‘Y’all are f--king us up’: Capitol Police officer recalls Jan. 6 encounter outside Pelosi's office

As rioters swarmed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, police were frantically working to evacuate Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s staffers barricaded inside her office suite when one of the officers — Harry Dunn — came face to face with members of the far-right Oath Keepers.

Dunn’s tense exchange with several members of the group were the focal point Monday in the seditious conspiracy trial against Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and four of his allies.

Some Oath Keepers involved in the encounter have contended that they attempted to assist the beleaguered and outnumbered officer, offering to protect Dunn from the encroaching mob. But Dunn testified Monday that he recalled no offers of help from the group.

“They tried to get past me. And I stopped them. They didn’t. I did,” Dunn said defiantly under questioning from one of the Oath Keepers' attorneys.

Dunn’s faceoff with members of the Oath Keepers — including Florida leaders Kelly Meggs and Kenneth Harrelson — marked the outset of the fifth week of testimony in the trial, the most complex and significant to emerge from the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. It comes as Pelosi grapples with the aftermath of the San Francisco home invasion that seriously injured her husband, Paul, and sparked a new nationwide debate about politically motivated violence.

Some aspects of the attack on Pelosi’s home, from the alleged attacker’s call of “Where’s Nancy” to his embrace of election conspiracy theories, included eerie echoes of the Jan. 6 Capitol breach.

Prosecutors have attempted to portray Oath Keepers members as singularly driven to seek out Pelosi and then-Vice President Mike Pence, part of an extensive conspiracy to prevent the transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. Justice Department attorneys have used recent testimony to reconstruct the Oath Keepers’ march through the Capitol, with some members of the group splitting off toward the Senate and others to the House.

Prosecutors displayed videos of Dunn’s encounter with Meggs, Harrelson and other members of the mob, and Dunn walked them through the exchange. “I’m not letting you come this way,” Dunn remembered saying.

“We have dozens of officers down. They’re taking us out on stretchers. Y’all are fucking us up,” he said.

Lawyers for the defendants pressed Dunn on whether his memory may have been faulty given the extreme strain he was under. Dunn, a large and imposing figure, agreed he was beleaguered — sprinting from one location to another while wearing heavy body armor and wielding an M4. He arrived outside the speaker's office after first helping defend a stairwell that led to the Lower West Terrace, the site of the most extreme and protracted violence that occurred that day.

Another officer, David Lazarus, testified that he witnessed Dunn’s "antagonistic" exchange with the Oath Keepers while helping lead a furious effort to create a safe path to evacuate Pelosi’s staffers, some of whom had locked themselves inside a conference room in her nearby suite.

“I’m in tunnel vision. I just want to get into the office,” Lazarus said, describing his approach to Pelosi’s suite, before he spotted Dunn jawing with members of the crowd.

Lazarus said he had been texting and communicating with members of Pelosi’s staff to assure them that it was him when he arrived to help free them from the locked room. He was fearful that the second floor of the Capitol — the site of the rotunda, as well as the House and Senate chambers — was too overrun to create a safe evacuation route. So he said he led the staffers to a third-floor conference room that was easier to secure and told them not to open the doors until he returned.

Dunn also recalled observing Lazarus, who he briefly mistook for a member of Congress because he was wearing a suit and had a pin on his lapel. And he said he quickly sought to divert the crowd’s gaze from the officer and toward himself.

Harrelson’s attorney Brad Geyer sought to raise questions about Dunn’s memory, particularly in his FBI interview about the encounter, when he initially suggested he believed members of the Oath Keepers had offered to protect him from the oncoming crowd.

Dunn said he was describing two separate encounters. The first came in the Capitol's first-floor "Crypt" area atop a stairwell that led to the Lower West Terrace, amid the intense violence happening below. There, he said, a group wearing military-style gear approached and offered to stand between him and the mob at the top of the staircase.

But that group, he said, didn’t include any of the Oath Keepers whom he later saw outside Pelosi’s office and who didn’t offer to help him, he testified.

Geyer also wondered whether Dunn’s use of profanity with the rioters was “unusual,” underscoring the extreme physical and mental strain the officer was under.

“That day was the most unusual of occurrences that occurred in my career,” Dunn responded, agreeing that he had feelings of fear and anger amid the riot.

“Did you experience feelings of betrayal?” Geyer asked.

“During the event, not so much," Dunn replied. “Afterward, sure. During the event, it was just about surviving.”