- Rep. Ruben Gallego says the Capitol Police were "sent to be slaughtered" on January 6, 2021.
- A former White House aide testified Donald
Trump knew there weren't enough officers at the Capitol.
Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego said Tuesday that US Capitol Police officers "were sent to be potentially slaughtered" on January 6, 2021, after a former White House staffer testified that then-President Donald Trump knew that protesters were armed and that there wasn't enough security at the Capitol.
"If it wasn't because of this brave 25-year-old woman, we wouldn't even know what was happening," the Arizona lawmaker told reporters at the surprise hearing by the House select committee investigating January 6, referring to Cassidy Hutchinson. "This is a very sad moment in our country right now."
Gallego, a US Marine veteran who instructed fellow lawmakers how to don gas masks during the Capitol attack, was one of several witnesses to the attack who expressed shock in the Cannon Caucus Room at the aide's sworn account of that day.
His remarks came after Hutchinson, an aide to the the White House chief of staff at the time, Mark Meadows, testified that Trump and his White House advisors were informed that protesters on the National Mall were armed and heading to the Capitol, where lawmakers were formalizing Joe Biden's victory over Trump in the 2020 election.
In gripping testimony before the House select committee, Hutchinson testified that Meadows and Trump seemed indifferent about the armed and angry crowd and that Trump was "furious" that the crowd area for his speech wasn't filled with people, something she said he attributed to metal detectors that would deter people carrying weapons.
At one point, she recalled Trump saying: "I don't effing care that they have weapons. They're not here to hurt me. Take the effing mags away. Let my people in — they can march to the Capitol from here. Let the people in."
During that same period, she also recalled White House staffers being told there wasn't enough security on Capitol Hill to handle the hundreds of protesters making their way to the building.
Sgt. Aquilino Gonell of the Capitol Police told Insider he felt betrayed after hearing Hutchinson recount that Trump and his staffers knew the Capitol Police were outnumbered and that Trump wanted to march with his supporters."Even if you give him the benefit of the doubt that he didn't know, he still didn't do anything to help us," he told Insider. "We wanted to lead the crowd according to the evidence put out today."
Gonell was one of the many officers injured during the January 6 insurrection while attempting to stop the Trump supporters from forcing their way into the Capitol. An Army veteran who served in Iraq, Gonnell testified before the House committee last year that he was thinking, as he struggled to breath while compressed from the crowd: "This is how I'm going to die."
More than 140 law-enforcement officers were injured during the insurrection.