Protesters loyal to President Trump stormed the Capitol on Wednesday, halting Congress’s counting of the electoral votes to confirm President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory as the police evacuated lawmakers from the building.
Around 2:15 p.m., as the House and Senate debated a move by a faction of Republicans to overturn the election results, the proceedings ground to a halt as security rushed Vice President Mike Pence out of the Senate chamber and the Capitol building was placed on lockdown, with senators and members of the House locked inside their respective chambers. Shortly afterward, the police escorted senators and members of House from the building to others nearby, as the protesters swarmed the hallways just steps from where lawmakers were meeting, carrying pro-Trump paraphernalia.
The extraordinary day in Washington laid bare deep divisions both between the two parties and within Republican ranks, when the ceremonial counting of electoral votes that unfolds every four years in Congress was transformed into an explosive spectacle, with Mr. Trump stoking the unrest.
“This is what you’ve gotten, guys,” Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, yelled as the mayhem unfolded in the Senate chamber, apparently addressing his colleagues who were leading the charge to press Mr. Trump’s false claims of a stolen election.
After exhorting his supporters to go to the Capitol to register their discontent on Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump tried later in the day to tamp down on the violence.
“Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement,” he tweeted. “They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!”
In a scene of chaos and confusion seldom witnessed in the history of the capitol, hundreds of protesters barreling past fence barricades outside the Capitol and clashing with officers — with shouting demonstrators mobbing the second floor lobby just outside the Senate chamber as law enforcement officials placed themselves in front of the chamber doors.
Representative Nancy Mace, a freshman Republican from South Carolina, described seeing protesters “assaulting Capitol Police.” In a Twitter post, Ms. Mace shared a video of the chaos and wrote, “This is wrong. This is not who we are. I’m heartbroken for our nation today.”
Other Republican lawmakers, locked inside the Capitol, used their Twitter feeds to urge the protesters to be peaceful.
“This is a coup attempt,” Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, said.
The police fired what appeared to be flash-bang grenades. Rather than disperse, the protesters cheered and shouted, “push forward, push forward.” One protester shouted, “that’s our house,” meaning the Capitol. Other protesters repeatedly shouted, “You swore an oath.”
As officers and protesters clashed outside, lawmakers had debating an objection to the certification of Arizona electors, ensconced in their respective chambers. Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, warned of a “death spiral” for democracy, while Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, listed a litany of accusations of election fraud with little evidence.
“I don’t recognize our country today, and the members of Congress who have supported this anarchy do not deserve to represent their fellow Americans,” said Representative Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia.
Kevin McCarthy, the top Republican in the House urged the protesters to be peaceful.
Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington put a curfew in place from 6 p.m. Eastern Wednesday to 6 a.m. Thursday.
— Nicholas Fandos, Emily Cochrane, Eileen Sullivan, Glenn Thrush and Zolan Kanno-Youngs
/https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%2Fimages%2F2021%2F01%2F06%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2F06transition-pence%2Fmerlin_182046861_42c4cbb8-9555-40d0-b961-01b773f184f8-articleLarge.jpg%3Fquality%3D75%26auto%3Dwebp%26disable%3Dupscale){kind=spacer}
Vice President Mike Pence, in a bold statement on Wednesday afternoon, rejected President Trump’s pressure to block congressional certification of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the presidential election, claiming that he lacked the “unilateral authority” to decide the outcome of the presidential election.
“As a student of history who loves the Constitution and reveres its Framers,” Mr. Pence wrote in a two-page letter, “I do not believe that the Founders of our country intended to invest the vice president with unilateral authority to decide which electoral votes should be counted during the Joint Session of Congress, and no vice president in American history has ever asserted such authority.”
The letter was released by the White House as Mr. Trump was speaking to a group of supporters at the Ellipse, where over and over he implored Mr. Pence to have “the courage to do what he has to do.”
Mr. Pence does not have the unilateral power to alter the results sent by the states to Congress.
But Mr. Trump, listening to the advice of allies like Rudolph W. Giuliani, his personal lawyer, has been convinced that the vice president could do his bidding. “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election,” Mr. Trump said Wednesday, claiming inaccurately that the vice president has “the absolute right to” throw out the election results.
Mr. Pence’s defiance — the first in his four years as a deferential No. 2 — created a remarkable and uncomfortable split screen, as the president continued the public pressure campaign even as Mr. Pence arrived at the Capitol to preside over a joint session of Congress where the Electoral College vote will be certified.
