Leading the news: “I was slipping in the blood of the people,” said U.S. Capitol Officer Caroline Edwards, believed to be the first officer to be injured on Jan. 6.
“It was a massacre. It was chaos. I can not even describe what I saw.” The Jan. 6 commission also played a video showing Edwards being pushed to the ground by rioters, banging her head on the steps of the Capitol where she fell unconscious. Edwards was shaken by the attack and fainted for months after the uprising, the New York Times reported.
British documentary Nick Questt, who watched the right-wing extremist group Proud Boys, also described what he saw on January 6, saying the crowd had turned “from protesters, rioters, insurgents”.
“I was surprised by the size of the group, the anger and the swearing,” he testified. Quested also described being “confused” that “a few hundred proud boys were walking to the Capitol” before Trump’s speech. “I was somewhat confused because we were moving away from the president’s speech because that’s how I felt we were there to cover it up,” Quested said.
The big picture: The testimony of two eyewitnesses set the stage for the commission’s argument that the uprising “was the result of a concerted effort to overthrow the 2020 election results and stop the transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden” “, Says Axios Alayna Treene.
The Jan. 6 committee chairmen, Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) And Vice President Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), Linked Trump to the events of that violent day. “President Trump called the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack,” Cheney said. “January 6 was the culmination of a coup attempt,” Thompson said.
What follows: Thursday’s Watergate primetime hearing was the first in a series of public hearings scheduled for the rest of the month.
The committee has scheduled the next hearing for June 13 at 10 a.m.
Go deeper … January 6 committee shows behind-the-scenes video of Bill Barr’s deposition
