Senator's Tweet Revealed Where Lawmakers Were Hiding From Trump Rioters [View all]

[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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