On Tuesday night, after The New York Times reported that the vice president in a private meeting had informed Mr. Trump he did not have the authority to change the results of the election, Mr. Trump released a statement disputing the story. “He never said that,” the statement said. “The Vice President and I are in total agreement that the vice president has the power to act.”
The vice president’s advisers have been eager to find some middle ground where Mr. Pence could mollify Mr. Trump by acknowledging some of his concerns. In the letter, Mr. Pence indicated that he shared the president’s concerns about “integrity of this election” and would make sure that challenges received a “fair and open hearing” in Congress.
Releasing the letter ahead of his arrival at the Capitol took some of the drama and suspense out of Mr. Pence’s largely ceremonial role, and the swirling questions about how he would play the awkward moment. But his aides expected him to be on the receiving end of the president’s ire for not complying with his wishes. They expected him to underscore his loyalty to the Trump agenda in other ways, over the coming days.
On Wednesday, Kelli Ward, who chairs the Arizona Republican Party, also joined a group of far-right Republicans that petitioned the Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito to grant Mr. Pence the authority to reject some state electors, after lower courts rejected the request. One of the attorneys who wrote the petition is Sidney Powell, a longtime member of Mr. Trump’s legal team.
/https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%2Fimages%2F2021%2F01%2F06%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2F06transition-briefing-trump-sub%2Fmerlin_182045205_bf2842dc-b0a9-4215-876c-612302abc8de-articleLarge.jpg%3Fquality%3D75%26auto%3Dwebp%26disable%3Dupscale){kind=spacer}
President Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to illegally throw the 2020 election his way, excoriated Republicans, the news media, Democrats and the U.S. electoral process in a speech before a crowd of supporters on the National Mall on Wednesday.
“We will never concede,” said Mr. Trump at a rally aimed at protesting the results of the election, in which President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. got more than seven million votes more than Mr. Trump did and received 306 electoral votes.
The rally began on an off-note when Mr. Trump started talking but his microphone wasn’t working. People in the crowd shouted that they couldn’t hear him, until the microphone suddenly came to life as Mr. Trump was midway through his first of many complaints about the news media.
From there, he went on to describe nearly everything and anyone he sees as critical of him as “corrupt” in one way or another.
Mr. Trump began speaking almost exactly an hour before the start of a joint session of Congress, during which the Electoral College votes are to be certified. Mr. Pence’s constitutionally-mandated obligation is to oversee the proceedings in a ministerial role.
“I hope Mike is going to do the right thing,” Mr. Trump said. “I hope so, I hope so, because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election.” He added, “one of the top constitutional lawyers in our country” told him Mr. Pence has “the absolute right to” throw out the election results.
But he does not have the power to toss the results or alter them, despite Mr. Trump’s repeated insistence that he does. The president maintained he would be following the Constitution if he sent the results back to the states to be recertified.
In fact, there is no precedent for what Mr. Trump is demanding and Mr. Pence has made clear to the president he does not have the ability to do so, according to people briefed on their conversations.
“Mike Pence has to agree to send it back,” Mr. Trump told the crowd, prompting chants. Later, he conceded he would be “very disappointed” in Mr. Pence if he does not do so.
He insisted the country’s elections are worse than third-world nations, a statement that would be welcomed by authoritarians in countries around the globe.
He addressed the widely-criticized call with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, which took place on Saturday and a recording of which was made public, in which the president urged Mr. Raffensperger to “find” additional votes to allow Mr. Trump to win the state. “People loved that conversation,” he said.
The Republican governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp? Mr. Trump said he should be voted “out of office, please.”
At one point during the rally, Mr. Trump conceded that the two Republican candidates in the Georgia runoffs on Tuesday, Senator Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, whose Senate term ended Sunday, had lost their races, saying they “didn’t have a shot” as he continued with baseless allegations of electoral fraud and theft.
At other points, he complained that he has no control over the three U.S. Supreme Court justices he appointed. And he complained about the former attorney general, William P. Barr, saying he had liked him, “but he changed, because he didn’t want to be considered my personal attorney.”
He also attacked Representative Liz Cheney, Republican from Wyoming and the party’s third-ranking House leader, who has criticized his efforts to undermine the election, saying she wants to keep U.S. soldiers in foreign countries. “The Liz Cheneys of the world” need to be voted out, he said.
Time and again he returned to the theme that the news media is “the biggest problem we have in this country.” He complained about polls conducted for the Washington Post several months ago, speaking with specifics about the poll he was referring to.
Talking about his inability to get his unvarnished statements into news circulation, Mr. Trump falsely declared, “That’s what happens in a communist country.”
Read on NYTimes
