Raskin chokes up during Trump impeachment speech

In an emotional statement Tuesday at the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, Rep. Jamie Raskin recalled the terror experienced by lawmakers — and his own family — when a violent mob breached the Capitol on Jan. 6.

“They thought they were going to die,” Raskin, the Maryland Democrat leading the impeachment case against Trump, said on the Senate floor, describing how his youngest daughter, Tabitha, and his son-in-law, Hank, felt while they were barricaded inside the office of House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., with Raskin’s chief of staff.

Raskin’s family was at the Capitol to observe the certification of the Electoral College vote. They were in Hoyer’s office when the mob breached the building, Raskin said Tuesday. Afraid that the mob would kill them, Raskin said his family “placed final texts and whispered phone calls.”

Raskin, meanwhile, was on the House floor when the rioters broke in and was unable to be with his family. Raskin had just returned to Congress to count the votes following the funeral of his son, Tommy, who died by suicide in December.

“All around me people were calling their wives and their husbands, their loved ones, to say goodbye,” he said. “Members of Congress were removing their congressional pins so they wouldn’t be identified by the mob as they tried to escape the violence.”

Raskin said he remembers hearing “the sound of pounding on the door like a battering ram. The most haunting sound I’ve ever heard and I will never forget it.”

When Raskin finally rejoined his family, he said he apologized to them and told his daughter Tabitha that the riot would not happen again when she came back to the Capitol. It was then, Raskin said as he choked up, his daughter told him that she did not “want to come back to the Capitol."

“Of all the terrible brutal things I saw,” he said. “That one hit me that hardest.”

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