Video shown during the House select committee hearing Thursday shows how House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others spent the time in hiding.
It is understandable that a House committee tasked with detailing a violent attack on the House of Representatives should spend some amount of time articulating the threat they themselves faced. For the most part, the House select committee probing the attack at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, has largely focused elsewhere, discussing the threat to themselves far less often than the threat the day’s violence posed to American democracy.
On Thursday, though, during what is likely to be the committee’s last public hearing, several minutes were devoted to showing a specific facet of how the threat to legislators unfolded. For the first time, Americans were given a look at what congressional leaders were doing as the rioters ransacked their offices and rifled through their desks.
The footage began with the initial evacuation of House members out of the chamber. Not all were immediately evacuated; photos of legislators huddling for safety in the chamber’s balcony are an important part of the historical record of the day. But leaders including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) were removed to a safer, unidentified position.
The video shown by the committee included only snippets, a segment of professionally filmed interactions or phone calls. Those were interspersed with footage showing what was happening in and around the Capitol itself: police being beaten, protesters loudly seeking out Pelosi herself.
