Capitol Attack Anniversary: At the Capitol on Jan. 6, a Day of Remembrance and Division (Published 2022) (2024)

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Biden condemns Trump as Washington splits over legacy of Jan. 6 attack.

“The former president of the United States of America has created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election,” Mr. Biden said, standing in the National Statuary Hall, which had been invaded by throngs of Trump supporters a year ago. “He’s done so because he values power over principle, because he sees his own interests as more important than his country’s interests and America’s interests, and because his bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our Constitution. He can’t accept he lost.”

The president’s address began a commemoration that, instead of showcasing American unity against threats to democracy, only underscored just how riven the country remains a year after rioters armed with hockey sticks, baseball bats, crutches, flagpoles, fire extinguishers, bear spray and stolen police batons broke into the Capitol to disrupt the counting of the Electoral College votes ratifying Mr. Trump’s defeat.

Democrats, warning of the undiminished dangers posed by Mr. Trump and his followers, marked the anniversary with a day of events, including speeches, personal testimony, a panel of historians, videos, moments of silence and a candlelight vigil, while Republicans by and large stayed away and refused to participate.

No Republican senators showed up on the floor for a session of remarks recalling that day. Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, one of Mr. Trump’s most vocal critics, was the only elected member of her party to join a moment of silence in the House chamber, bringing along her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney.

The disparate approaches to the anniversary made clear that Jan. 6 has become just another barometer of America’s partisan divide. Democrats view the storming of the Capitol as an existential attack on the Constitution unlike any in modern times. Most Republicans would rather focus on anything else, with some convinced that Democrats are exploiting it as a weapon against them while others fear crossing Mr. Trump, who continues to dominate the party.

Feelings remained raw on Capitol Hill, a place of post-traumatic stress that has yet to fully recover from the psychological and political scars of an assault that led to at least seven deaths as well as injuries to 150 police officers. More than the usual acrimony over legislative differences, the legacy of Jan. 6 has exacerbated the toxic rift between members and staff aides on opposite sides of the aisle.

While the elaborate fencing around the Capitol has come down and the National Guard has gone home, many were on edge as the anniversary approached and security forces were on guard. Federal officials saw an uptick in online threats, including a video calling for a mass hanging of lawmakers, but cited no new, credible evidence of organized plots, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times.

Online chatter about celebrations and rallies by right-wing groups protesting what they call the persecution of the hundreds of rioters who have been arrested did not translate into large-scale events, and the day passed peacefully in Washington.

But emotions were high for Democrats who recalled the fear and dread of that day as lawmakers were rushed out of their chambers by overwhelmed police officers who could not contain rioters chanting “Hang Mike Pence” and hunting for Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont paused to compose himself as he remembered the police officer who took his arm and vowed to protect him. Representative Colin Allred of Texas, a powerfully built former National Football League player, described shedding his coat, expecting to have to physically guard his colleagues.

To emphasize the significance of the event, Ms. Pelosi hosted a discussion led by Carla Hayden, the librarian of Congress, with the historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Jon Meacham, who talked about other moments of peril, like the years leading up to the Civil War. The panel was introduced with a video specially produced by the cast of “Hamilton,” performing a song from the hit musical about the founding of the country.

“In my lifetime, this is the hardest moment for democracy,” said Ms. Goodwin. Mr. Meacham, who helped write Mr. Biden’s speech, called this moment “democracy’s hour of maximum danger” and said “it’s either a step on the way to the abyss or it is a call to arms, figuratively, for citizens to engage and say no, we are more important” than “the whim of a single man or a single party.”

The absence of Republicans indicated that 1/6 will never be remembered like 9/11, as a moment to come together. The surreal scene of Dick Cheney, himself a former member of the House, being welcomed cordially in the chamber by Ms. Pelosi and other Democrats who once deemed him a war criminal illustrated how much Mr. Trump has transformed the political dynamics of the country.

“It’s not a leadership that resembles any of the folks I knew when I was here for 10 years,” Mr. Cheney said, when asked about top Republicans and their response to the riot.

Earlier in the morning, his daughter, who serves as vice chairwoman of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot, castigated fellow Republicans for “looking the other way” rather than confronting the import of the Capitol attack.

