24 Hours at the Capitol, page 3
Stewart Rhodes, leader of the Oath Keepers, made a speech.
THE ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE: In his speech, Rhodes called on President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to help him remain in power, adding that if he does not do so, groups such as the Oath Keepers would have to mount a “much more desperate” and “much more bloody war” to ensure that outcome.3
Then former national security advisor Michael Flynn, whom Trump had pardoned for lying to the FBI during the Russia investigation, took the stage. While he spoke, President Trump took the concept of a “drive-by” to new heights.
JACOB GLICK: Trump actually flew over it [the crowd] in Marine One.
CHIEF SUND: At 1:34 p.m., two Marine Sikorsky helicopters (the one carrying Trump designated Marine One) took flight from the south grounds of the White House. The crowd on the plaza could clearly see the helicopters as they cleared the tree line. The two massive aircraft slowly passed over Freedom Plaza, eliciting loud cheers from the crowd. They flew in tight formation around the Capitol and the Supreme Court, making several passes over the energized crowd.4
MICHAEL FLYNN, FORMER NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR, FROM STAGE: There he is! He’s a sneaky guy. But he’s a fighter.5
SANDI BACHOM: There was [also] so much of this Christo-fascism. I come up on this group at Freedom Plaza and they’re all wearing MAGA hats, and they’re chanting, “America First.” And they’re chanting, “Christ is King.” So that’s how they got all those people—there was the Christian thing that Trump was sent by Jesus.
DAVID BUTOW: I heard on several occasions through these megaphones, people say, “Donald Trump is not my God, but he is my president.” Which sounds a pretty strange thing to say. Why would you think to even come up with something like that? So I mean, that tells me that there’s—this is not just the people who are supporting him politically. This is some other level of—I mean, there’s some very, very deep-seated psychological connection with this man that’s kind of hard to understand for many of us. And then you begin to think, well, I wonder what these people are really going to do. How far are they willing to go to support his cause at this point?
Again, the violence started once the sun went down.
SANDI BACHOM: There were thousands, it seemed, of Proud Boys. And the other thing to remember is the whole city was in lockdown. The streets were barren except for the protesters.
LOUIE PALU: It was kind of like little pockets of battles all around downtown DC. I remember there were these three Proud Boys and I was beside the cops and I was taking photos with my flash and they were so pissed. They’re like, “We’re going to fucking kill you.” And one of them had a can of mace in his hand. I kind of thought, Whoa, the police aren’t even taking the mace away from them. They have bats and axes and they’re not being disarmed. They’re not like, “Hey, you’re all under arrest.” They’re just, “Hey, stay away from the armed protesters and don’t fight.” That’s all the cops were doing. I thought, How are they not arresting these guys?
And so that night when I got those death threats right to my face, the cops were like, “Hey, you should get out of here. You should take off.” I kind of felt scared. The cops knew it was going to explode.
ADAM GRAY: People were using bear spray, baseball bats, anything they could get their hands on, and they were kind of chasing each other. That was kind of the biggest street fight that I saw before January 6th, I think.
9:48 P.M.
The Proud Boys tore down a Black Lives Matter banner from a Black church and burned it in the street.6
10:02 P.M.
ADAM GRAY: You just spend so much time in protests, in crowds, you kind of get a really good sixth sense of when something’s happening, when they change their focus. And I kind of noticed people looking to the side and a lone guy was walking down the street, and the Proud Boys went over to him.
He was a person of color.
ADAM GRAY: He kind of ended up surrounded. I’m not sure why he decided to come down the street and he got surrounded and then it just descended into a fight. A Proud Boy pulled something over his head so the guy couldn’t see, and the guy pulled a knife out and stabs him whilst he has this thing over his face.
SANDI BACHOM: I didn’t hear until after it happened. There was just so much hate. All that hate had to go somewhere.
The same attacker went on to stab at least three other people.7
LOUIE PALU: I rode my bike home that night and I took the most circuitous route possible so no one could follow me home. That’s the first time where I thought, What if one of these guys follows me home?
