A ‘nightmare’ scramble to safety
Bay Area Democrats recount horror of Wednesday’s riot
U. S. Rep. Mark DeSaulnier feared he and two aides might be taken captive by the mob raging outside the door. Rep. Anna Eshoo spent five hours in a windowless room, wrestling with spotty cell service to assure her frantic family that she was safe. San Mateo
Rep. Jackie Speier’s mind traveled back to 1978 and Guyana, when she was shot five times by armed devotees of cult leader Jim Jones and her boss, Rep. Leo Ryan, was killed.
The lawmakers shared those harrowing memories less than 24 hours after they fled into barricaded rooms, under attack and fearing for their lives as violent supporters of President Donald Trump stormed into the U.S. Capitol and breached the Sen
ate chamber and several congressional offices. But with those immediate dangers now past, members of the Bay Area’s allDemocratic House delegation also discussed Thursday the steps they believe must be taken to restore respect for American government — including taking action against Trump.
East Bay Democrat DeSaulnier said he was among the last members of Congress to reach the safe
room where many of his colleagues were taken after the House chamber was evacuated. He had been participating in a vote to certify Joe Biden as the next president from a separate room, just off the chamber, as a COVID-19 precaution because he fell seriously ill with pneumonia and spent three weeks in an intensive care unit last year.
That room would become his refuge and hiding place after a voice came over the building’s loudspeaker with a warning: “Lock your doors, shut your lights off and be quiet,” said DeSaulnier, who is still in Washington D.C. Then, he said, “We could hear the confrontations in the hallway right outside the house chamber.”
The lawmaker said he worried that he and the staffers “might be taken” by the rioters.
His fears might have been well- founded. Photos from the scene showed one rioter inside the Capitol was carrying a bundle of zip ties.
The congressman said the room had afforded him what is normally a postcard view down the National Mall toward the Washington Monument. But that bucolic view turned into a hor
ror show Wednesday afternoon.
“I could watch the television — hear president Trump, what he was saying, riling them up — then watch them come up toward us,” DeSaulnier said of the frothing crowd of Trump loyalists.
He watched as the demonstrators pushed through barricades and clashed with overmatched police near temporary bleachers set up for President- elect Joe Biden’s inauguration later this month.
“You just can’t believe that all of this is happening,” DeSaulnier said. “And that it’s happening to a
building that, to my way of thinking, is sacred.”
DeSaulnier said he fully supports efforts to remove Trump from office.
“It just makes me so angry and so determined that the people who did this need to be brought to justice, including the person who incited this,” he said of Trump. “He tried to overthrow the country, he tried to overthrow the United States government. … You can’t just let this go.”
The assault on the Capitol rattled even veteran lawmakers.
“I think we’re all traumatized,” said Eshoo, a Palo Alto Democrat. “If I had a
bad nightmare, it wouldn’t have captured what we experienced yesterday.”
Eshoo was en route to the House gallery from her office building when police came running toward her, shouting “go back, go back,” she recalled in an interview Thursday from Washington.
The congress woman made her way with a couple of staffers to a windowless interior room in another office building, where she spent five hours holed up with Rep. Mike Thompson of Napa “watching in horror as the mob breached the Capitol.”
With nothing but a livestream of the chaos around her, a few bottles of water, her voting card and spotty cell service, Eshoo scrambled to reassure hysterical family members that she was all right.
Eshoo said she agrees that the president needs to be removed but doesn’t hold out a lot of hope that Vice President Mike Pence will use his constitutional powers to boot Trump.
“If I could impeach him right now, I would,” said the congresswoman, adding that although she was scheduled to f ly home Thursday evening she was prepared to return to Washington if necessary.
Eshoo also blasted the Capitol Police, calling their lackluster response a “failure across the board” and describing the barricades outside the Capitol complex “like doggy doors … it was like, ‘ Welcome, I’m taking you on a tour.’ ”
Lawmakers, she said, had gotten a detailed memo about street barricades and procedures, but when she arrived and looked across the Capitol Hill plaza, “I thought, where is everyone?”
“I had a very eerie feeling. … I just kept pushing that bad feeling away,” she recalled.
Wednesday’s mob violence brought up painful memories for Speier, a San Mateo Democrat who was shot and left for dead during a 1978 fact-finding mission into the human rights abuses being carried out by Jones, a charismatic cult leader whose many devotees left everything behind in the Bay Area to follow him to Jonestown, Guyana.
“More than 40 years ago, as I lay bleeding from five gunshot wounds on an air strip in the Guyanese jungle not knowing if I would live or die, I swore that if I did survive I would dedicate my life to public service,” Speier, who was en route back to the Bay Area on Thursday and unavailable for an interview, wrote in a late Wednesday statement. “I thought of that moment today, when the U. S. Capitol was stormed by a mob of Trump rioters emboldened by the President fomenting a coup d’état.”
“The president must be immediately removed under the 25th Amendment,” Speier said. “His words and deeds have encouraged a violent insurrection and he presents a direct and deadly threat to our democracy and the rule of law.”
Rep. Zoe Lofgren of San Jose, who also supports removing Trump from office, said she wants to help organize a review of security at the Capitol.
“We can’t allow terrorists to come in and invade the Capitol of the United States,” L ofg ren said. “We’ve got to prevent that from happening again.”