The Jan. 6 committee on Thursday released previously unheard radio conversations between Secret Service officers and Mike Pence’s security as they frantically assessed whether they could safely move the then-vice president to safety as insurgents stormed the capital.
Audio played over footage of rioters entering the Capitol shed new light on how concerned the Secret Service is for the vice president’s safety, as well as their own.
“If we lose any more time, we may… lose the ability to leave. So if we’re going to leave, we have to do it now,” a Secret Service agent said in a radio broadcast.
As other agents relayed the location of the insurgents, one official asked if they would encounter insurgents if they tried to move Pence to safety in the Capitol.
The White House National Security Council listened in on the radio conversations in real time and commented on chat. One national security official wrote at 2:24 p.m.: “Capital service doesn’t sound good right now.”
The commission interviewed an anonymous White House security official who told the panel that the message reflected how panicked the Secret Service seemed at the time and that some feared for their lives.
“There was a lot of shouting. Very very personal conversations on the radio, so it was embarrassing. I don’t like to talk about it, but there were calls to say goodbye to family members and so on and so forth,” the anonymous official said in audio released Thursday.
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“I think there were discussions about reinforcements coming but again it was just chaos, they were just shouting,” the official continued. “If they’re running out of options and they’re starting to get nervous — it looks like we’re getting very close to a service that has to use lethal options or worse.”
The committee compared the sheer panic expressed by many Secret Service agents on the ground to a tweet sent by former President Trump at 2:24 p.m. — the same time security officials said the Secret Service was radioing goodbyes to their families — condemning Pence that he did not reject the results of the election.
“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what needed to be done to protect our country and our Constitution by giving states a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, rather than the fraudulent or inaccurate ones they were asked to certify before. Trump wrote.
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