The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Bennie Thompson, didn’t realize the severity of the Jan. 6 insurrection until his wife called him. He was inside the Capitol, sitting in the upper gallery of the House, hoping for what he called a “birds-eye view of the process” and to be able to tell his grandchildren that he was there when Congress certified Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential victory.
People are breaking into the building, London Thompson told him, and it was on television. “I’m watching people climbing over the wall right now,” she said. “It doesn’t register,” the Mississippi Democrat recalled in an interview with The Associated Press. “I said, ‘You can’t break in. There’s police and barricades and a lot of things out there.’”
But it was not long before the House chamber was under siege. Police rushed Thompson and several dozen other members of Congress to another side of the gallery and told them to duck under their seats as supporters of then-President Donald Trump tried to break down the doors to the chamber below.
