Colorado’s Jason Crow talks about pro-Trump mob rioting at Capitol

As rioters attempted to break down the doors of the U.S. House of Representatives, and police pointed their guns through the broken glass of those chamber doors, Rep. Jason Crow of Aurora was watching from the gallery.

“They evacuated the folks on the floor but those of us in the gallery actually got trapped for like 20 minutes as the rioters stormed the stairwells and the doors. So, Capitol Police actually locked the doors of the chamber and started piling furniture up on the doors to barricade them, while holding their guns out,” he recalled.

“I got into ranger mode a little bit,” the Army combat veteran said. “Most of the members didn’t know how to use the emergency masks, so I was helping them get their emergency masks out of the bags and helped instruct a bunch of folks on how to put it on and how to use it. I wasn’t going to leave the House floor until every member was gone, so I waited until we were able to get everybody out.”

The Democratic congressman, a veteran of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, never believed he would witness in America what he witnessed Wednesday: a takeover of the U.S. Capitol. “It is a very, very dark day and we have a lot of work ahead.”

“The president is directly to blame but the president has shown us for a very long time who he is,” Crow said of President Donald Trump. “His enablers, the people around him, the members of Congress, allowed us to get to this point. This is the inevitable conclusion of Donald Trump. But people let him get this far, and we have to have a very hard conversation about why and how.”

The attack on the Capitol, which forced Colorado members of Congress to flee into more secure locations, was condemned by members of both political parties. Republican Rep. Ken Buck wrote on Twitter, “Violence and anarchy must be condemned, we are a nation of laws. Law enforcement must end this now.”

Rep. Ed Perlmutter, an Arvada Democrat, said in an interview from an undisclosed location that he felt sad at the day’s events.

“Over the course of the last month or so, you could see this building. I didn’t expect it would get to this level but it has,” the congressman said.

“I think the president has fomented this. There have been 60 court cases, counts and recounts, and he lost. He lost the popular vote, he lost the electoral vote, and over the course of the history of the country, when somebody has lost, everything moves forward, the new administration comes in on January 20th. I don’t think we’ve seen this kind of resistance to election results before. This is a shame.”

Soon before the House was evacuated, Rep. Joe Neguse, a Lafayette Democrat, and Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Rifle Republican, debated whether to certify the election results in Arizona, with Neguse in favor and Boebert objecting.

“Madam speaker, I have constituents outside this building right now,” Boebert yelled on the House floor. “I promised my voters to be their voice.”

Colorado Democrats were unsparing in not only their denunciations of the rioters, but also in their denunciations of the president’s rhetoric which preceded the riots.

“This isn’t a protest. This is an attempted coup,” said Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Denver. “I never thought we’d see such anarchy spurred by our own president.”

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