Peninsula Congresswoman Recounts Assault On U.S. Capitol

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Even for a congresswoman who does not scare easily, being inside the Capitol building as it was stormed by rioters Wednesday elicited some fear.

Rep. Jackie Speier, D-San Mateo, described the experience in an interview with ABC 7 from her office inside the building just hours after a mob incited by President Donald Trump burst through the Capitol building.

Being in the epicenter of one of the darkest days in American political history was no humdrum affair to be sure, and Speier acknowledged that lying on the floor as rioters were heard pounding on the doors to the House floor left her feeling “anxious.”

But to hear her tell it, the experience didn’t generate the type of off-the-charts fear meter reading one might expect.

Surviving the 1978 Jonestown Massacre, it seems, will have that effect

“I certainly was anxious,” Speier said of the chaos that unfolded in the Capitol Wednesday, “but I knew that we did in fact have the police officers there who could in fact use their guns if they needed to.”

That wasn’t the case when Speier was shot five times and left for dead on an airport runway in Guyana, South America, where she had been sent to investigate a religious cult leader.

Speier was part of a group ambushed by the cult leader’s loyalists. Her boss, Rep. Leo Ryan, was killed. More than 900 were killed including some 300 children at Jonestown amid a murder-suicide pact with Jim Jones and his followers in which they drank cyanide-laced drinks.

“I certainly had a flashback, I have to be honest with you, but when we were on that airstrip, we had no police officers with us, we had no guns, so we had no way to protect ourselves,” the 70-year-old congresswoman said.

“There was a sense that unless this was a cavalcade of terrorists with guns that we would be secured.”

Congress was debating a GOP-led effort to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s Nov. 3 election victory based on Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud Wednesday when the riot broke out.

Speier sensed something wasn’t right when she saw House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Whip Steny Hoyer escorted from the gallery.

“I knew something was happening,” Speier said.

An announcement followed shortly afterward that the Capitol had been breached. Lawmakers were advised to remain seated and advised to pull out gas masks from under their seats.

“I’ve never known that they were there, but they are there for precisely for circumstances like that,” she said.

Speier showed viewers the small box wrapped in white packaging containing the mask.

“Then when you open it up you can hear this thing taking off,” she said, as a drone sound is heard.

At one point Speier heard a shot fired.

Speier is among a growing number of mostly Democratic lawmakers calling for Trump’s removal from office in the aftermath of Wednesday’s rioting.

At least one Republican, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, has joined in those efforts, CNN reports.

“He has only been back in Washington for six days and look at what’s happened. I do not believe that it is safe for our country,” Speier said.

“He continues to lie with such alacrity that he has to be stopped. I’m afraid of what he’s going to do in the next two weeks."

Speier noted that it was Vice President Mike Pence, not Trump

Who authorized the National Guard in D.C. to quell Wednesday’s chaos.

“That would suggest to me that the president has washed his hands clean…He takes some sadistic like to the fact that all these people with Trump signs are coming up to the Capitol and making themselves heard. I actually think that he relishes it.”

Speier called the rioters “domestic terrorists” who she said were incited by the president.

“The Capitol hasn’t been breached since 1814 when the British came in and burned the Capitol down. And now we have Americans who think that they can violate the law, that they can take unlawful acts, they can take property from the Capitol and that’s OK, and a president that frankly incited them to do just that," she said.

Speier said she believes Wednesday’s events have shaken Washington.

“Certainly, the day’s events have sobered up some of my colleagues who thought this political theater was good for them and their base,” she said.

“I don’t know how anyone can look at what happened here and suggest that somehow this is good for America.”