President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign is enlisting the help of three police officers who were among those defending the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when rioters stormed the building in an effort to stop the presidential certification vote.
The three officers — Sgt. Aquilino Gonell, Police Officer Harry Dunn and Police Officer Danny Hodges — are planning to tell people in key swing states that former President Donald Trump threatens fundamental rights of Americans as well as the country’s democracy.
One of the officers, Hodges, is still with DC’s Metropolitan Police Department. However, two of them, Dunn and Gonell, sustained injuries during the riot that led them to retire from Capitol Police.
Dunn told CNN that they he and his fellow officers were victims and that if he can tell the story a million times, he will. Dunn said hopes to do his part to save democracy from another Trump presidency.
This week, the officers will be traveling to speak at campaign stops in Nevada and Arizona. Next on the list will be Michigan, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The weeks leading up to the first debate between Biden and Trump on June 27, which will be hosted by CNN, is crucial in terms of getting their message out. Biden’s campaign is expected to focus on the first-person, threat-to-democracy message in the coming weeks.
Before the actual road campaign, the messages of the three officers have already been tested among Biden supporters through a fundraising email blitz. In the email, Gonell narrated how he sustained “career-ending” injuries, and also being “trampled in a tunnel.” In the same email, he said that he would continue to fight for the country even after being in the service.
Biden-Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, wrote in a memo that was released on Friday, together with a new ad that bore the same message, that “When Trump lost the 2020 election, he snapped.”
“He tried desperately to cling to power, and encouraged a violent assault on our nation’s Capitol, cheering on a mob that threatened to hang his own vice president,” O’Malley added.
In a press conference this week, Biden-Harris Communications Director Michael Tyler said that Americans must not accept the manner by which Trump has campaigned, citing political violence as the grounds to do so, Oregon Capital Chronicle noted.
“I will start by saying simply that political violence has no place in the United States of America. It should never be acceptable,” Tyler stated.
“This is a conversation that should not even be necessary. In fact, it’s a conversation that even a decade ago would have been unrecognizable in our political discourse. But it’s not anymore,” he added.
