I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year

by Carol Leonnig

  “Calm down, Steny,” Hogan said. “I have nearly three hundred state police on the way to the Capitol right now as we speak, and I’ve activated the National Guard, everybody we had available, a thousand soldiers. But we don’t have authorization to go in.”

  Hoyer yelled across the room at Schumer. “Hey, Chuck! Chuck! Hogan says he doesn’t have authorization.”

  Hoyer then tells Hogan, “Chuck says you do have authorization.”

  “Steny, I’m telling you, I don’t care what Chuck says, I’ve been told by the Department of Defense that we don’t have authorization,” Hogan said.

  They ended the call.

  Most lawmakers had been evacuated from the Capitol for their own safety, but most of their staffers were left to fend for themselves as armed mobs of violent rioters started to roam through hallways and in and out of offices. Some of them punched and kicked doors. They yelled, “Stop the steal!” As if trapped in a building with multiple active shooters, Hill staffers suffered the terror of not being sure if they would live or die. Many of them were in their twenties and thirties—part of a generation of Americans who had grown up with the scourge of mass gun violence and had learned in school what to do in active-shooter situations.

  In Pelosi’s office suite, eight of her staffers hunkered down undetected in a small conference room as invaders trashed her offices, rifled through the papers on her desk, and yelled, “Where are you, Nancy?”

  Pelosi later recalled in her interview for this book that the most traumatic part of the siege for her was hearing that after she had been evacuated her aides remained in serious danger. “Much of my staff were under a table, in the dark, locked up in rooms, silent for more than two hours because these people were banging on the doors trying to find the Speaker because they were going to do whatever they were going to do,” she said. “They’re young people who come with their idealism to Capitol Hill to be involved in public service for the life of our country. Patriotic.”

  On the Senate side, McConnell’s aides were just as terrified. A top McConnell staffer who had left the Senate Chamber after McConnell was evacuated by his security team began walking quickly toward the Rotunda and came face-to-face with a U.S. Capitol Police officer sprinting in the opposite direction. The two made eye contact, then the officer yelled: “Run!” The staffer wasn’t sure what he was running from and which way he should go to safety. He darted down a side hallway lined with offices and realized he didn’t have his office key with him. He jiggled one locked doorknob, then another. A co-worker poked his head out of the office of McConnell’s speechwriter. The fleeing staffer lunged inside, pushing the co-worker back in as he did.

  Within minutes, the McConnell aides heard the shouts and footfalls of rioters getting louder, as well as unexplained screams. A text alert from Capitol Police blared on every phone in the room: “Due to security threat inside: immediately, move inside your office, take emergency equipment, lock the doors, take shelter.” Some of McConnell’s aides piled a sofa and tables against the door as quietly as they could, ever fearful they’d be discovered.

  It was terrifying. The senior McConnell staffer began texting and then calling a friend he thought could help: Will Levi, who had recently been Bill Barr’s chief of staff at the Justice Department. He told Levi that the Capitol Police had lost control of the building. Countless staffers were in hiding but who knew when rioters would break down their doors. If backup did not arrive soon, the McConnell staffer told him, people could die.

  Levi called FBI deputy director David Bowdich, who was then monitoring the protests in the command center in the FBI’s Washington Field Office. Bowdich knew protesters from the Ellipse had been aggressively skirmishing with police around the perimeter but was surprised when Levi reported they were now running roughshod through the Capitol.

  Bowdich normally would seek an invitation from the Capitol Police to send FBI agents onto the Capitol grounds, but he decided there was no time. He dispatched an FBI SWAT team from the Washington office, then two more, to the Capitol. He instructed the first team to start by securing the safety of lawmakers and staff on the Senate side, and follow-up teams would try to help regain control of the entire building. Speed was key, so he told them to skip the standard step of meeting off-site to coordinate.

  “Get their asses over there. Go now,” Bowdich said to the first SWAT team’s commander. “We don’t have time to huddle.”

  After first evacuating congressional leaders to the secure area of the Hart Building, Capitol Police decided to err on the side of caution and transported leaders, including Pelosi, McConnell, Schumer, and Kevin McCarthy, to Fort McNair, an army post in Southwest Washington where the Potomac and Anacostia rivers meet.

  At the Pentagon, Miller’s office was a hub of activity. At 2:45, the acting defense secretary had a group conference call with acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen to urge he deploy all law enforcement officers at his disposal. Miller stressed they had to make an immediate show of presence at the Capitol. Milley said the National Guard had to move as soon as possible, too, though he acknowledged that it would surely take longer to move troops into action than police forces.

  At 3:04, Ryan McCarthy transmitted the decision to call up National Guard units from D.C. and neighboring states. The Guard units would begin to arrive on the Capitol grounds about two and a half hours later—which the Pentagon considered lightning speed.

  Lawmakers were horrified as they hid from rioters. People who appeared to be maniacs—some wearing horns, carrying zip ties, and chanting about hanging the traitors—were coursing through the halls of Congress waving Confederate and neo-Nazi flags. A mob had taken over the Senate floor.

