DeLauro speaking with the Independent from her House office before returning to the floor; newly discovered gas mask is at her right.
Gunshots rang out. Rosa DeLauro dialed her husband — and made sure not to start out by saying, “I love you.”
She didn’t want to scare him.
“That would hearken to 9/11,” when passengers called their loved ones before their plane crashed, DeLauro recalled.
Her husband, Stanley Greenberg, answered the call.
“I’m OK,” DeLauro told him. “We’re safe. Call the kids.”
Before hanging up, she then felt it safe to say, “I love you.”
At the time, DeLauro, New Haven’s U.S. Congresswoman, was in the midst of an insurrection. Capitol police had ordered DeLauro and her fellow representatives to hit the floor. No one was sure how they were going to get out and to safety.
DeLauro recounted her dramatic rendezvous with history in a conversation with the Independent Wednesday evening as she prepared to rejoin her colleagues in the House to resume the counting of electoral votes to declare Joe Biden and Kamala Harris the next U.S. president and vice-president.
She spoke from her office in the Rayburn building. She was indeed safe. Now.
Her safety was less clear six hours earlier.
DeLauro was in the House’s third-floor gallery at the time, social distancing as House members debated a challenge to certifying the electoral votes cast by the state of Arizona.
“All of a sudden,” she recalled, “there was a flurry of activity.” She saw Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi, James Clyburn, and Steny Hoyer being removed from the chamber.
Hmmm. “Clearly, something was happening.” But what?
“The Capitol police came to the podium,” she said. “They said, ‘Relax. We’re going to resume the debate.”
They returned to to the podium moments later to report that rioters had amassed in the rotunda outside. “They’re heading for the chamber,” police reported. So police were preparing to use tear gas.
“Grab the gas mask under your seat,” the police instructed the Congress member.
Gas mask? DeLauro never knew there were gas masks under the seat.
She removed the gas mask. She’d never put on one on before.
DeLauro in the House gallery Wednesday right before chaos erupted.
Before she had a chance to figure it out, the group received new instructions: “You’ve got to go. We’re got to get you out of here. They’re swarming the hall.”
Security locked the doors. They barricaded the two main doors.
“Rioters broke the glass on the doors,” DeLauro recounted. “Then they started to fire in. There was an exchange of gunfire.”
DeLauro and others were led to the top row of the gallery. Then came a command: “Hit the floor!’
For 15 to 20 minutes, they remained there. That’s when DeLauro called her husband.
“We were all trying to watch out for one another,” she said.
She and Texas U.S. Rep. Lizzie Fletcher gave each other a thumbs up.
“I knew,” DeLauro said, “I was in a very potentially dangerous situation.”
A door opened.
“Ok,” security informed the members. “You gotta move.”
“I’ll stand with you,” second-term U.S. Rep. Lou Correa of California told DeLauro. “Come let me help you.”
The members were led downstairs to a secure room. Aka “an undisclosed location.”
They spent hours there. They had water. They had goldfish — the cracker kind. And that was it. DeLauro, who had eaten nothing but Cheerios that day, had three bags of goldfish.
She did some work. She called back her husband to inform him all was calm.
By 8:15 p.m., when DeLauro spoke with the Independent, law enforcement had finally cleared the Capitol of the armed, Confederate-flag-waving mob Donald Trump has dispatched to the building. DeLauro was back in her House office, preparing to return to the gallery to join her colleagues in completing the act of certifying the presidential election.
“We’re going back. We have to go back,” she said. “This was an attempted coup, an attempt to take down the federal government, which was instigated by the president of the United States.”
Some of her colleagues were suggesting impeaching Trump immediately. Or called for the invocation of the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.
DeLauro embraced the call — not for a specific method, but “whatever means” to ensure Trump is “removed as commander in chief” for the final two weeks of his term.
“We need to move and move rapidly,” DeLauro said. “He incited an insurrection and an attempted overthrow of the government. He put everyone in danger.”