On Monday, when he took the stand on behalf of the U.S. Justice Department, U.S. Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn said that nary a single Oath Keeper “helped” him on Jan. 6 and what would have helped him on that horrible day is if everyone simply would have left the building.
“I didn’t ask for any of this,” Dunn testified.
Dunn endured a wave of racial slurs as he fought for his life and for the lives of fellow officers, lawmakers, and staff inside the Capitol on Jan. 6. But he did not discuss those horrific moments for jurors. Instead, Dunn walked the court through another series of tense, high-stakes moments when he encountered several of the Oath Keepers now on trial for seditious conspiracy including former Florida Oath Keeper leader Kelly Meggs.
A key plank in Meggs’s defense, and that of his fellow Oath Keepers on trial including Stewart Rhodes, Jessica Watkins, Thomas Caldwell, and Kenneth Harrelson, has been the claim that the extremist network provided a support role to beleaguered cops on Jan. 6 and that the Oath Keepers showed up in Washington to act as a “peacekeeping” force against anti-Trump elements including leftists, supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement and “antifa.”
They have also argued that they were merely there to provide protection to certain VIPs aligned with former President Donald Trump like Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, and others.
On the day of the Capitol assault, Dunn was stationed just outside of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office when he interacted with a handful of Oath Keepers who managed to get inside the building. He was armed with an M-4 rifle but the 15-year veteran of the Capitol Police force said when the mob started to grow ever closer around him and the Oath Keepers inched closer, he kept his distance.
“I was cognizant not to get too close to these individuals,” Dunn said. “I knew it wouldn’t take much for someone to grab my rifle off me.”
Dunn admitted it was an “intimidating” situation given the sheer number of people crammed into the area he was guarding.
“But I didn’t let it affect how I did my job,” he testified.
Video played for jurors on Monday showed Dunn briefly interacting with Oath Keepers. His voice, booming in the video, sounded firm though tense.
“We have dozens of officers down, they’re taking them out on stretchers. Y’all are fucking us up,” Dunn told rioters as he repeatedly urged them to leave.
When he spoke to Meggs and Harrelson and others with them, Dunn said he told them officers were “getting the shit kicked out of them” and were hurt.
They appeared “taken aback” for a moment, Dunn recalled.
“[They were] almost humanized for a minute,” he said.
They offered to stand there and keep other rioters from going down a flight of stairs toward the lower west terrace of the Capitol, he recalled. In a moment, Dunn had to make a choice of survival.
He was severely outnumbered and just behind where he and the Oath Keepers now stood was a group of incapacitated police officers undergoing decontamination from chemical irritants doused on them earlier.
“’I don’t need your help,’ is what I thought,” Dunn testified under oath. “But I allowed them to stand there, took three steps down to create distance, and allowed time for other officers to come.”
He continued: “They said they'd stand there. It didn't make sense for me to engage them or start to fight with them, so I allowed them to stand there," Dunn recalled.
But no one was getting down that stairwell.
“Nobody,” Dunn said.
Defense attorneys for Kelly Meggs and Kenneth Harrelson peppered Dunn—who has over two years of experience as a crisis negotiator as well—with questions about his mentality during the attack.
Geyer tried to get into Dunn’s mindset on Jan. 6 and asked the officer if he felt “betrayed” during the siege and questioned whether his memory of what occurred was correct.
Dunn told Geyer in the heat of the moment, it was “just about surviving” not betrayal. Those feelings would come long afterward, he said.
But Dunn did not let Geyer get very far as he continued to suggest Oath Keepers “assisted” him.
“People tried to get past me and I stopped them. They didn’t. I did,” Dunn said.
U.S. Capitol Police Special Agent David Lazarus corroborated Dunn’s testimony. Lazarus passed Dunn three to four times as Dunn encountered the Oath Keepers on Jan. 6.
Lazarus, who was on a mission of his own to secure staffers trapped inside Pelosi’s office, told the jury each time he passed it was the same dynamic.
“The conversation was very antagonistic among rioters, people in tactical gear and Officer Dunn,” he said.
Lazarus said he never heard Oath Keepers offer to assist Dunn.
Jurors also had a chance to see video shot by Dunn on his work phone from just a day before the insurrection. Protests had formed around the Supreme Court across the street from the Capitol. A man approached Dunn and asked him if he knew where the “Oath Keepers command post” was located.
“I had no idea what this man was talking about,” Dunn told jurors.
He turned to his colleague in fact, he said, and remarked: “Oath Keepers? What the fuck are Oath Keepers?”
In addition to testimony from Officer Dunn, the Justice Department also called forward witness and Oath Keeper Graydon Young. His testimony stretched for more than an hour Monday and was at times emotionally raw.
His appearance was the second of its kind at the trial. The only other member of the extremist network who has pleaded guilty to the conspiracy charge and testified on behalf of the government is Jason Dolan of Florida. Dolan testified on Oct. 18 that it was “conquer or die” for Oath Keepers as they fought to keep Trump in the White House on Jan. 6.
