Sarah Burris is a long-time veteran of political campaigns, having worked as a fundraiser and media director across the United States. She transitioned into reporting while working for Rock the Vote, Future Majority and Wiretap Magazine, covering the Millennial Generation's perspective during the presidential elections. As a political writer, Burris has had bylines at CNN, Salon.com, BNR, and AlterNet and serves as a senior digital editor for RawStory.com.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke to MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell on Tuesday about some of the findings from the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Some of the scenes that day were revealed in footage taken by her daughter. In one moment, Pelosi is seen on the phone with then Vice President Mike Pence asking if he was safe. She explained that she and other leaders were taken away from the Capitol to an undisclosed location. Pence was still in the secure parking structure.
In I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year, by Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig quoted Pence telling his Secret Service detail that he wasn't getting in the car to leave.
"[Pence] uttered what I think are the six most chilling words of this entire thing I've seen so far: 'I'm not getting in that car,'" Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) described when talking about the incident in April. "He knew exactly what this inside coup they had planned for was going to do."
The theory is that the Secret Service's job is to get Pence away from the danger. But now there is a conversation about whether the vice president assumed the Secret Service was part of the coup.
"The very idea that this mob would be sent by the president of the United States with the claim that they were going to hang Mike Pence should tell the public that, yes, our democracy is at stake," said Pelosi. "We were taken to an undisclosed location. He was still in the Capitol. I was very concerned, because the Capitol was being overridden, and the president -- the then president was not doing anything to stop the horror of it all."
"I wondered if he could trust the Secret Service to take him to a safe place," said Pelosi. "I don't know. But I do know that he was in danger in the Capitol and I wanted to be sure that he was protected. He was the vice president of the United States. We owe him -- I mean, it seems self-evident that the president should have been making those statements, but he wasn't."
