Jamie Raskin Gives Emotional Account of Riots at Trump Trial: My Daughter Told Me ‘Dad, I Don’t Want to Come Back to the Capitol’

Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD) got emotional on Tuesday as he delivered closing remarks for the start of the Donald Trump impeachment trial.

The Capitol riots took place on Jan. 6, one day after Raskin buried his son Tommy. He told senators that his daughter and son-in-law were with him at the Capitol, Raskin explained, “because they wanted to be together with me in the middle of a devastating week for our family.”

Raskin said they asked him if it would be safe, citing Trump’s calls for his supporters to gather in D.C., and he said he responded to them, “Of course it should be safe, it’s the Capitol.”

On Jan. 6, when they were at the Capitol, Raskin said by the time they learned about what was going on, they were in an office and “I couldn’t get out there to be with them.”

“All around me, people were calling their wives and their husbands, their loved ones, to say goodbye.”

Raskin even said members of Congress “removed their congressional pins so they wouldn’t be identified by the mob as they tried to escape the violence.”

He described hearing “the sound of pounding on the door like a battering ram, the most haunting sound I have ever heard and will never forget it.”

Raskin bluntly told senators his family was worried they might die, and teared up as he described what happened when they reunited:

“When they were finally rescued, over an hour later by Capitol officers, and we were together, I hugged them and I apologized and I told my daughter Tabitha… how sorry I was and I promised her that it would not be like this again the next time she came back to the Capitol with me. And you know what she said? She said, ‘Dad, I don’t want to come back to the Capitol.’ Of all the terrible brutal things I saw and I heard on that day, and since then, that one hit me the hardest.”

“Senators, this cannot be our future. This cannot be the future of America,” Raskin said as he described some of the mob violence in disturbing detail.

You can watch above, via MSNBC.