."
He said that in the moment he was "oddly touched" by the Republican members with concern. But he'd been getting death threats for years
"That feeling soon gave way to another: If these Republican members hadn't joined the president in falsely attacking me for four years, I wouldn't need to be worried about my security, none of us would. I kept that thought to myself."
He remembered one Republican who grabbed a wooden post with hand sanitizer on it to use as a weapon.
"Are you that worried?" Schiff asked him. The member confessed he was, noting, "I think I just heard gunshots."
"I was just elected. I replaced John Ratcliffe. I'm Pat Fallon."
Schiff promised the new member it wasn't always like that.
He went on to write that he remembered when he knew Republicans accepted Trump's guilt in the Jan. 6 attack but made the decision that they wouldn't do anything about it.
He said that during the Senate trial members would walk past him or speak directly to him, but the intelligence from Sen. Chuck Schumer's (D-NY) staffers revealed questions they were getting. He explained that for years Republicans would confide in him and other Democrats about the "misgivings" they had about Trump. They were people who would go on Fox News and bash Schiff while saying the opposite in private. Some even told him to keep doing what he was doing with his investigation.
"And it became clear that many Republicans felt someone needed to do it, someone needed to put a stop to it all, even if they couldn't, or wouldn't," he wrote.
And the question wasn't so much "Why should he be removed?" as "Why should I be the one to remove him? Why should I risk my seat, my position of power and influence, my career and future? Why should I?"
He had to figure out how to convince Republicans not that they should convict Trump but why they should risk their own seats to remove a president who was already gone. In the end, they weren't willing to do it.
Read the full essay here:
SCREAMING MATCHES, OXYGEN MASKS, AND WILD STAMPEDES: A CONGRESSMAN DESCRIBES JANUARY 6 FROM THE HOUSE FLOORThis is because of you!” a Democrat yelled at a Republican as protesters battered at the doors and Capitol police officers urged lawmakers to “move!” In Adam Schiff’s new book, Midnight in Washington, he recounts the horrific scene—and the events that enabled itBY ADAM SCHIFF
OCTOBER 6, 2021
Please grab a mask!” a Capitol Police officer shouted from the well of the House floor. Up until this point, I still wasn’t sure what was happening outside the chamber and whether we were at serious risk. There were rioters in the building, that much I knew. How many of them, or how great a threat they posed, it was impossible to tell. I looked around at my colleagues to see if they were as perplexed as I was, and besides, what were we supposed to do in an emergency? I suddenly wished I had been paying more attention at freshman orientation twenty years earlier.
Sensing our confusion, the officer continued: “Be prepared to don your mask in the event the room is breached.” He told us that we did not need to put the masks on yet, but tear gas was being deployed, so we should get them ready. “Be prepared to get down under your chairs if necessary. So, we have folks entering the Rotunda and coming down this way...Just be prepared. Stay calm.” I pulled a rectangular canvas pouch from under my seat and unzipped it. Inside was a strongly sealed plastic container with no obvious opening. I flipped it from side to side and upside down, trying to open the damned thing. Finally figuring it out, I helped the members around me open theirs, and we removed the plastic hoods. These hoods didn’t resemble the gas masks you see police wearing during a riot; instead, they were a large polyethylene bag that you pulled over your head, with a small motor attached to circulate and filter the air. As you removed the hood from its packaging, the motor began running, and suddenly there was a din of dozens of these hoods buzzing, which only added to the growing sense of alarm.
“When you put on the hood,” one of my colleagues and a former Marine, Ruben Gallego of Arizona, shouted, “breathe slowly.” Ruben was standing behind me, and he could see the panic spreading from member to member. “Take slow, steady breaths. Your impulse will be to hyperventilate, but you need to breathe slowly.” This was very helpful advice. I have a bit of claustrophobia, and the idea of pulling a bag over my head already had my pulse quickening. I resolved to wait until the last moment before I had to don the thing, since I wasn’t smelling tear gas, not yet. “Breathe slowly when you put it on,” Ruben intoned again, “or you will pass out. That is how people can die from wearing these.” Okay, that wasn’t so helpful.
"This is because of you!” yelled Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota from the gallery at Representative Paul Gosar, who had been at the microphone. “Shut up!” came the Republican reply. “Call Trump, tell him to call off his revolutionary guards,” screamed Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee. He was also in the gallery, above me and to the right, his face red with anger. Other members tried to settle things down and not allow the recriminations to spread, but Phillips wasn’t wrong. We were here for what should have been the ceremonial certification of the 2020 presidential election results, but instead we were now in danger. For months, GOP members of Congress had propagated the president’s big lie about the elections, and you could draw a direct line between those lies and the threat we all now faced. Because of the pandemic, Phillips, Cohen, and other members had been required to wait in the gallery before their chance to speak, and they were the most exposed. Down on the House floor, we could barricade ourselves in, but upstairs there are multiple doors to the gallery and little to prevent the rioters from entering.