“All of my colleagues, anyone who attempts to minimize what happened, anyone who denies the truth of what happened, they ought to be ashamed of themselves,” Ms. Cheney said on the “Today” show on NBC. “History is watching, and history will judge them.”

In the Senate chamber, Democrats assailed Mr. Trump, “the worst president in modern times,” as Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic majority leader, put it.

“It was Donald Trump’s big lie that soaked our political landscape in kerosene,” Mr. Schumer said. “It was Donald Trump’s rally on the Mall that struck the match. And then came the fire.”

Mr. Biden’s decision to go after Mr. Trump so directly broke a year of mostly silence in which he avoided acknowledging his predecessor while he tried to fulfill his campaign promise of working across party lines.

But with bipartisanship elusive and Washington stalemated, Mr. Biden dispensed with the restraint and gave the sort of full-throated denunciation no sitting president other than the voluble Mr. Trump has issued against a predecessor in modern times.

Without using Mr. Trump’s name, the president goaded him by referring to him as the “defeated former president.” He assailed Mr. Trump for encouraging supporters and then “doing nothing for hours as police were assaulted, lives were at risk, and the nation’s capital under siege.”

Mr. Biden rejected efforts since then to rewrite history and cast the attackers as patriots. “Is that what you thought when you looked at the mob ransacking the Capitol, destroying property, literally defecating in the hallways, rifling through desks of senators and representatives, hunting down members of Congress?” Mr. Biden asked. “Patriots? Not in my view.”

“Those who stormed this Capitol and those who instigated and incited and those who called on them to do so,” he added, “held a dagger at the throat of America, at American democracy.”

He repeated the imagery in vowing to safeguard the system: “I will stand in this breach. I will defend this nation. And I will allow no one to place a dagger at the throat of our democracy.”

Mr. Trump fired back in written statements from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. “This political theater is all just a distraction for the fact Biden has completely and totally failed,” he wrote. “The Democrats want to own this day of Jan. 6 so they can stoke fears and divide America,” he added. “I say, let them have it because America sees through theirs [sic] lies and polarizations.”

Mr. Biden offered his most extended rebuttal of the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, noting that multiple recounts, court battles and inquiries had turned up no meaningful fraud. He pointed out that Republicans had not challenged Republican victories for Congress and governorships based on the same balloting they claim was illegitimate in the presidential race.

Mr. Biden also touched on voting rights legislation stalled in the Senate, although he has a separate speech on the subject scheduled for next week. Vice President Kamala D. Harris, who spoke before Mr. Biden, said, “We must pass voting rights bills that are now before the Senate.”

Republicans accused the White House and Democrats of politicizing the attack to promote legislation meant to benefit their own party, and rejected Mr. Biden’s indictment of Mr. Trump. “What brazen politicization of Jan. 6 by President Biden,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina wrote on Twitter.

Mr. Graham himself broke with Mr. Trump on that day a year ago, saying, “All I can say is count me out, enough is enough.” But it did not take long for him, like most Republicans, to fall in line behind the former president again.

In a series of tweets on Thursday, Mr. Graham decried the violence on Jan. 6 but not Mr. Trump. “President Biden and Vice President Harris’s speeches today,” he wrote, “were an effort to resurrect a failed presidency more than marking the anniversary of a dark day in American history.”

Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House Republican whip, said Mr. Biden and Democrats have a “mass obsession” with Mr. Trump and were distracting from their own failures. “They just want to continue talking about Donald Trump and anything else other than the problems they created,” he said on Fox News.

Still, even as Republicans went after Mr. Biden and Democrats, no senior party leaders offered any real defense of Mr. Trump. The former president was left to be defended only by some of his most faithful fringe allies, like Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, who is under federal investigation for sex trafficking, and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a onetime QAnon follower who asserted that a California wildfire was started by a space laser controlled by a Jewish banking family.

The two lawmakers offered conspiracy theories blaming the riot on Democrats and federal authorities at a news conference and on a podcast hosted by Stephen K. Bannon, a former adviser to Mr. Trump who himself is under indictment for contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with the House investigation.