Young, also a resident of Florida, pleaded guilty in June 2021 to conspiracy to obstruct Congress from certifying the election. He’s been cooperative with the government ever since. Young faces up to seven years in prison when he is finally sentenced and his cooperation may earn him leniency.
Young became overwhelmed twice on Monday, once using a tissue to wipe away tears on his face, and then, at another moment, covering his face with his hand before holding his open palm out to the court as if to ask for “a moment.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Nestler asked Young why he made the decision to come clean about his conduct on Jan. 6.
“I was guilty and I knew that,” Young said, as tears began to flow. “On a personal level, [I entered a guilty plea] to be forgiven. I needed to confess completely and wholly to be forgiven.”
Young said he felt deep shame and embarrassment after the 6th and on Jan. 7, when he and his sister , Oath Keeper Laura Steele—who awaits trial for her own role in the alleged obstruction conspiracy—returned to her home in North Carolina, they burned equipment used during the insurrection as well as clothes they wore.
“The primary reason was to destroy evidence of what we participated in, By then, my sister and I were in solid freak-out mode and scared,” he said.
The shame had finally started to seep in. Once caught, he would have to tell his family, including his own mother, about what he had done. He would also have to tell a sister about what he had done and that was particularly painful to think about, he said.
Her husband, he testified, was a police officer.
On the night of the 6th, his attitude was far different, he admitted.
He was still riding the high of what the Oath Keepers had done throughout the day. He went on Facebook that night and boasted of the “Bastille-type moment” they had, he said.
“It was exhilarating. I felt like I was going to be an important or an integral part of what was happening,” Young said.
In 1789, a prison in Paris known as the Bastille was attacked by an angry mob. The attack by citizens on the fortress-style prison represented an attack on the French government itself, Young explained under questioning.
Long before he would march on the Capitol, Young described having reservations about coming to D.C. on Jan. 6 but it was Stewart Rhodes who “re-galvanized” him on Christmas.
Would Trump stop “dithering” and do something about the stolen election, Young once asked fellow Oath Keepers in a Signal chat.
“I’m working to get him to see other options and put them on table,” Rhodes wrote of Trump on Dec. 25, 2020.
Young said it seemed as if Rhodes had a connection to Trump directly but he never saw any proof of that for himself and wasn’t sure. He assumed as leader of the organization, Rhodes had some sort of insight into what happened in Washington, D.C. Nonetheless, Young didn’t want coming to Jan. 6 to become a “fool’s errand.”
“It’s not a fool’s errand. It has benefits regardless of outcome and regardless of what we then do. Trump needs to know we support him in using the Insurrection Act. And that needs to be the message, if Congress rubber stamps an unconstitutional fraud, President Trump must defend the Constitution and we urge him to use the Insurrection Act to do so,” Rhodes told Young in a text message. “And we will support him with our boots on the ground nationwide and will protect and assist him. He needs to know that to his bones… And we need to have that message echoing off every rooftop from now until that day focus like a laser.”
Rhodes had already published two open letters to Trump by this point urging the 45th president to raise Oath Keepers as his militia in order to stop the certification.
Rhodes kept driving his point home to Young: “He needs to know if he fails to act, then we will. He needs to understand that we will have no choice.”
Young said it was in that moment that he believed their trip to D.C. was “more meaningful than I realized.”
On cross by James Lee Bright, a defense attorney for Rhodes, Bright grilled Young about the Oath Keepers mission on Jan. 6. Through questioning, Bright established that Young didn’t receive any direct orders to storm the Capitol specifically.
During his interview with the FBI in February 2021, Bright recalled, Young said when Oath Keepers got to the Capitol it was more of a “stupid, ‘let’s do this’ idea.’” Then on Monday, Young also told the defense attorney representing Jessica Watkins, Jonathan Crisp, that he did not receive specific instruction to move down a hallway toward the Senate chamber on Jan. 6.
But he knew there would be lawmakers at the end of that hallway, Young told Nestler during redirect.
Specific instructions weren’t necessarily needed because the plan was “implied.”
If an opportunity presented itself for the Oath Keepers to do something to stop the certification, they would do it, Young said.
He admitted Monday as well that when he arrived in D.C. to fight against what he then thought was a corrupt government, it was him acting like a traitor to his own government.
When court reconvenes Tuesday, prosecutors are expected to recall FBI Agent Kelsey Harris, a representative from Facebook and at least one other FBI agent. Another “civilian” witness is expected too and though prosecutors didn’t say who, it is expected this “civilian” witness will be Oath Keeper Joshua James.
James, who served as leader of the Alabama Oath Keepers division, pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy in March and could prove an extremely valuable witness for the Justice Department since James left the Capitol with Rhodes on Jan. 6 and accompanied him on a long drive to Texas.
For even more details about what happened today, check out the Daily Kos live blog or this mega-thread on Twitter:
