As the then-speaker was being evacuated from an overrun Capitol, her security detail drove her near a pipe bomb at the Democratic National Committee headquarters that had yet to be rendered fully safe.
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Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s vehicle came within a few hundred feet of a makeshift bomb near the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
As Speaker Nancy Pelosi was evacuated from the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, while the complex was under attack, her motorcade passed by a pipe bomb at the Democratic National Committee headquarters that law enforcement had yet to render safe, according to video and analysis released this week by House Republicans.
The revelation is the second known instance of a prominent Democrat coming close to the explosive device, and it underscores the threat that elected officials faced that day when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol.
Capitol Police officials responded Thursday by saying the makeshift bomb had been rendered mostly inoperable by the time Ms. Pelosi’s motorcade came near it, and that the greater danger to her at that moment was from the mob laying siege to Congress.
According to the video, which Republicans unearthed as part of their push to discredit the findings of the House Jan. 6 committee, Ms. Pelosi’s vehicle came within a few hundred feet of the makeshift bomb when her security detail drove her through a security perimeter and away from the Capitol. Republican investigators have been searching for signs of bias in the Jan. 6 investigation carried out by House Democrats during the last Congress and working to shift the focus to security breaches rather than the actions of former President Donald J. Trump.
Sean P. Gallagher, the assistant chief for uniformed operations for the Capitol Police, has acknowledged that the department made mistakes on Jan. 6, including allowing pedestrians too close to the makeshift pipe bomb at the committee headquarters.
“The perimeter that was set up around the D.N.C. — it looked chaotic because it was chaotic,” Mr. Gallagher said in March in testimony before the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight. “We were dealing with a pipe bomb a couple blocks away at the R.N.C. We were dealing with a pickup truck that had 11 Molotov cocktails, machetes, rifles, handguns, ammunition in it. And at the same time, our officers were suffering injuries on the west front of the Capitol.”
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Source: nytimes.com