JACOB GLICK: You have to assume, at that point, Trump was told there was violence in DC by some of the people who were at this event. But [two days later], Monday the 14th, is when the Electoral College met all around the country to actually vote. And that’s a huge blow to Trump’s efforts. And then there are several court cases that Trump loses that week of the 14th. And McConnell comes out and says the election’s over. It was a bad week.
Then, the 18th, that Friday, Michael Flynn is in the Oval Office. So you have people in the room who were also at that rally on stage with Stewart Rhodes on the 12th, and then you don’t really know what happens, but Trump sends [a] tweet out that morning, the 19th, after meeting with Michael Flynn and other people who have been at this event on the 12th.
DECEMBER 19
DONALD TRUMP VIA TWITTER, DECEMBER 19, 2020: Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!8
JACOB GLICK: He again calls out for the crowd, knowing that just a week before, they had basically engaged in vigilante violence on the streets of DC.
JANE: I remember when he tweeted that. It was not a surprise because I was kind of waiting for him to do something like that. I mean, I was waiting for it. So when I saw that tweet, it was like, Okay, here we go.
CHAPTER 3
“ONE MILLION PATRIOTS”
DECEMBER 19
Trump supporters immediately responded to their leader’s call to gather on January 6. At least a dozen permits were filed for events on January 5 and 6 in DC, including an approximately five-thousand-person rally at the Ellipse on the morning of January 6. On the far-right online forum TheDonald.win, users took Trump’s tweet to heart.
THREAD ON THEDONALD.WIN: TRUMP TWEET. DADDY SAYS BE IN DC ON JAN. 6TH.
MRMCGREENGENES: Well, shit. We’ve got marching orders, bois.
BUTTFART88: He can’t exactly openly tell you to revolt. This is closest he’ll ever get.
LISTROPOE: Then bring the guns we shall.1
TELEGRAM POST: We should march into the capital [sic] building and make them quake in their shoes2
ERIC BARBER, rioter: Trump had never asked me personally for anything. He never asked conservative America for anything, really. And he personally asked for us to come to DC that day. And I thought for everything he has done for us, if this is the only thing he is going to ask of me, I’ll do it… .
The other part was that, it kept being promoted to me as it “would be wild.” And I didn’t know what that meant, but as someone who likes to drive race cars—I like high-risk activities, I like really hardcore things—the notion of something being wild and hardcore and fun really appealed to me.3
Bobby Schornak, a thirty-nine-year-old Trump supporter from Roseville, Michigan, also answered the call.
ROBERT “BOBBY” SCHORNAK, rioter: We believed something great was going to be revealed or happen that day. I wanted to be there for that.4
TEXT FROM BOBBY SCHORNAK TO HIS BROTHER: We can’t stay home n watch our republic be stolen. They want a fight let’s have it.5
TEXT FROM BOBBY SCHORNAK TO HIS FRIEND: I’m going to DC on the 6th and I don’t expect it to be peaceful.6
Schornak asked his friend Daniel Herendeen, a forty-four-year-old construction worker from Chesterfield, Michigan, to go with him.
FACEBOOK MESSAGE FROM BOBBY SCHORNAK TO DANIEL HERENDEEN: Cant stay home, I would not be able to live w myself7
DANIEL HERENDEEN, RIOTER: That’s how I feel… . I heard it might be hard to get to DC. I go regardless.8
BOBBY SCHORNAK: Hard, nothing easy ever worth doing. Just call me bro.9 Wanna make a plan? I have next two weeks off work. Just worked every day from Thanksgiving till this Thursday. 10
DANIEL HERENDEEN: Well, the president asked us to come… . And I thought it’d be fun. I planned on going and seeing the city and everything, making a little trip out of it.11
Stephen Ayres, a Trump supporter and carpenter living in Ohio, found out about the rally from his friend Matthew Perna.
STEPHEN AYRES, rioter: He’s like, “If you want to go, we’ve got room.” I’d never been to a Trump rally before that. And I figured that was going to be his last one, him leaving from the Presidency.12
Janet Buhler, a middle-aged Trump supporter from Utah, agreed to attend the rally with her stepdaughter’s sixth husband. She wanted a chance to bond with her new son-in-law, who was also a former cop.
