By now, most anyone who follows Tulsa politics closely has seen the picture: It’s a close-up of Ken Reddick standing in front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021.
He’s wearing a hooded jacket and ballistic safety glasses. Behind him is a throng of people, some carrying American flags, others wearing helmets.
The selfie, according to Reddick, was taken on the northwest side of the Capitol at 1:18 p.m. That was less than an hour before some in the mob broke through doors and windows to get into the historic building.
By then, Reddick said, he was already back in his hotel room.
“We get back on the Metro rail and take it back to the hotel in Virginia, and we watched everything unfold live on the news,” he told the Tulsa World.
Reddick is a conservative Republican who ran for mayor in 2020 and this year is now making a second run for the District 7 City Council seat held by Lori Decter Wright. He has posted at least one message on social media casting doubt about the 2020 presidential election results and says he would support an investigation into how the votes were tallied.
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But, he insists, he did not go to the nation’s capital that day to take part in the insurrection.
“Once you are in D.C. that day, it’s guilty by association,” Reddick said, “even though, at first, I just offered to pay someone’s way.”
Reddick said he had no intention of going to Washington on Jan. 6 for the Save America March promoted by former President Donald Trump but that things changed at the last moment. After he bought a plane ticket for a local veteran who hoped to make the trip, the flight was canceled. So he offered to drive him there instead.
It was no two-man trip. According to Reddick, the veteran was part of a security detail accompanying a Tulsa podcaster. He says that’s where he got the protective glasses he was wearing in the picture.
“It was about six guys, and they were a mixed bag of veterans I’d met here during the 2020 campaign and a couple of local law enforcement,” Reddick said.
Reddick did not name the law enforcement officers.
He said the podcaster’s plan to do live man-on-the-street interviews never panned out because of poor internet reception and that the group he was with spent most of its time on the National Mall and the surrounding area.
They did not attend Trump’s speech near the White House, Reddick said, and began moving toward the U.S. Capitol when the crowd from that event started heading in their direction.
“Everyone starts walking down Constitution Way and the National Mall, and you know what a half a million people headed in your direction looks like,” Reddick said. “So we are like, oh, let’s go over here and just get as close as we can (to the Capitol).”
Reddick said he decided to head back to the hotel after people started climbing over things in an effort to get closer to the Capitol.
“Before you know it, Capitol police are standing out on that inauguration stage, outside those doors where the large steps are, where the stage is there, and we hear blasts and … tear gas, rubber bullets,” he said.
Thoughts on the 2020 election
Reddick said that in the months following the 2020 presidential election he never bought Trump’s false assertion that the election had been stolen. He claims that he went to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, to help a veteran, do some sightseeing and maybe, just maybe, witness history.
“Because I was the realist, I thought, in the group. Where everyone else — you have 20 hours in the vehicle with everyone — they all had high hopes, and they knew what states were going to get challenged first, because it was going to go alphabetical,” Reddick said. “And I was like, ‘Listen guys. I wish I was as optimistic as you, but … it’s not going to happen.’ But I’d hate to miss it if it did. So that was my personal view.”
His social media posts on Jan. 6 and afterward have not always reflected the same equanimity when it comes to the election results or his visit to D.C.
After returning to his hotel that day, Reddick posted a series of pictures from the trip with this message on Facebook: “Regardless of the typical antics of Antifa, it was an awesome rally and I was honored to be surround (sic) by well over one million America lovin patriots.”
Both the selfie and the post with the series of photos can no longer be viewed publicly on Facebook.
Earlier this year, Reddick thanked former U.S. Senate candidate Jackson Laymeyer — an election denier who was backed by Trump adviser Roger Stone and retired Gen. Michael Flynn, a former Trump national security adviser — for supporting his City Council candidacy. And he took to Facebook to criticize Sen. James Lankford, whom Laymeyer was challenging, for not doing enough to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election.
In May, after watching the movie “2000 Mules” at Embassy Church, Reddick wrote in part that with “all of the obvious fraud and blatant theft, Senator James Lankford was the first to stand up and push to certify the Presidential Election in favor of Joe Biden.
“This is not representative of Oklahoma Values. … We have to make sure that strong people are there to represent us and fight for our country and stand in the way when they witness criminal acts. I believe Jackson Laymeyer is that man and will fight for our country.”
