Overnight, the plaque honoring police officers who defended the Capitol on Jan 6 was finally installed [View all]

Olivia George @oliviacgeorge
Scoop: Overnight, the plaque honoring police officers who defended the Capitol on Jan 6 was finally installed, following years of delay.

I know because I was there, watching at 4 a.m. as two employees working a nightshift bolted it to the granite wall.


In the predawn darkness Saturday, around 4 a.m., staff with the Architect of the Capitol bolted the bronze plaque to a granite wall near an entrance on the west front, close to where the armed crowd had amassed and scaled scaffolding set up for the inauguration. They wheeled the plaque, stored in plywood, across the stone basement floor and guided it through the double doors. They raised the tribute with a jack table and began bolting it to the wall, the clang of their tools ringing out through otherwise empty hallways.

There was no announcement, no ceremony, no news cameras — just two employees on their routine overnight shift working while most of Washington slept. The quiet installation, which Congress ordered completed by mid-March 2023, marks the latest turn in the contested effort to remember Jan. 6, as Trump continues to reframe the riot as patriotic and the rioters as victims of a weaponized justice system.

Congress passed a law in March 2022 mandating the installation of a memorial plaque within a year. Instead, the plaque sat in the Capitol basement, surrounded by maintenance equipment. It lists the names of almost two dozen local, state and federal law enforcement agencies including the D.C. police, the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Capitol Police, the National Guard and the Maryland and Virginia state police.

Last summer, two police officers who responded to the riot sued the Architect of the Capitol to have the congressional memorial installed and, according to federal court records, “to honor the women and men who saved the lives of those inside the building, and to ensure that the history of this attack on the Capitol — and on democracy — is not forgotten.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/long-delayed-jan-6-plaque-honoring-police-quietly-erected-overnight-at-capitol/ar-AA1XIulo