JANET BUHLER, rioter: He called me, like, two maybe three days before the rally—and he said, “Listen, I really want to go. And I don’t have anybody to go with. And so will you go with me?” And out of the idea of creating better relationships in the family, that’s why I went, because not everybody gets along with him. So I just thought, Okay, this will be a good way to kind of bond with him and bring the family closer together, that kind of thing.13
In the back of my mind, I wanted Congress to understand, like, how many people were there that were concerned about the election.14
Other families weren’t so thrilled that their loved ones were going to DC on January 6. When thirty-four-year-old Trump supporter Roseanne Boyland of Georgia announced her plans to go, her parents and sisters were concerned.
LONNA CAVE, Roseanne Boyland’s older sister: Roseanne was five years younger than me, so growing up we didn’t really have too much in common because of the age difference. Honestly, I always just kind of thought of her as my annoying younger sister until we got older. Then we could start going to concerts together and everything.
She’s always been super sweet and caring and helpful, just always the first one to jump if you need help moving or something, to help somebody else and not gain anything from it.
BLAIRE BOYLAND, Roseanne Boyland’s younger sister: She was older than me by three years, so we were pretty close growing up. And then when we became teenagers, she got a little too cool for me [laughs] and kind of didn’t let me hang around her and the neighborhood friends as much.
She wasn’t afraid to tell people how she felt about things, and me being a very shy person—very introverted, especially growing up—I just always looked up to her for that.
CHERYL BOYLAND, Roseanne Boyland’s mother: She had a background as a drug abuser and worked very hard to get herself off of heroin, and succeeded, which is very rare. And swore she would never ever do that again. She knew that if she ever did anything like that she would die, because so many of her friends had in the past, and she didn’t want to put anybody through that.
Boyland’s family says she got clean around 2014.
LONNA CAVE: When Roseanne was having all of her problems, I actually stopped talking to her for over a year just because I couldn’t take all of the back and forth and the drama. And then my husband’s twin brother overdosed, and that’s kind of when we started getting close again. And then when I got pregnant, then we were all in together. I think it was right then. That’s when she was like, “I’m done.”
BLAIRE BOYLAND: I feel like Lonna getting pregnant definitely cemented her staying clean too. She was so excited, just knowing she’d be an aunt and get to watch, not only Lorelei, but also Lonna’s other daughter, Annily, grow up. She was so excited to be the cool aunt to them.
CHERYL BOYLAND: Roseanne had cervical cancer and so she knew she wasn’t going to have kids. Lonna’s were her only outlet.
LONNA CAVE: Yeah, she did better than me at writing down milestones and stuff. Roseanne was always the one that wrote down stuff—”lost her first tooth”—and she was always asking after their checkups, “How tall is she? How much did she weigh?”
But then COVID hit.
LONNA CAVE: During Covid, everybody was doomscrolling on their phone. Nobody knew what was going on. Everybody was by themselves. There were no [AA or NA] meetings that she could go to. She was on Facebook a lot. I was over there swimming one day and she was talking about some Wayfair [conspiracy theory] thing. The kids were getting smuggled in these expensive furniture items, like armoire that cost like twelve thousand bucks and stuff. I kind of talked to her about it and I left, and then she texted me the next morning and was like, “Call me when you are awake.” And she had been up the whole night, just rabbit-holing through all of this: Adrenochrome, Wayfair, all of the children, Pizzagate, all of the QAnon children’s stuff. She had just gone deep. And honestly, I think Facebook is really what made it worse for her.
BLAIRE BOYLAND: The whole “Save the Children” was circulating around online, and I know there was Save the Children protests. That kind of added to the content being shared online. Coincidentally, stuff [was] going on in Roseanne’s personal life with people in real life she knew being affected by stuff like that.
Roseanne’s family members say that two of her close friends had children who had been physically and sexually abused.
BLAIRE BOYLAND: And then Lonna having our two nieces, she was just really worried about them too. So it all kind of was this perfect storm of things.
