Rep. Maxine Waters and House Majority Whip James Clyburn are among those casting a wary eye toward law enforcement’s response to Trump supporters who violently seized the U.S. Capitol last week.
In an interview Friday on Sirius XM’s “The Joe Madison Show,” Waters explained that she had spoken to U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund prior to Jan. 6 to gauge his department’s plans of defense against threats of violence from Trump supporters.
“I felt that I was not totally satisfied, but he was the police chief assuring me constantly that they were on top of it, that they were in control, that they knew what they were doing,” the California Democrat said, The Root reported. “It turns out he had nothing under control, nothing under control and we were overrun.”
Sund has since resigned, but Waters nevertheless wants more answers.
“We’ve got to get to the bottom of this,” she said. “We’ve got to find out exactly what took place, who was involved. There’s got to be prosecutions. There’s got to be accountability. Whether it was because it was poor planning or whether it was because there were certain kinds of infiltration, we don’t know.”
House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.), who also appeared on the show Friday, voiced concern about how the Trump loyalists were able to move so easily throughout the Capitol, particularly since they came across where he usually resides in the building — a location that he said isn’t public knowledge.
“If you don’t know where it is, you ain’t going to find it by accident,” Clyburn. “The one place where my name is on the door, that office is right on Statuary Hall. They didn’t touch that door. But they went into that other place where I do most of my work. They showed up there, harassing my staff. How did they know to go there?”