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Yesterday we broke the story about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez not being in the Capitol building at the time that everything went down on Jan. 6.
That was something people hadn’t realized when she told her dramatic Instagram story of what happened that day in her experience. People assumed that her office was in the Capitol building.
But there’s another fact that’s also not been highlighted about all this: that’s the timeline and that’s important too.
According to AOC as she describes in her video at about 40 minutes in, she was in her office (which is in the Cannon building, a building about a six-minute walk away from the Capitol Building). She was excited and happy that Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock were declared the winners in Georgia the day before. She said she finished a conversation about that with her Chief of Staff at 1:01. She didn’t even say anything about knowing anything that was going on outside at that point. She then checked her phone for lunch options when suddenly the knock came on the door. Her story is that she thought it was rioters trying to get in and ran to the bathroom and then later found out it was a Capitol Police officer who seemed angry and something felt off about him. “They got inside,” she says she thought.
Let’s stop there for a moment and explain why her timeline is problematic and what was actually going on at the time.
There had been an alert sent out to evacuate Cannon because of a suspicious package which appears to have been the one at the RNC. As I said yesterday, the actual threat appears to have been greater to Republicans at the RNC than it was to AOC on that day. A bomb being at the RNC is a fact that she has conspicuously avoided mentioning while bashing and blaming the GOP for what went down.
Here’s the announcement of the evacuation and the reentry authorized.
FLASH: Capitol Police have ordered evacuations of two Capitol campus buildings — LoC Madison Building and Cannon House Office building, both just across Independence Avenue from the Capitol.
— Mike DeBonis (@mikedebonis) January 6, 2021
Here are the folks evacuating, looking more bored than terrified.
#Breaking. We have just been evacuated out of the Cannon House Office building. Capitol Police yelled “Clear the building” did not say why. Holding in a secure location. @Fox5DC pic.twitter.com/pCMLjNB0ks
— Tom Fitzgerald (@FitzFox5DC) January 6, 2021
So that’s why the building was being evacuated and why the officer came to get her, not because anyone had breached the building.
Here’s what AOC says about the officer knocking in response to OAN’s Jack Posobiec tweeting my story and to Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) remarks about there being no rioters in their mutual hallway.
People were trying to rush and infiltrate our office buildings – that’s why we had to get evacuated in the first place.
The attempts of attackers & publicly available communications show how they tried to gain access and share location info on finding members for physical harm.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 3, 2021
This is a deeply cynical & disgusting attack, @NancyMace.
As the Capitol complex was stormed and people were being killed, none of us knew in the moment what areas were compromised.
You previously told reporters yourself that you barricaded in your office, afraid you’d be hurt. https://t.co/4FyWsaXSDx pic.twitter.com/7gW6yKO9gJ
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 4, 2021
But when the knock came on her door, shortly after 1:01, no one had even breached the Capitol building yet. There was some pushing past an outer perimeter barrier at 12:53 still some distance from the Capitol building but the breach of the building didn’t come until about an hour after the officer knocked on AOC’s door. What she’s saying now is with the hindsight of what later occurred, but there was no way of knowing that people were breaching a building at that point because it hadn’t yet happened.
“As the Capitol complex was stormed and people were being killed, none of us knew in the moment what areas were compromised.” But that “moment” hadn’t actually happened yet at 1:01 p.m. No one knew any of that. The building hadn’t been “compromised” or “stormed” as of yet.
So suggesting that it had, to provide buttress for her reaction, is again manipulative.
There’s also been no public evidence that people were ever trying to storm the Cannon building, much less at 1:01 p.m. We’ve asked the Capitol Police for their records to confirm that but haven’t gotten a response yet.
As we reported, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) said that rioters never go into the hallway that she shared with AOC, she has the office two doors down from AOC.
But then AOC attacked Mace, using Mace’s legitimate feelings of concern from later in the day to attack her and suggest that she, Mace, was somehow lying about what had occurred. That’s pretty pathetic.
Now again, I’m not saying that AOC didn’t have any reason to have any concern given the tension of the day.
The basic problem seems to be she doesn’t like it when people step on her narrative with the truth.
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