Scott Wong, a reporter for The Hill, witnessed the insurrection unfold in real-time.
It’s hard to believe that the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a group of pro-Trump supporters happened a year ago, but for The Hill reporter Scott Wong, it’s nowhere near a distant memory.
On the morning of the assault, he distinctly remembers his wife questioning whether it was really safe to be going in that day amid concerns about a Covid-19 outbreak and reports of protests over the results of the 2020 election. “My wife’s instincts were correct that day, but I had a job to do,” Wong tells KCM.
Like lawmakers, other journalists, and Americans across the country, he never believed that such a violent attack was even possible in the first place. For one thing, the Capitol was one of the most secure buildings if not the most secure building in the country.
That’s part of what made the mob of more than 700 rioters who stormed the Capitol not only shocking but also extremely confusing even for those inside. “We had no visibility of what exactly was happening outside, and so I’ve been sort of describing it as the fog of war,” Wong says. “You were hearing a lot of things, you were seeing bits and pieces of things happening, but you had no real sense of the enormity of the attack.”
At the time of the insurrection, Wong and a handful of other reporters were two floors down from the House chamber in an area known as the Capitol Visitor Center, where they had been covering the electoral vote count, and formal declaration of the victory of President Joe Biden. Up until that point, this process had merely been a formality, but due to efforts to undermine the election by former President Trump and many Republicans, it had become a spectacle.
“We knew that it was going to be a spectacle on the House and Senate floors,” he says. “Little did we know that the real spectacle would be outside the Capitol as hundreds of police officers were battling these violent rioters.”
Before long, Wong was becoming the eyes and ears as rioters stormed Capitol Hill — literally. Since cameras and the media for the most part had been set up inside to cover the certification of the election, people even inside the Capitol didn’t know what was going on, and so Wong began spreading the word via Twitter, even phoning in to CSPAN at one point for a live on-air interview. “The CSPAN feed goes to every office in the building,” he explains. “So, what I was seeing in the Capitol was being conveyed to every congressional office in the Capitol complex.”
Though he didn’t hear gunshots or broken glass, he came face to face with one rioter who was being taken away in handcuffs, screaming, “See how you treat your patriots!” He didn’t understand the gravity of the situation until he saw a group of officers heading toward them and shouting at them to run. “That was pretty terrifying because they looked like they were running for their lives and they’re yelling at you to run; not really telling you where to run, but just saying run as fast as you can,” he recalls. “That’s a pretty shocking experience.”
Shortly after that, Wong witnessed a fellow reporter helping an officer who was screaming out in agony because he had been temporarily blinded by some kind of spray (he believes it was either pepper or bear spray). “Even though we were far removed from most of the fighting, there were instances where the violence came to us, even though we were sort of tucked away in the back of the basement of the Capitol,” he says.
Unlike some of the lawmakers’ offices, the basement didn’t have a lock on the door, so he and fellow reporters were thinking through scenarios in case the rioters came down to the basement. “It was a harrowing experience and one that we all sort of experienced together,” he tells us.
Due to security reasons, Wong says he and fellow reporters weren’t able to go home until midnight, and he wasn’t even able to hug his family following the ordeal due to concerns about potential Covid-19 exposures during the hours-long lockdown.
Even though a year has passed, Wong emphasized that there’s still a lot we don’t know about the lead-up to that day. After all, the House Select Committee’s investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is still in full swing. First established in June, the panel has been tasked with investigating the facts surrounding the brutal assault and then using them to inform a formal congressional report. While we don’t know when the findings will be drafted, Wong expects the panel to complete their findings before this year’s midterm elections.
So far, the panel has come a long way: lawmakers have already talked with more than 300 people, issued over 40 subpoenas, and held a public hearing that included emotional testimonies from the police officers who fended off attackers that day. While Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows and White House adviser Steve Bannon are among the more well-known figures named in the probe, Wong says there’s a whole cast of lesser-known characters that he expects to come to light in the coming weeks and months.
But as this probe plays out, he and many others who were there are still trying to reconcile with what they experienced first-hand. “People are still processing what happened and trying to make sense of it, and are talking with each other. Everyone experienced that day differently,” he tells us. “But it’s still an ongoing process of trying to understand, on a personal level, what we all experienced that day.”