“We’re ashamed of nothing,” Mr. Gaetz told Mr. Bannon. “We’re proud of the work we did on Jan. 6 to make legitimate arguments about election integrity.”

On the steps of the Capitol, Democrats ended the day with a solemn candlelight vigil, featuring prayer and patriotic song and tributes to the police officers who defended them and in some cases lost their lives. What the nation did not end the day with was a consensus, either about what happened then or what will happen now.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Emily Cochrane and Catie Edmondson contributed reporting.

4 takeaways from the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

But Mr. Biden held on to one vestige from the past year: He still refused to call Mr. Trump by name.

Here are four takeaways from the day.

Biden takes a new, confrontational approach to Trump.

As president-elect in November 2020, Mr. Biden and his staff proceeded with the transition process by treating Mr. Trump’s attempts to reverse the election as little more than histrionics.

The calculation made back then by Mr. Biden and his advisers was that America was simply ready to move on, but on Thursday, the president was more willing than usual to address Mr. Trump’s claims, calling him a loser in the process.

“He’s not just a former president. He’s a defeated former president — defeated by a margin of over 7 million of your votes in a full and free and fair election,” Mr. Biden said. “There is simply zero proof the election results were inaccurate.”

His remarks set him down a more confrontational path with Mr. Trump, who holds a firm grip on his party and shows no sign of backing down from continuing to perpetrate a false narrative about the 2020 election. It is a development Mr. Biden spent his first year in office avoiding, but one that he seemed to embrace as a matter of necessity on Thursday.

Biden rejects working with Republicans who support ‘the rule of a single man.’

On his Inauguration Day just under a year ago, Mr. Biden promised to be “a president for all Americans. I will fight as hard for those who did not support me as for those who did.” On Thursday, he appeared not as the peacemaker president but as a leader who had a warning for Americans who attacked the Capitol in service of Mr. Trump.

“I did not seek this fight brought to this Capitol one year ago today, but I will not shrink from it either,” Mr. Biden said. “I will stand in this breach. I will defend this nation. And I will allow no one to place a dagger at the throat of our democracy.”

Mr. Biden also reserved some of his ire for elected officials. For a leader who came into office speaking poetically about the art of bipartisanship — “politics is the art of the possible,” he said early on — and about the need to heal a fractured nation, Mr. Biden suggested that he was only interested in working with Republicans who have not tied their political fortunes to the falsehoods spread by Mr. Trump.

“While some courageous men and women in the Republican Party are standing against it, trying to uphold the principles of that party, too many others are transforming that party into something else,” Mr. Biden said. “But whatever my other disagreements are with Republicans who support the rule of law and not the rule of a single man, I will always seek to work together with them to find shared solutions where possible.”

Trump — and Trumpism — is not going away.

The president’s remarks presented a stark choice: “Are we going to be a nation that lives not by the light of the truth but in the shadow of lies?” In corners of the internet governed by Mr. Trump and his supporters, the answer seemed clear.

On a podcast hosted by Stephen K. Bannon, a former Trump aide who was indicted in November for failing to comply with congressional investigators, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia deflected blame for the attack and suggested it was part of a government conspiracy.

In his own cascade of statements, Mr. Trump showed no sign that he was going to shrink from a fight. He assailed Mr. Biden for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, and even the way he delivered his Thursday remarks.

“He acts like he’s aggrieved,” Mr. Trump said in one of several statements, “but we’re the ones who were aggrieved, and America is suffering because of it.”

The Republican Party remains very much Mr. Trump’s, his lies about a stolen election a litmus test that he is seeking to impose on the 2022 primaries with the candidates he backs. He is the party’s most coveted endorser, its leading fund-raiser and the early front-runner in polling for the 2024 presidential nomination.

Mr. Trump has a rally scheduled in Arizona next week.

Republicans mostly tried to stay out of the spotlight.

Mr. Biden’s forceful condemnation of Mr. Trump was echoed by Democrats across the Capitol. Republicans were mostly absent.

Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, accompanied by her father, appeared to be the only elected Republican among dozens of lawmakers who gathered on the House floor on Thursday afternoon. Many Senate Republicans were out of town for the funeral of a former colleague.

Republicans were not totally silent. While calling last Jan. 6 “a dark day,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, said in a statement that it has “been stunning to see some Washington Democrats try to exploit this anniversary to advance partisan policy goals that long predated” the chaos at the capitol, a likely reference to a Democrat-led push for voting rights legislation.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who condemned the events of the day when they happened only to reverse course soon after, accused Democrats of politicizing the anniversary: “Their brazen attempts to use Jan. 6 to support radical election reform and changing the rules of the Senate to accomplish this goal will not succeed,” Mr. Graham said.

But there were some voices among unelected Republicans calling for something of a reckoning over the party’s support for Mr. Trump.

Karl Rove, the strategist who helped George W. Bush win the presidency twice, used his Wall Street Journal opinion column to rebuke “those Republicans who for a year have excused the actions of the rioters who stormed the Capitol, disrupted Congress as it received the Electoral College’s results and violently attempted to overturn the election.”

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A year later, the Jan. 6 attack has become just another wedge dividing the nation.

That was then. A year after the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol in which supporters of President Donald J. Trump trying to stop final recognition of a certified free and fair election burst through barricades, pummeled police officers and forced lawmakers to flee for their lives, what is most striking is not what has changed, but what has not.

America has not come together to defend its democracy; it has only split further apart. Lies and disinformation spread by the former president have so permeated the political ecosphere that nearly universal outrage has reverted to separate blue and red realities. Far from shunned for what even his own vice president deemed an unconstitutional attempt to thwart the will of the voters, Mr. Trump remains the undisputed powerhouse of his party — and a viable candidate to reclaim the White House in three years.

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Republicans and Democrats come together in Atlanta to remember Senator Isakson on Jan. 6.

In Washington on Thursday, most Republican legislators refused to take part in the commemorations of the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol by supporters of former President Donald J. Trump. But they came together at Peachtree Road United Methodist Church, in Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood, to honor Mr. Isakson.

Among the attendees were Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, and Senator Raphael Warnock, the Democrat who was elected to Mr. Isakson’s old Georgia seat last January.

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, delivering words of remembrance, acknowledged that the funeral resonated in a spirit of comity that the Senate was once known for, but that has lately become more scarce.

“I haven’t seen this big of a bipartisan group of Senators together off the floor since September,” he said. That, he said, was the date of an annual, “Johnny Isakson barbecue lunch,” a social tradition that Mr. Isakson started and that lawmakers have continued in his absence.

Former U.S. Senator Saxby Chambliss, an old friend of Mr. Isakson’s, also delivered remarks, noting that in his farewell speech to the Senate, Mr. Isakson said that he divided the world into two categories: friends and future friends.

Mr. Chambliss recalled that Mr. Isakson also quoted Mark Twain’s advice to do the right thing, on the grounds that “It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”

Mr. Isakson held firm conservative beliefs, opposing the Affordable Care Act and gay marriage, but he also bucked the party’s status quo at times, and he was not afraid to publicly criticize Mr. Trump.

Along the way, he made numerous friends in both parties; Mr. Chambliss said that former Georgia Governor Roy Barnes, a Democrat, once quipped, “If all Republicans were like Johnny Isakson, I would be a Republican.”

The pews were packed with friends and admirers from both parties, including Mr. Barnes. The top statewide elected officials in attendance included Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, both of whom are facing tough primary challenges from pro-Trump challengers.

A folk duo underscored the tone with a rendition of “Let There be Peace on Earth.” When they sang “God Bless America,” the mourners stood up en masse.

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Elevating conspiracy theories, Greene and Gaetz led the only Republican event commemorating Jan. 6.

Speaking from an office building near the Capitol, they elevated unproven conspiracy theories about the origin of the assault that sought to deflect blame from former President Donald J. Trump, such as one suggesting that federal agents stoked the violence against Congress.

There is no evidence that federal agents played any role in the assault, which occurred when supporters of Mr. Trump, who falsely claimed the election had been stolen from him, stormed the Capitol while Congress was counting the electoral votes to formalize President Biden’s election.

Still, Ms. Greene and Mr. Gaetz decried the treatment of the people charged with taking part in the riot, who are being held without bail at a jail in Southeastern Washington, D.C.

