Unlike many of their fellow Trump supporters, the Proud Boys failed to show up for Mr. Trump’s speech near the White House on January 6. Instead, they gathered at the Washington Monument around 10 a.m., according to one of the commission’s live witnesses. Nick Quested, a documentary filmmaker who was embedded with the group that day.
About 200 members of the group gathered that morning, Mr. Quested, and marched through the city streets, arriving at the Peace Circle on the west side of the Capitol just before 1:00 p.m., just minutes before lawmakers in the building were ready to begin ceremonial proceedings to declare the election. to certify. mr. Quested said he was surprised by the anger and profanity of the Proud Boys as the larger crowd around them turned, as he put it, “from protesters to rioters to insurgents.”
Another witness at the Peace Circle was Officer Edwards, who testified that he was in the middle of the first breach on the Capitol grounds. Mrs. Edwards described how a Proud Boys leader named Joseph Biggs encouraged another man to approach the bike rack barricade where she had been placed. That man, Ryan Samsel, she said, pushed the bike rack over, hitting her head and losing consciousness.
But before she blacked out, Mrs. Edwards recalled seeing “a war scene” play out before her eyes. Police officers were bleeding and vomiting, she recalls.
“It was a bloodbath,” she said. “It was chaos.”
Representative Bennie Thompson, Mississippi Democrat and the committee chair, apologized to Ms. Edwards for the ordeal and echoed the theme of the police standing up to defend democracy that day while Mr. Trump did nothing to blow the crowd off which he had aroused. she has suffered.
“It’s a shame you had to defend the Capitol against fellow Americans,” said Mr. Thompson.
As this was all unfolding, Mr. Trump, watching from the White House, believed his supporters in the crowd were “doing what they should be doing,” Ms. Cheney said.