  At 3:15, Dan Sullivan called Milley. “This is really fucked up down here,” the Republican senator said. Milley told him there was confusion about how to deploy troops to the Capitol.

  Sullivan told Milley the senators were safe in a secure location and there was a tentative plan by Capitol Police to evacuate them by bus from the Capitol complex. Sullivan, who had military training, thought the movement would put them in more danger. “I’m going to tell them it’s a bad idea,” Sullivan told Milley. “Can I mention that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs agrees?”

  “Yes,” Milley said. The plan never came to be.

  At 3:22, Adam Smith called Milley to say, “We need to clear the Capitol. Bring overwhelming force. The mob has overwhelmed us.” The Democratic congressman said some members were in their hideaway offices and people were freaking out.

  At 3:33, Pelosi and Schumer together called Miller, who had other Pentagon leaders standing by listening. The two had a firm message to deliver. There was high anxiety in their voices. They sounded angry, though not panicked.

  “We want action now,” one of them said. “We must have active-duty troops.”

  Milley spoke up: “We have the Guard coming.”

  Miller explained that the FBI and other federal law enforcement were on their way.

  Pelosi and Schumer said that wasn’t enough. They needed active-duty troops to get control of the situation. This was a matter of life and limb.

  “The country is at stake,” Pelosi said.

  Miller said soldiers were on their way. He didn’t explain how long it would take for troops to arrive.

  At 4:00, Pence called Miller from his secure location. The vice president was calm. He had no anxiety or fear in his voice. Pence delivered a set of directives to the defense chief.

  “Get troops here; get them here now,” the vice president ordered. “We’ve got to get the Congress to do its business.”

  “Yes, sir,” Miller said.

  Pence emphasized they needed to act with all possible speed. It was the sternest Miller or the other Pentagon officials listening had ever heard Pence. He sounded like a commander in a firefight, issuing orders upon which lives depended. The voices overheard in the backgr
ound of Pence’s end of the call were far more animated and anxious. Lots of people were talking, perhaps his family members or his aides. But Pence sounded resolute.

  “Get the Capitol cleared,” he told Miller. “You’ve got to get down here. You’ve got to get the place cleared. We’ve got to do what we have to do.”

  “Yes, sir,” Miller answered.

  * * *

  —

  As Pence gave orders to the military, the actual commander in chief was effectively AWOL. Trump spent the afternoon glued to the television watching the drama unfold.

  After his tweet castigating Pence for his lack of courage amid the height of the attack, Trump had issued two tweets that many of his aides felt still missed the mark. In neither did Trump call on his supporters to leave the Capitol. At 2:38 p.m., Trump wrote, “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!” And at 3:13, Trump tweeted, “I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order—respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!”

  As soon as she saw on the television in her second-floor office that the rioters were inside the Capitol, Ivanka Trump said to her aides, “I’m going down to my dad. This has to stop.” She spent several hours walking back and forth to the Oval trying to convince the president to be stronger in telling his supporters he stood with law enforcement and ordering them to disperse. Just when Ivanka Trump thought she had made headway and returned upstairs, Meadows would call her to say the president still needed more persuading. “I need you to come back down here,” Meadows would tell her. “We’ve got to get this under control.” He would clear the room of other aides and say, “I only want Ivanka, myself, and the president in here.” This cycle repeated itself several times that afternoon. As another presidential adviser said, “Ivanka was described to me like a stable pony. When the racehorse gets too agitated, you bring the stable pony in to calm him down.”

  Other White House officials also pleaded with Trump to condemn the violence unequivocally. One after another, they urged the president to implore the thousands of rioters laying siege to the Capitol under his name to stand down and go home.

  “You need to tweet something,” Kellogg told Trump. “Nobody’s going to be watching TV out there, but they will be looking at their phones. You need to tweet something.”

  “Once mobs get moving, you can’t turn them off,” Kellogg added. “Once they start rolling, it’s hard to bring it under control. But you’ve got to get on top of this and say something.”

  Kevin McCarthy, who had been trying to reach Trump at the White House, finally succeeded and asked him to publicly and forcefully call off the rioters. Trump falsely claimed that the attackers were members of Antifa. McCarthy told the president that in fact they were his own supporters.

  “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,” Trump said, according to the account that Republican congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler said McCarthy gave her.

  Other advisers who were away from the White House tried to call Trump, but he didn’t take their calls. They figured he knew what they were going to say, and he didn’t want to hear it. Plus, he was busy watching TV.

  Chris Christie called the White House intending to tell Trump, “Are you crazy? What are you doing? You’re the president of the United States . . . You’ve got to stop this.” But when Trump didn’t take his call, the former New Jersey governor went on TV and tried to deliver his message to the president through the screen.

