Claim
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez exaggerated the danger she was in during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, in that she "wasn't even in the Capitol building" when the rioting occurred
.Rating
Mostly False
About this rating
What's True
Ocasio-Cortez wasn't in the main Capitol building where the House and Senate Chambers are located.
What's False
However, Ocasio-Cortez never claimed to be in the main Capitol building. When the attack on the Capitol began, Ocasio-Cortez was, as she stated, in her congressional office, which is located in a network of office buildings immediately surrounding the Capitol, and her office building was one of the two buildings that were evacuated.
Around the time the clashes at the Capitol started, Ocasio-Cortez said she was at her desk when she heard a loud, “violent” banging on her office doors. She ran over to her legislative director Geraldo Bonilla-Chavez (whom she calls “G”), who told her, “Hide, hide, run and hide.”
She hid in the bathroom of her office and realized that the person who was banging on the door had gotten inside and was yelling, “Where is she?” Ocasio-Cortez said didn’t know it while she was hiding, but the person calling that out was actually a Capitol police officer.
In the moment, while she was hiding in her bathroom and the door started to open on her, Ocasio-Cortez said, she thought she was going to die. “This was the moment where I thought everything was over.”
Ocasio-Cortez went on to describe the ensuing chaos as she and Bonilla-Chavez tried to find a place to hide after the officer told them to evacuate, without directing them to a specific evacuation destination. While she and Bonilla-Chavez ran up and down stairways and wandered hallways, she said, they could hear rioters getting louder and louder, trying to break inside, and felt that at any moment the attackers might breach the building.
Ocasio-Cortez said they finally found U.S. Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., and ended up sheltering in place in her office.
The Online Attacks
Ocasio-Cortez was attacked on social media with bad-faith attempts to discredit her story by people who falsely claimed she exaggerated the danger she was in because she wasn’t actually inside the main Capitol building where the House and Senate chambers are located.
But Ocasio-Cortez never claimed she was in the main building. She said was inside her office, which is in just one of the network of buildings containing congressional offices that comprise the Capitol complex.
The office buildings and the main Capitol building are interconnected by a series of tunnels known as the Capitol Subway System, which allows members of Congress to traverse underground from their offices to their respective chambers.
1 Nomination
Vegas giants Feb 05, 2021
Go to original post on Feb 06, 2021 10:46am