Both lawmakers are considered outliers in their party. Democrats booted Ms. Greene off her congressional committees for posting violent social media posts that predated her election to Congress, and Mr. Gaetz has been dogged by a federal child sex trafficking investigation.

But their unyielding allegiance to Mr. Trump — and their willingness to mirror his bombastic rhetoric — has won them a devoted following among hard-right conservatives across the country and online, a standing they will no doubt attempt to parlay into power should Republicans win the House later this year.

Right-wing media criticized Biden’s speech and played down the Jan. 6 anniversary.

One chief narrative on conservative platforms was the notion that Democrats and mainstream journalists had overblown the attack on the Capitol and were overly fixated on Thursday’s commemoration of Jan. 6, which marked the first interruption of the peaceful transfer of power in American history.

“Unless you were there that day, you cannot possibly understand what it was like,” the Fox News host Tucker Carlson said on Wednesday evening, mocking what he deemed an overly emotional response by reporters. “Imagine the Tet offensive, plus Falluja, plus the night before Thanksgiving at Whole Foods.”

Fox News carried Mr. Biden’s speech live on Thursday morning, along with analysis from its political staff and a report from the congressional correspondent Chad Pergram, who covered the riot in person that day. Bret Baier, Fox’s chief political anchor, cautioned that the comments of Vice President Kamala Harris, which included references to major attacks on the United States, could stoke criticism from conservatives.

“The fact that the vice president conveyed that Jan. 6, 2021 was like Dec. 7, 1941, and Sept. 11, 2001 — even for some people who are going to condemn the attacks and the riot, they’re going to find that, I think, pretty hyperbolic,” Mr. Baier said. “And for 9/11 family survivors, maybe insulting. We may see that backlash.”

Mr. Baier is set to interview Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and a sharp Trump critic, at 6 p.m. on his flagship program.

Still, there were long stretches where Fox News entirely set aside the subject of the Capitol attack. The network’s 2 p.m. hour came and went without a mention of the anniversary or of Mr. Biden’s speech, a period when CNN and MSNBC carried wall-to-wall coverage of the anniversary, including live remarks from lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Instead, “America Reports,” Fox News’s afternoon newscast, ran segments on the closure of the Chicago public school system, a possible change of venue for the Super Bowl, and ties between the billionaire George Soros and prosecutors in Chicago, San Francisco and elsewhere.

In that particular hour, even Newsmax, which is known for a more sharply right-wing approach than Fox News, ran anniversary coverage. One segment included a correspondent’s on-air reminder that Mr. Trump’s claims of election fraud were “rejected unanimously by the courts and even his own attorney general.”

One America News Network, a far-right channel carried in some 35 million households, ran a segment about “the patriotic demonstrations at the Capitol on Jan. 6” that amplified a range of conspiracy theories, including the falsehoods that the attack was predominantly peaceful and a ploy by liberals to strip patriotic Americans of their liberties. “Leftist, Media Narrative Surrounding January 6th, 2021 Simply an Excuse for Democrats to Seize Power,” read an onscreen headline.

On Wednesday, Mr. Carlson, the top-rated Fox News host, used his show to continue his revisionist approach to the Jan. 6 riot and to mock liberals and journalists who were emphasizing the significance of its anniversary on Thursday.

“Pretending that a protest was actually a failed coup is the Democratic Party’s entire strategy to win this year’s midterm election,” Mr. Carlson told viewers. “At this point, it’s all they’ve got.”

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The lawyer who helped Pence stand up to Trump is still concerned for democracy.

Violent online threats rose in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 anniversary, officials say.

Mr. Cohen said any new attacks inspired by the posts could target officials and government installations inside or outside of Washington.

“The potential threat of violence could extend beyond” the capital region, he wrote, adding the reports were “being investigated, as appropriate.”

The Capitol was heavily guarded on Thursday as President Biden and Vice President Harris arrived to deliver speeches in Statuary Hall, though not nearly at the level of protection it had in the days after the riot, when National Guard troops camped out in the hallways and protective fencing was installed.

On Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Chief J. Thomas Manger of the Capitol Police acknowledged the heightened threats, but said their departments were better prepared to confront possible threats than they were a year ago.

While most online threats turn out to be bombastic noise, Mr. Cohen singled out a few examples of online threats that F.B.I. officials found particularly worrisome.

An unknown individual on a QAnon forum posted a video online listing 93 members of Congress who voted to certify the “fraudulent” 2020 presidential election, and called for them to be strung up in front of the White House, he wrote.

The video was originally put online last month, but it was reposted multiple times on Telegram and other platforms this week, garnering about 60,000 views.

Another online post encouraged Trump supporters to assassinate Democratic political figures, including President Biden, because of a false perception that he was elected fraudulently.

Homeland Security officials have shared the information with the Secret Service, the Capitol Police and the Washington Metropolitan Police. In light of that reporting, the Federal Protective Service has also expanded patrols in and around federal facilities across the country.

The warning comes after federal officials outlined a range of potential threats associated with the commemoration of the Jan. 6 attack. That assessment found no credible or concrete evidence of an organized attempt to launch a similar attack, but also warned about the possibility of lone-wolf attacks, whipped up by misinformation and incitement to violence.

The most likely offenders would be people “who adhere to ideologies associated with promoting the superiority of the white race, militia violent extremism, and conspiracy theories, including those related to QAnon,” the Homeland Security Department concluded in that separate memo dated Dec. 30.

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The fight over American democracy and the fragility of good faith: A discussion with Times reporters.

The Cheneys, once despised by the left, are welcomed warmly by Democrats at a Jan. 6 observance.

So while Republican leaders stayed away from the remembrances at the Capitol on Thursday, Ms. Cheney — who was ousted from her leadership post for speaking out against Mr. Trump — was the only elected Republican present in the House chamber on Thursday. Most Senate Republicans issued statements and instead traveled to Atlanta to attend a memorial service for a former colleague. House Republicans remained largely silent.

“The future of the country is at stake, and there are moments when we all have to come together in order to defend the Constitution,” Ms. Cheney told reporters as she left the chamber.

Her father joined her on the House floor, as top Democrats — many of whom regarded him as a detested foe when he served under President George W. Bush — lined up to shake his hand and greet him warmly.

“It’s not a leadership that resembles any of the folks I knew when I was here for 10 years,” Mr. Cheney said, when asked about top Republicans and their response to the riot.

Asked about how they have treated his daughter, he replied, “My daughter can take care of herself.”

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‘We’re going to count those votes.’ Schumer recounts a harrowing evacuation and a resolute return.

“I’ll never forget that grip. And he said to me, ‘Senator, we got to get out of here, you’re in danger,’” Mr. Schumer recalled.

As they rushed through the halls, Mr. Schumer had to quickly change course.

“I was within 30 feet of these nasty, racist, bigoted insurrectionists,” he said. “Had someone had a gun, had two of them blocked off the door, who knows what would have happened. I was told later that one of them reportedly said, ‘There’s the big Jew. Let’s get him.’”

No Republicans attended the session, which was devoted to remembrances of the riot a year ago.

Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota and chairwoman of the Rules Committee, recalled the quick thinking of congressional aides who whisked the chests carrying electoral votes out of the chamber before the mob could seize them.

“As I stand here, I look at the faces of the staff, I remember the moment when we were pushed out of this chamber for security reasons,” Ms. Klobuchar said. “I remember the words of one staff member who yelled out, ‘Take the boxes. Take the boxes.’ She was talking about the mahogany boxes that were filled with the electoral ballots, because we knew they would be destroyed if they were left behind.”

Later, that decision would allow Republican and Democratic leaders, working together, to return to the Capitol and complete the counting of electoral votes, preserving the peaceful transfer of power.

“I remember when the leaders — Senator McConnell, myself, Speaker Pelosi, Leader McCarthy — were sent off to the secret place,” Senator Schumer said, referring to a secure location where congressional leaders are taken in emergencies. “We convened, after desperately trying to get the president on the phone to ask him to call the rioters off.”

“We spoke to the secretary of defense and the acting attorney general, but to no avail,” Mr. Schumer continued. “But then the four of us got together and said, ‘We’re going to come back. We’re going to count those votes. We’re not going to let the violent insurrectionists stop us.’ And count the votes we did.”