California Rep. Raul Ruiz was preparing for a possible mass shooting during the violent, police-aided takeover of the capitol by white seditionist supporters of impeached president Donald Trump on Wednesday. Ruiz, an emergency room physician by training and Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) chair, told NBC News that he began to plan what to do if shooting began. Who’s to blame for rioting that resulted in four deaths is clear, he also said.
“There is no doubt the president and his loyalists were inciting the violence,” Ruiz told NBC News. “They invited this. They welcomed and encouraged this to happen.” Other Latino legislators also pointed to Trump, but said congressional Republicans also had blood on their hands. Illinois Rep. Chuy García “said he’d put Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, at the top of the list of enablers in the Senate,” the report said.
Texas Rep. Veronica Escobar “thought back to the Aug. 3, 2019 El Paso mass shooting,” NBC News reported, when a white supremacist terrorist drove hours to shoot and kill Mexicans. In a series of tweets Wednesday, Escobar called the pro-Trump rioters “terrorists,” and wrote they “not only breached the Capitol and got into Statuary Hall but they were banging on the locked doors of the House Chamber as we were told by Capitol Police to get down on our knees.”
“We were told to get the gas masks under our seats ready because of the tear gas,” she continued in her tweets. “This is unfortunately the natural conclusion to what Donald Trump and his enablers have created. May God save America.”
Another member of the Hispanic Caucus, California Rep. Linda Sanchez, told NBC News that a “premonition” of violence on the day legislators were to certify the Electoral College votes of President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris led her to make her husband aware of her will. “This is a violent act,” she said in the report. “Shots were fired inside the Capitol—this is a seditious, treacherous act to delegitimize votes. All of them should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
There has been content circulating on social media of police officers sworn to protect the Capitol actively aiding these white seditionists, even taking selfies with some. “Videos showed officers stepping aside, and sometimes taking selfies, as if to usher Trump’s supporters into the building they were supposed to guard,” ProPublica reported. California Rep. Maxine Waters said she’d been warning Capitol Police of the imminent danger of white supremacist violence.
“Well, let me tell you, I suspected that something like this would take place, and I talked with the chief of police here at the Capitol about what the security plans were,” she told Los Angeles Magazine. “And the chief of police assured me that they would not even get on the plaza, let alone get in the Capitol.”
Waters said she in fact had a lengthy conversion about security, asking “30 or 40 questions about how he was going to secure the Capitol and how would he know which of these organizations would be here,” she continued. “I mentioned to him that the Proud Boys were in town and the Oath Keepers were in town and white supremacists were in town, and he assured me that not only did they have it under control they were working in cooperation with the Metropolitan police of DC. And all of that has turned out to be untrue that they really had it taken care of.”
The new Democratic Congress must investigate. “January 6, 2021 will be remembered as a dark and tragic day in American history,” Escobar continued in a tweet. “Our democracy was threatened by domestic terrorists who violently stormed the Capitol at the direct instigation of the 45th President of the United States and his enablers.”