Senator's Tweet Revealed Where Lawmakers Were Hiding From Trump Rioters

[LiberalArkie]

Social media has a way of disrupting the best laid plans. As rioters stormed the capitol building on January 6, members of Congress took shelter in various locations throughout the building. At four minute before 5, when rioters were still in and around the Capitol building, Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) tweeted a picture that gave away his location.

Link to tweet

“Electoral college ballots rescued from the Senate floor,” Merkley said in his tweet that showed a picture of the ballots and the feet of several people milling on a blue carpeted floor. “If our capable floor staff hadn’t grabbed them, they would have been burned by the mob.” It’s great that quick thinking staff thought to preserve the electoral votes, but Merkley inadvertently shared their new location while the crisis was ongoing.

Link to tweet

“That’s a really distinctive blue carpet,” Jeffrey Lewis, Director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Project at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, told Motherboard over the phone. Lewis is an expert on nuclear war, an area of study that’s given him a familiarity with Capitol Hill, knowledge of U.S. disaster related continuity of government plans, and skills at open-source intelligence analysis.

The U.S. Government maintains a set of plans it is supposed to deploy when a crisis hits. The idea is to maintain a continuity of government—the ability for elected officials to continue to do their job and preserve the Union to the best of their abilities. In the decades after World War II, this meant preparing for a nuclear disaster and ushering congress into a bunker at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia.

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https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7apzb/senators-tweet-revealed-where-lawmakers-were-hiding-from-trump-rioters?utm_source=email&utm_medium=editorial&utm_content=daily&utm_campaign=210108

[DonaldsRump]

1. This is silly

How would the thugs know which room(s) had blue carpet?

[DURHAM D]

2. lol

Sure, only one room in the Capitol complex has blue carpet.

[LiberalArkie]

7. Yep the only one in the Hart building with the brass outlet covers all over the place.

Now the Senate floor and the House floor also have them, but can't be seen unless all the furniture is removed. But since all the Capitals furniture is on the floor, that only left 1 other place. Of course only an insider would know that, and we know that the terrorists did not have any insiders on their side.

[Grasswire2]

3. no one should equate this with the very real collaborateurs who revealed..

...whereabouts of Pelosi and other details, deliberately and with malign intent. I'm talking first and foremost about Rep. "Glock" who tweeted Pelosi's specific whereabouts.

Merkley is a fine Democrat and solid. It was thoughtless to tweet any specifics. But not anything more.

[MagickMuffin]

4. And there is an armed officer in the room with them

And probably more than one.

[BusyBeingBest]

5. Victims of a break-in mob should learn not to give away their own locations for their own safety.

People inciting the invading mob to begin with (rhymes with Schmoebert) definitely shouldn't be giving out the immediate whereabouts or relocation info about the second in line of succession, the Speaker of the House.

[Bev54]

6. I hope you are not trying to "both sides" this issue

There is no equivalency to what the repubs did, giving out real time information.

[2naSalit]

8. +1

[StarfishSaver]

9. I don't blame any of them for this - there were no protocols and no precedents

But in the after action, there will need to be some policies set out for the use of social media in these situations. Members tweeting and posting photos really could have put people's lives in danger. There will need to be some protocols put in place in the future for this.