Nancy Pelosi Tells Hillary Clinton: ‘No, We Can’t Move on’ from Capitol Riot, Members Were ‘Traumatized’

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) joined twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for a bonus episode of the You and Me Both podcast and talked about the January 6 protest at the U.S. Capitol, telling the former Trump challenger that lawmakers “can’t move on” from the protest, as members were “traumatized” by the events.

I think everyone listening knows what happened on January 6, when the United States Capitol was attacked by a group of seditionist, insurrectionist traitors,” Clinton said, kicking off the bonus episode of the podcast before asking Pelosi how she is “holding up.”

“I’m sad. I’m deeply sad, because here it is, the Capitol, this symbol of democracy to the world, being overrun by people who are being incited by a person who is not speaking truth,” Pelosi told Clinton:

“Everybody said, ‘Well, we’ve got to move on.’ No, we can’t move on,” she declared. “We can’t move on. We will move on, but we have to take stock of what this is.”

Pelosi detailed what occurred as she was whisked out of the chamber, explaining that Democrat members were “traumatized” by the turn of events, hiding under chairs and belly-crawling across the gallery:

But it wasn’t about me, because I had security; it was about my members. And they were traumatized by it. Some were on the floor; some were in the Gallery watching. Because of COVID we had to have our distancing, and those up there had to go under their seats for a long time. And then they had to do a belly crawl across the Gallery so that they could have a safe egress from the Chamber, because if they had gone out the door they were nearest to, the protestors were there. They were there, and they were out to harm people.

“And just the image of these members elected to represent Americans crawling on their bellies to escape the House Chamber is just beyond outraging,” Clinton responded as Pelosi continued to recount the events.

Pelosi, who recently won the Speakership position by less than a majority in the House, said that Congress has a responsibility to unify the nation, identifying President-elect Joe Biden as a “respectful” and firm “unifier.”

During a stop on the campaign trail in October, Biden referred to his opponents as “chumps.” More recently, he compared both Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels as he blamed them, in part, for the Capitol riot that occurred earlier this month.

“You said so beautifully in your campaign that people need to see a place for themselves in the future. Many of these people don’t see that place,” Pelosi continued, pitching that Biden should “show them that there is a place for them – that it’s not a zero-sum game.”

“Women and minorities and LGBTQ people can thrive, not at their expense. When we’re addressing the climate crisis, it isn’t at the expense of their job,” she continued.

During the podcast, Clinton openly wondered if Trump spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin on the day of the Capitol protest, effectively resurrecting the wholly debunked Trump-Russia collusion narrative.

“I hope historically we will find out who he’s beholden to, who pulls his strings. I would love to see his phone records to see whether he was talking to Putin the day that the insurgents invaded our Capitol,” she remarked, prompting Pelosi to indulge in the favorite Democrat narrative as well. 

“I don’t know what Putin has on him politically, financially, or personally, but what happened last week was a gift to Putin,” Pelosi said of the riot, adding that the people who engaged in it were acting as “Putin puppets”.

“They were doing Putin’s business when they did that at the incitement of an insurrection by the president of the United States,” she added.

Pelosi added that a commission will ultimately have a “bigger agenda” to “get to the bottom of what complicity members of Congress have in all of this” — a reference to the riot:

And if they did, they should be prosecuted, as well as others – whether it’s in security… Anybody who has anything to do with the Capitol could have been a resource for whose offices were here. I didn’t care that they damaged things in my office. I don’t care about the things they broke, like the big mirror in the Speaker’s office. I don’t care about that. I do care that they traumatized my staff, young staff – traumatized them, scared them. If you could see the look in their eyes after having to be under the desk for nearly three hours, silent in the dark as people were pounding on the doors, out for blood.

Pelosi added that she had been in touch with Vice President Mike Pence, who also fled the chamber as the events unfolded, stating that protesters were “going to hang him and do something violent to me.”

“And the other members were expendable as well, in their view,” she added. “So, during the day, we had a shared view that as soon as we could, we would resume the ascertaining that Joe Biden was president. And I have to say that he had resolved that the Constitution would be honored. “