Mitt Romney asked Utah's governor during the Capitol riot to get state police to evacuate his family from his Salt Lake City home, book says

• Sen. Mitt Romney was worried about the safety of his family in Utah when rioters stormed the Capitol.
• He asked Utah's governor to dispatch state police to his home outside Salt Lake City, a new book says.

During the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah's safety concerns were more than 2,000 miles from the Senate hearing room where he waited out the riot with colleagues.

Worried about his family, Romney called Utah's governor, Spencer Cox, on his personal cellphone to ask him to dispatch the state police to his home outside Salt Lake City, according to the new book "This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future."

"There were some reports that there were protesters heading to the Romney home — their personal home," Cox told authors and New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns. "I immediately got the highway patrol there and we got the family out of there."

During the 2016 election, Romney, a former Massachusetts governor elected in Utah to the US Senate in 2018, was fiercely critical of then-candidate Donald Trump, calling him a "phony" and a "fraud."

And in February 2020, Romney earned the distinction of becoming the first senator to vote in favor of removing a president from his own party from office because of what he described as Trump's "appalling abuse of public trust." He voted to convict Trump for abuse of power for withholding nearly $400 million in military aid from Ukraine and pressuring Ukrainian officials to investigate the Biden family.

Romney's request to Cox during the January 6 insurrection wasn't "overheated or panicked," since the immediate threat was in DC, according to the book. But MAGA activists had been targeting Romney on social media for months, the authors wrote, given that he was the most "recognizable Republican dissident in the country."

"Even before the riot, he had already been berated on airplanes by seething Trump fans," the authors wrote.

When the Capitol was breached, Romney avoided the mob of insurrectionists by mere seconds because he was redirected by US Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman. "This is what the president has caused today, instigating this — this insurrection," Romney told his colleagues in the Senate hearing room, according to Burns and Martin.

Romney called the insurrection "heartbreaking" in a speech when he returned to the Senate chamber. "I have 25 grandchildren. Many of them were watching TV, thinking about this building, whether their grandpa was OK. I knew I was OK," he said.

"What happened here today was an insurrection incited by the president of the United States," he added.

Romney was among seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump in his impeachment trial in connection with the Capitol insurrection.

The Utah senator's office did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.