“Lock the gallery doors!” someone shouted from down below, but it wasn’t clear to police upstairs which doors in the gallery remained open. “Not those doors—those doors!” came another excited shout. “Those doors over there!”
A police officer returned to the well again: He told us that they had secured an escape route and he wanted us to exit the chambers and proceed immediately down the stairs. Now. There are two sets of double doors behind the Speaker’s chair and raised dais, and the doors to our right were pulled open. Members and staff quickly moved toward the exit and I was suddenly aware of just how many people had been on the floor, in the cloakroom or elsewhere, as they crowded by the exit and created a real logjam. I waited by my seat, still feeling relatively calm and wanting to give other members and staff a chance to go first. Besides, so many of the Republican members were not wearing masks, I wasn’t eager to be jammed in with them shoulder to shoulder on my way out the doors. Eventually, I wandered over to the GOP side of the chamber and waited there alone, several rows above the well, until a young staff member approached me, perplexed why I wasn’t leaving.
"Are you okay, Mr. Schiff?” she asked. I was astonished. She was all of about twentysomething and she was asking me if I was okay. What a remarkable calm amid the chaos. “I’m fine,” I said, “just don’t want to add to the melee. Thought I would let others go ahead.” And then, as an afterthought, I asked her—“Are you okay?” She nodded.
Suddenly I could hear the crowd of insurrectionists outside the chamber. They had migrated from the Senate side of the building and were approaching the House floor from Statuary Hall, on the opposite side of the chamber from where members were exiting. And from the noise, it sounded like a lot of them.
Just then came a tremendous thud—something had been thrust against the doors not twenty yards away from me, battering them. Thud. A moment later, again: thud.
“You need to get out!” a police officer shouted. “Move!”
I made my way down to the well and joined the remaining members and staff filing out, looking back at the doors being hammered to the rear of the chamber, glass now shattering. Police officers pushed large cabinets in front of the doors and would soon draw their weapons.
“You can’t let them see you,” a Republican member said to me. “He’s right,” another Republican member said. “I know these people, I can talk to them, I can talk my way through them. You’re in a whole different category.” In that moment, we were not merely members of different political parties, but on opposite sides of a much more dangerous divide. At first I was oddly touched by these GOP members and their evident concern. But by then, I had been receiving death threats for years, and that feeling soon gave way to another: If these Republican members hadn’t joined the president in falsely attacking me for four years, I wouldn’t need to be worried about my security, none of us would. I kept that thought to myself.
As I made my way out of the back of the chamber, I took another look at the Republicans walking out with me. One had grabbed a wooden post with a hand sanitizer dispenser attached to it and was carrying it like a club, in case he needed it to defend himself against the rioters. “Are you that worried?” I asked him, as we began filing down the stairs from the Speaker’s lobby and through the corridors below the Capitol. “Yes,” he said agitatedly. “I think I just heard gunshots.” He was right—only fifty feet away from the stairs, on the other side of the lobby, Ashli Babbitt, a fourteen year veteran of the Air Force, had just been shot to death by a Capitol Police officer. In all the commotion, I had just assumed it was a tear gas canister.
“How long have you been here?” I asked the Republican.
“Seventy-two hours,” he replied.
“What?”
“I was just elected. I replaced John Ratcliffe. I’m Pat Fallon.”
I looked him in the eye and said: “It’s not always like this.”
It was not always like this, it must be said, because the Republican Party has also not always been like this. The four years of the Trump presidency destroyed many friendships, and not a few marriages. But it also destroyed the Republican Party—once devoted to robust alliances, a healthy mistrust of executive power, and the expansion of democracy around the world—and turned it into something else: a party willing to tear down the institutions of its own government, a party willing to give aid and comfort to a malign foreign power that wishes to destroy us, a party hostile to the truth.
This was only possible because many of the Republican members of Congress, people I served with for years, liked, and respected—turned out to prize power and position, even if it meant imperiling the country. I remember precisely the moment during the first impeachment trial when it became so tragically apparent to me that Republicans accepted the President’s guilt but were unwilling to do anything about it. Especially tragic, because we might have avoided the terrible trauma that was to come.
“They think we’ve proven him guilty,” my staff told me just before I would make a closing argument on the second day of the trial. “They need to know why he should be removed.”
I didn’t have time to ask who “they” were. We had been getting feedback during the course of the trial, sometimes directly from senators who would walk past us in the small lobby behind the Senate floor, going to and from lunch, or on a break, or who would wander up to our small table on the Senate floor when the day’s presentations were done. But the best sources of information came from Senator Schumer’s staff, passed on to my staff in whispers and handwritten notes. Were these questions coming from Democratic senators, like Joe Manchin from West Virginia, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, or Doug Jones of Alabama? If so, we were in trouble.
Or was this feedback coming from Republican senators, several of whom had kept their cards close to the vest? If the Republican senators were asking, that meant their minds were still open to conviction, and that was good, even though at this point in the trial they had yet to hear the defense case.
And still, what were “they” really asking? If senators believed that we had proven Trump guilty of withholding hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid from an ally at war in order to coerce that nation into helping him cheat in the upcoming election, wasn’t that enough? Had the bar become so high with this president? It was like a juror in an extortion case asking the judge, “Okay, he’s guilty, but do we really need to convict?”
But as I walked to the lectern, I suddenly understood, in a way I hadn’t fully appreciated until that moment, that this was the central question: Why should he be removed? He was the president of their party. He was putting conservative judges on the court. He was lowering their taxes. Why remove him? I had watched during breaks in the trial as the president’s Senate defenders took to the airwaves to proclaim his innocence, and I had believed them—not their claims about the president’s conduct, but that they believed what they were saying, that they believed there had been, to quote the president’s mantra of defense, no quid pro quo. But I could see now that that wasn’t it at all.
For the past three years, Republicans had confided, to me and to many of my Democratic colleagues, their serious misgivings about the president. Some would go on Fox News and bash me, only to urge me privately to keep on with the investigation. And it became clear that many Republicans felt someone needed to do it, someone needed to put a stop to it all, even if they couldn’t, or wouldn’t. And the question wasn’t so much “Why should he be removed?” as “Why should I be the one to remove him? Why should I risk my seat, my position of power and influence, my career and future? Why should I?”
There was only half an hour left of our case that day when I made those seven short paces from the House managers’ table to the lectern, and I had no idea how I was going to answer that question. I had prepared to go through the record of the president’s call again, the one in which he says “I want you to do us a favor, though”—because I had discovered there was so much more to that transcript, so much more now that we understood the whole scheme. I had planned to go through it line by line. But the call record now seemed insignificant, compared to the question: Why should I?
Most of the senators were listening politely after a long day, but their concentration was wandering, and so was mine. I was doing a kind of extreme multitasking, reading and speaking about the call but thinking about the question I needed to answer, and all the other questions it presumed: What made this man so dangerous? What had he done to the country? How, in three short years, had he been able to so completely remake his own party, get it to abandon its own ideology, get my friends and colleagues to surrender themselves to his obvious immorality? How had he caused us to question ourselves, our values, our commitment to democracy? How had he been able to convince so many of our fellow citizens that his views were the truth?
When I could delay no longer, I told the senators, “This brings me to the last point I want to make tonight.” At the end of the trial, I said, I believed we would have proven the president guilty—that is, that he had done what he was charged with. But it was a slightly different question, I acknowledged, than whether he really needed to be removed. And all of a sudden, every senator seemed to be watching, alert and keenly interested in the answer. The moment stretched on in silence. “This is why he needs to be removed,” I said at last, and did my best to tell them.
In the year and a half since, I have thought a lot about what I might have said differently to persuade the senators of what a danger the now former president posed then, and poses still. Whether there was any course we might have taken, not just in the trial but in the years that preceded it, to prevent what was coming: a violent insurrection at the Capitol, a wave of antidemocratic efforts, and a full-out assault on the truth.
There is now a dangerous vein of autocratic thought running through one of America’s two parties, and it poses an existential danger to the country. In this we are not alone. All around the world, there is a new competition between autocracy and democracy, and for more than a decade, the autocrats have been on the rise. This trend toward authoritarianism began before Donald Trump and will not have spent its force when he steps off the political stage for good. It will require constant vigilance on our part to ensure it does not gain another foothold in the highest office in our land.
The actions of our government, like the broader sweep of history, are not taken on their own; they are not the product of impersonal forces operating without human actors and agency. We made Donald Trump possible. We the voters, yes, but we in Congress even more so. He would not have been able to batter and break so many of our democratic norms had we not let him, had we not been capable of endless rationalization, had we not forgotten why we came to office in the first place.
Midnight is the darkest moment of the day everywhere in the world. But it is also the most hopeful, because everything that comes after holds the promise of light. America has a genius for reinvention, and we must use it. As Lincoln said, we must “disenthrall ourselves” to save our country. From the same forces of bigotry that divided and nearly defeated us in the Civil War, yes, but from something new to the American landscape as well: a dangerous experimentation with a uniquely American brand of authoritarianism. We must all confront the question: Why should I?
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/adam-schiff-describes-january-6-from-the-house-floor
