Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took the left’s anti-police rhetoric to a new level as she spoke about her fears during the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
In a dramatic recounting of the events of that day, Ocasio-Cortez spoke of a man who burst into her office with “anger and hostility” and made her fear for her life.
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“This is the moment I thought everything was over,” she declared. “I thought I was going to die.”
But the man wasn’t a rioter.
It was a U.S. Capitol Police officer trying to help her and her staff – and yelling instructions on where lawmakers could seek shelter as the rioters breached the nearby Capitol building.
On a day the Capitol was filled with rioters… and on a day a U.S. Capitol Police officer gave his life defending the complex from the mob… she was in fear not only of the rioters, but of the police who were protecting her.
Her comments on Instagram Live came just one day before Officer Brian Sicknick, who was killed in the riot, was honored with a memorial service inside the Capitol Rotunda attended by President Joe Biden as well as congressional leaders.
Yet rather than honor those officers who helped protect lawmakers and their staff members, Ocasio-Cortez cast a cloud of suspicion over them for the simple act of doing their job.
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At the time of her encounter, Ocasio-Cortez and her staff weren’t in the Capitol itself.
They had evacuated to hide in their offices, which in her case was at the nearby Cannon House Office Building, which is attached to the Capitol via an underground tunnel.
“All of a sudden I hear ‘boom boom boom boom boom’ on my door,” she recalled. “Then, I hear these huge violent bangs on my door and every door, like someone was trying to break the door down. And there was no voices, there were no yells. No one saying who they were, nobody identifying themselves, just boom boom boom.”
Rioters didn’t breach the Cannon building.
But police were there to protect the lawmakers, although the congresswoman claims this particular officer didn’t identify himself as he banged on the door and eventually entered.
That apparently made him just as suspicious at the rioters. She said “it didn’t feel right” when he was in her office.
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“He was looking at me with a tremendous amount of anger and hostility,” she said. “And things weren’t adding up. Like there was no partner there and no one was yelling, he wasn’t yelling ‘this is Capitol Police, this is Capitol Police!’ And he was looking at me in all of this anger and hostility.”
She admitted she might’ve “projected” onto him in the heat of the moment, but then claimed one other person in her office “was sizing him up and didn’t know if he was going to have to fight him.”
Ocasio-Cortez also tried to compare her situation – a lawmaker under the protection of a U.S. Capitol Police officer – to the other more tragic encounters with police that have happened around the country.
“[W]e couldn’t even tell, we couldn’t read if this was a good situation or a bad situation,” she said. “Like so many other communities in this country, just that presence doesn’t necessarily give you a clear signal if you’re safe or not. And so the situation did not feel okay.”
Except she was safe: The officer advised her to go to the Longworth Building, which was more secure.
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There, she sheltered in the office of Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., who was drinking a cup of coffee at the time.
“Some people were at different urgency levels,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert.