Tag: aquilino gonell
Harry Dunn

'Shocking': Cops Who Defended Capitol Slam Trump Over Debate Slurs

Two U.S. Capitol police officers who battled insurrectionists on January 6, 2021 are condemning former President Donald Trump's response to moderators' questions about the Capitol riot.

During a Friday interview with CNN, former Capitol police officers Harry Dunn and Sgt. Aquilino Gonell blasted the 45th president of the United States for his refusal to take responsibility for his part in fomenting the deadliest attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812. Dunn said that for him, the moment that stood out the most in Thursday night's debate was Trump refusing to say definitively that he would accept the results of the 2024 election regardless of the outcome.

"He eventually said he would accept it if it was fair, but over 60 courts ruled that it was fair and he still didn't accept it," Dunn said. "So what is the category that defines it as fair? That's what was most shocking and angering about last night, because he's already planting the seeds that could lead to another January 6."


Sgt. Gonell said that he was struck by Trump's pivoting on the issue when moderators Dana Bash and Jake Tapper pressed him, saying the former president "doesn't take responsibility for what happened, even though he's the one who incited the mob to the Capitol." When he was asked what he thought of President Joe Biden's poorly received debate performance, Gonell didn't waver, arguing Trump was a far bigger threat.

"I'm supporting somebody who doesn't send a mob to kill me and my colleagues at the Capitol, someone who is not dangling pardons for the people who assaulted police officers and somebody who is not trying to upend democracy," Gonell said.

"It's very upsetting that the people we risked our lives for, like Speaker Mike Johnson, about two weeks ago, received him with open arms like he was a hero," Gonell added. "And the only reason why they are alive today is because of the actions of police officers like myself and my colleagues."

Both Dunn and Gonell — who are no longer with the U.S. Capitol Police Department — have been surrogates for Biden on the campaign trail throughout the 2024 cycle. They have both insisted that their experience doing battle with Trump supporters at the Capitol on January 6th has cemented their determination to keep the ex-president out of office.

However, despite Republicans making their support for law enforcement a key plank of past campaigns, that hasn't always led to warm receptions for the two former Capitol police officers. During a visit to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives earlier this month, Republicans were heard booing Dunn and Gonell after they were officially recognized by the speaker.

Voters will also have the events of January 6 in their minds as they cast their ballots in the 2024 election. A January 2024 poll by the Washington Post and the University of Maryland found that 55 percent of voters say the Capitol insurrection was an "attack on democracy that should never be forgotten." That same month, a CBS News/YouGov survey found that 78 percent of respondents said they disapprove of the actions of the rioters who forced their way into the Capitol building.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Capitol Police Testimony Moves Fox Anchor, But Network’s Pundits Sneer

Capitol Police Testimony Moves Fox Anchor, But Network’s Pundits Sneer

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

When Fox News turned to Bret Baier for comment shortly after the conclusion of Tuesday's hearing of the House select committee investigating the January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol by pro-Trump rioters, the network's chief political anchor was adamant that it would be impossible for anyone to downplay the devastating testimony heard that day. Over the previous several hours, four police officers had described in searing detail how they had risked their lives defending Congress from a violent, bigoted throng that sought to halt the counting of electoral votes formalizing President Joe Biden's election.

"If you were watching, you saw compelling, at times damning, emotional testimony from these four officers who fought the line to try to protect the Capitol and the lawmakers inside," Baier said. Highlighting the officers' descriptions of how they "fought to hold on to their lives," he added that while Republicans are trying to argue that the investigation is politically motivated, "you can't watch the testimony and say that's not a big deal."

Baier was describing an emerging consensus that is damaging to Republicans. But Fox exists in part to manufacture dissent, disrupting such consensuses with narratives that are more palatable to its right-wing audience. And so that evening, Baier's colleagues -- who helped lay the groundwork for the riots by trumpeting Donald Trump's baseless claims of a stolen 2020 election and then spent the last seven months downplaying and concocting justifications for the resulting insurrection -- went to work.

"We're being lectured by phony politicians about threats to our country," The Five co-host Greg Gutfeld sneered amid a whataboutist rant, going on to describe the January 6 Capitol riots as "having politicians' jobs disrupted for two hours." He added that the hearing was "a circus" and "a clown show."

Fox's star prime-time host Tucker Carlson literally snickered after playing a clip of Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone saying that he's "been left with psychological trauma and emotional anxiety" from the Capitol riots. (Fanone described being "grabbed, beaten, tased, all while being called a traitor to my country"; the assault resulted in a heart attack.)

Mocking the testimony of Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell, who compared the riots to his Army deployment in Iraq, Carlson described the events of January 6 as follows: "Officers let the rioters into the Capitol. They had casual conversations with them inside the Senate Chamber. Some of the rioters had face paint and carried American flags."

Carlson also made fun of the emotional responses some members of the committee had to hearing the testimony.

Sean Hannity picked up the next hour where Carlson had left off, denouncing the investigation as a "political charade" with a "predetermined outcome" intended to "smear and slander" Trump and the Republican Party.

What followed was a parade of whataboutism, with Hannity and his guests highlighting how Democrats were fixated on the sacking of the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob intent on stopping the peaceful transition of power rather than homicides in Chicago or violence at last year's protests against police brutality.

Later that night, from her platform on Fox's 10 p.m. ET hour, Laura Ingraham described the hearing as "nothing more than performance art." She went on to announce "The Angle awards for today's best performances," including the award for "best use of an exaggeration in a supporting role" to Gonell, "blatant use of partisan politics when facts fail" to Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn, and "best performance in an action role" to Fanone.

Over the prime-time block, Carlson and Ingraham aired clips from the hearing only to mock the speakers, while Hannity bashed the event without actually airing clips from it.

Whether or not they watched the hearings as Baier did, Fox's right-wing propagandists did their best to leave their audiences thinking that the testimony that day was not actually a "big deal." And by this morning, the hearings had all but disappeared from the network's airwaves.

The same phenomenon has happened over and over again: Fox's "straight news" side describes events as damning for Republicans or helpful for Democrats, only for the "opinion side" to go into overdrive to hide that from its audience.

The cycle played out after professor Christine Blasey Ford testified that then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had attempted to rape her when they were in high school in the early 1980s. It happened again during the 2019 impeachment hearings over Trump's abuse of power in Ukraine. And it happened after Biden called for "uniting our nation" and ending "this uncivil war that pits red against blue" during his inaugural address.

Fox isn't in the business of telling its viewers what happened. It's in the business of telling them what they should think about what happened.

Research contributions from Will DiGravio

Sgt. Aquilino Gonell testifies in front of the Select Jan. 6 Committee.

Capitol Cop Rips Trump’s 'Pathetic Excuse' For Rioters

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

During a recent interview with Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo, former President Donald Trump seriously downplayed the violence that occurred in Washington, D.C. on January 6 — describing the insurrectionists as "loving" and "peaceful." But when Sgt. Aquilino Gonell of the Capitol Police testified before House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's select committee on the January 6 riot on Tuesday, he vehemently disagreed with Trump's description of what occurred that day.

Gonell was among the police officers who was present in the U.S. Capitol Building when it was violently attacked by a pro-Trump mob on January 6. And during his testimony before members of Congress, he offered vivid, graphic testimony about the violence that he witnessed.

Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, an arch-conservative Republican who Pelosi picked for her committee, quoted Trump's exact words during Tuesday's hearing: "It was a loving crowd. There was a lot of love in the crowd." And when Cheney was questioning Gonell, she matter-of-factly asked him, "How does that make you feel?"

Gonell responded, "It was upsetting. It is a pathetic excuse for his behavior for something that he himself helped to create — this monstrosity. I'm still recovering from those hugs and kisses that day."

The Capitol police sergeant, on Tuesday, described the injuries that he suffered on January 6.

"Rioters, terrorists were assaulting us that day," Gonell told Cheney. "If that was hugs and kisses, we should all go to his house and do the same thing to him. To me, it's insulting. It's demoralizing. Because everything that we did was to prevent everyone in the Capitol from getting hurt. And what he was doing — instead of sending the military, instead of sending the support or telling his people, his supporters to stop this nonsense, he egged them to continue fighting."

Gonell went on to say of the insurrectionists, "All of them were telling us: 'Trump sent us.' It was nobody else. It was not Antifa. It was not Black Lives Matter. It was not the FBI. It was his supporters — he sent them over to the Capitol that day. And he could have done a lot of things. One of them was to tell them to stop."

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