LONNA CAVE: I looked at all the hashtags that she was doing, and at the beginning it was all Save the Children, Pizzagate, blah, blah, blah, all stuff relating to kids. And then somewhere along the line it turned into Trump is the only one that can save all these kids.
I just don’t know how all of a sudden it happened, but there’s definitely a point in time when it switched from being all innocent about “saving the children” to Trump is now our savior, and he’s the only one that can save the world from these—
CHERYL BOYLAND: Pedophiles.
BLAIRE BOYLAND: And that part happened overnight, it felt like just all of a sudden.
LONNA CAVE: And that’s when she got more standoffish about it and more—not necessarily aggressive, but she didn’t want to talk about it. And we got into a couple arguments because we just couldn’t see eye to eye. I actually did some research on how to deal with people in a cult because that’s what I was worried about. If we try and probe her and try to tell her all the things that are wrong, it’s just going to push her further and further in.
CHERYL BOYLAND: She wanted to go on January 6th because she thought there was going to be mass arrests of all these pedophiles at the Capitol, and I don’t know where she got that from.
LONNA CAVE: That’s all the QAnon stuff. I was talking to her and saying it was a bad idea, blah, blah, blah. But there’s really no telling her what to do.
CHERYL BOYLAND: And my husband—all three girls and my husband have severe crowd issues. I just couldn’t imagine that she even wanted to go there. But one of the things she told me was, “Mom, I’ve done so many stupid things in my life and my president has asked people to be there, and I want to go. And if something happens to me, God forbid, at least it will be something for a cause that I believe in instead of stupid heroin or something.”
In addition to mainstream Trump supporters, the extremists were making plans, too. The militia groups were gearing up for more illicit activities. They explicitly talked about their plans to bring weapons.
OPEN LETTER FROM STEWART RHODES, OATH KEEPERS FOUNDER, PUBLISHED ONLINE, DECEMBER 23: Tens of thousands of patriot Americans, both veterans and non-veterans, will already be in Washington DC, and many of us will have our mission-critical gear stowed nearby just outside DC… . [We may have to] take to arms in defense of our God given liberty. 15
Privately, the messages among Oath Keepers were even more explicit in planning where that “mission-critical” gear would be stowed. They planned for a QRF—in military parlance, a Quick Reaction Force—of fighters with multiple guns, including an AR-style assault rifle and a shotgun.
SIGNAL MESSAGE FROM JOSHUA JAMES, OATH KEEPER: We have a shitload of QRF on standby with an arsenal.16
SIGNAL MESSAGE FROM STEWART RHODES: We WILL have a QRF. this situation calls for it.17
They discussed the logistics of transporting and activating those weapons.
MESSAGE FROM THOMAS CALDWELL, OATH KEEPER: Can’t believe I just thought of this: how many people either in the militia or not … have a boat on a trailer that could handle a Potomac crossing? If we had someone standing by at a dock ramp (one near the Pentagon for sure) we could have our Quick Response Team with the heavy weapons standing by, quickly load them and ferry them across the river to our waiting arms … if it all went to shit. 18
There’s no evidence that the boat plan materialized. Instead, they rented hotel rooms.
COURT DOCUMENTS: The Comfort Inn Ballston, in Arlington, Virginia, [was] the location that the QRF would use as its base of operations for January 6, 2021.
The Proud Boys also coordinated their operations.
MESSAGE FROM A PROUD BOY IN A GROUP CHAT: What would they do [if] 1 million patriots stormed and took the capital building. Shoot into the crowd?19
RESPONSE, UNKNOWN PROUD BOY: They would do nothing because they can do nothing.20
DECEMBER 21
Amid this planning process, the Proud Boys along with other demonstrators stormed yet another state capitol building, this time in Salem, Oregon. They carried firearms and bear spray.21
SANDEEP PRASANNA, investigative counsel for the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol: Militia groups interrupted a COVID legislative session, literally hand-to-hand combat with Oregon State police officers, militia members spraying bear spray on police officers and beating them with flagpoles.