  “I’ve been spending the last twenty-five minutes or so trying to get the president on the phone myself to say this to him directly,” Christie said during ABC’s breaking news coverage. “The president caused this protest to occur. He’s the only one who can make it stop. The president has to come out and tell his supporters to leave the Capitol grounds and to allow the Congress to do their business peacefully. And anything short of that is an abrogation of his responsibility. He spoke to this crowd, his son spoke to this crowd, and sent them on their way. I don’t know that they anticipated this was going to be the result, but it doesn’t matter whether they did or they didn’t. This is the result of their words, and now their words must put a stop to this.”

  Kellyanne Conway tried to talk to Trump and left a message with his office, asking that her name be added to the chorus of people calling on the president to do something.

  “This is really bad,” Conway said. “People are going to get hurt. Only he can stop them. He can’t just tweet. He’s got to get down there.”

  Alyssa Farah, watching on television from Florida, was heartbroken and reached out several times to Meadows, her former boss. “You guys have to say something,” she told Meadows. “Even if the president’s not willing to put out a statement, you should go to the [cameras] and say, ‘We condemn this. Please stand down.’ If you don’t, people are going to die.”

  Some other White House officials felt helpless as they watched the horror unfold. Larry Kudlow watched the riot on television from his second-floor West Wing office. At one point, Chris Liddell came in to join him. They were horrified, but they didn’t believe there was anything they could do to stop it. These were two of the most powerful people in the government, yet what could they do if the president refused to act? Kudlow drew a parallel in that moment to his publicized battle with alcoholism and cocaine addiction in the 1990s. Kudlow later told others he realized on January 6 that he had no control, just like how in his youth as a Wall Street trader he thought he was the master of the universe until he crashed and burned and it dawned on him he wasn’t the master of anything.

  More junior staffers felt just as hopeless. Sarah Matthews, twenty-five, was a deputy press secretary, working under McEnany, and had put her name to countless defenses of the president as his mishaps and statements landed him in crisis after crisis. But the Capitol insurrection was one she could not stomach defending. She had gone to the Ellipse that morning to watch Trump speak and was thrilled to see so many supporters turning out for the president. After getting back to the West Wing, she huddled outside McEnany’s office with a few colleagues and watched the crowds arrive at the Capitol. They were excited to see so many demonstrators but knew things had turned ugly when protesters started clashing with police and rushing through the barricades and up the Capitol steps.

  Matthews appealed to two of her more senior colleagues, McEnany and Ben Williamson, an adviser to Meadows, that she thought Trump needed to say something along the lines of, “I support peaceful protesters but violence is never the answer and attacking law enforcement is unacceptable and those who are doing that need to stop.” But Trump’s tweets fell short of that. He gave no call to action to leave.

  Frustrated that her advice was being ignored, Matthews headed down to the Lower Press area. Emotional and physically shaking, she told some press staff colleagues, “Oh, my gosh, we’re not saying what we need to say right now.”

  Graham wanted to get through to the president as well. He had an idea: call Ivanka Trump. The senator rang the first daughter on her cell phone numerous times until she finally picked up.

  “You need to tell him to tell these people to leave,” Graham told her.

  “We’re working on it,” Ivanka Trump replied.

  * * *

  —

  On Capitol Hill, most of the senators, along with about fifty staff members, were together in a large undisclosed room secured by Capitol Police. They had several televisions on to watch live news coverage of the siege under way around them. Tensions were high. Romney was as upset as he’d ever been. He went up to Josh Hawley and Ron Johnson, two of the dozen Republican senators objecting to certification, and confronted them.

  “This is what you have caused,” Romney said to them both.

  Romney later recalled, “I was angry that in
the cradle of democracy . . . a process which is the center of the democratic process was being interrupted and attacked.”

  At 4:05 p.m., Biden came on the screens to deliver remarks from Wilmington. The senators stopped what they were doing and silently watched. Trump still had not appeared on camera since the siege began, but the president-elect stepped in to try to calm the nation.

  “At this hour, our democracy is under unprecedented assault, unlike anything we’ve seen in modern times,” Biden said. He added, “What we’re seeing are a small number of extremists dedicated to lawlessness. This is not dissent. It’s disorder. It’s chaos. It borders on sedition. And it must end now. I call on this mob to pull back and allow the work of democracy to go forward.”

  Biden added, “The words of a president matter, no matter how good or bad that president is. At their best the words of a president can inspire. At their worst, they can incite. Therefore, I call on President Trump to go on national television now to fulfill his oath and defend the Constitution and demand an end to this siege.”

  Watching from their secure room, the senators stood and applauded—Republicans and Democrats both. “It was like, wow, we have a leader who said what needed to be said,” Romney recalled.

  At 4:17, Trump posted on Twitter a video of remarks to the nation that he had recorded in the Rose Garden after hours of pleading from those closest to him. He began by repeating his fraudulent line that the election was rigged.

  “I know your pain. I know you’re hurt,” Trump said. “We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everybody knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order.”

  Then the president said: “We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You’re very special. You’ve seen what happens. You see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel, but go home, and go home in peace.”