Official: Correct.
Committee Staff: What does that mean?
Official: The members of the VP detail at this time were starting to fear for their own lives. There were a lot of—there was a lot of yelling, a lot of—I don't know—a lot [of] very personal calls over the radio. So—it was disturbing. I don't like talking about it, but there were calls to say good-bye to family members, so on and so forth. It was getting—for whatever the reason was on the ground, the VP detail thought that this was about to get very ugly.
Committee Staff: And did you hear that over the radio?
Official: Correct.
…
Committee Staff: … obviously, you've conveyed that's disturbing, but what prompted you to put it into an entry as it states there, "Service at the Capitol—"
Official: That they're running out of options, and they're getting nervous. It sounds like that we came very close to either Service having to use lethal options or worse. At that point, I don't know. Is the VP compromised? Is the detail—like, I don’t know. Like, we didn't have visibility, but it doesn't—if they're screaming and saying things, like, say good-bye to the family, like, the floor needs to know this is going to a whole another level soon.[508]
Also at 2:24 p.m., knowing the riot was underway and that Vice President Pence was at the Capitol, President Trump sent this tweet:
Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth![509]
Evidence shows that the 2:24 p.m. tweet immediately precipitated further violence at the Capitol. Immediately after this tweet, the crowds both inside and outside of the Capitol building violently surged forward.[510] Outside the building, within ten minutes thousands of rioters overran the line on the west side of the Capitol that was being held by the Metropolitan Police Force's Civil Disturbance Unit, the first time in history of the DC Metro Police that such a security line had ever been broken.[511]
Virtually everyone on the White House staff the Select Committee interviewed condemned the 2:24 p.m. tweet in the strongest terms.