Reddick himself described the film by conservative author Dinesh D’Souza as propaganda, not a documentary. The movie, which claims to show that organizations paid people, or “mules” to illegally collect and place ballots in ballot boxes in five key swing states, has been debunked by Trump’s former Attorney General William Barr and many others.
But it has Reddick thinking twice about the election results.
“I went from defeatist, move on, forget about it, to I would actively support an investigation,” Reddick said. ”I am not of the camp where they are: It was stolen; it’s been stolen, and this only further justifies how I have been feeling the whole time. I have been moved from: It’s over; move on; we’re defeated, to: Now I am willing to listen. And if there were a petition, I would sign it.”
Facebook Live lost
Reddick said he was broadcasting on Facebook Live on Jan. 6 but that all of that video was lost after he returned to Tulsa and was interviewed by local and federal law enforcement.
During the interview in the parking lot of a south Tulsa convenience store, Reddick said, the law enforcement officials asked to access the videos on his phone. Over the next week, as items kept becoming missing from his Facebook accounts, Reddick asked the officers if they had removed anything from his accounts.
Reddick said they said no, at which time he asked them if he could change his password, and they said yes.
“So people would ask: ‘Prove what you saw. Prove this. Prove that,’” Reddick said. “I was like: ‘Well, it’s all on my Facebook.’ It’s the only way I recorded is Facebook Live. I didn’t have my video camera out.”
Featured video: Jan. 6 panel focuses on Trump’s ‘staggering betrayal’
The House Jan. 6 committee opened its first hearing in months Thursday declaring it will delve into Trump’s “state of mind” and the central role the defeated president played in the multipart effort to overturn the election. “In a staggering betrayal of his oath, Donald Trump attempted a plan that led to an attack on a pillar of our democracy, said Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., moments after gaveling the hearing to order. “It is still hard to believe.” Opening statements from Thompson and Vice Chair Liz Cheney at the panel’s final public session of the year were laden with language frequently seen in criminal indictments. Both lawmakers described Trump as “substantially” involved in the events of Jan. 6. Cheney said Trump had acted in a “premeditated” way. The panel warned that the insurrection at the Capitol was not an isolated incident but a warning of the fragility of the nation’s democracy in the post-Trump era. “Why would Americans assume that our Constitution and our institutions in our republic are invulnerable to another attack? Why would we assume that those institutions will not falter next time? Republican Rep. Cheney asked. “Any future president inclined to attempt what Donald Trump did in 2020 has now learned not to install people who could stand in the way,” she added. The committee is starting to sum up its findings that Republican Trump, after losing the 2020 presidential election, launched an unprecedented attempt to stop Congress from certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s victory. The result was the mob storming of the Capitol. The committee may well make a decision on whether to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department, though Cheney said she recognized that the panel’s job was not to make prosecutorial decisions.
11 searing moments of Jan. 6: From ‘an attempted coup’ to chaos
‘An attempted coup’
The first hearing, aired in prime time and watched by more than 20 million viewers, set the stage for the next seven.
It laid out the conclusion that the panel would come back to in every hearing: that Trump conspired to overturn his own defeat, taking actions that sparked the violent insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when hundreds of his supporters beat police and broke through windows and doors to interrupt the certification of Biden’s victory.
“January 6th was the culmination of an attempted coup, a brazen attempt, as one rioter put it shortly after January 6th, to overthrow the government,” said the committee chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss. “The violence was no accident. It represents seeing Trump’s last stand, most desperate chance to halt the transfer of power.”
‘Carnage’ at the Capitol
Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards (pictured), one of two witnesses at the first hearing, described what she saw outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 as a “war scene.” As some Republicans, including Trump, have tried to play down the violence of the insurrection, calling it “peaceful,” Edwards recalled the brutality she experienced on the front lines. She suffered a traumatic head injury that day as some of the first protesters barreled through the flimsy bike rack barriers that she and other officers were trying to hold.
“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Edwards testified. “There were officers on the ground. You know, they were bleeding. They were throwing up. … It was carnage. It was chaos.”
‘Detached from reality’
The committee has used clips of its interview with former Attorney General Bill Barr (pictured) in almost every hearing, showing the public over and over his definitive statements that the election was not stolen by Biden — and Barr’s description of Trump’s resistance as he told the president the truth.
At the second hearing, the committee showed a clip of Barr recalling how he told Trump to his face that the Justice Department had found no evidence of the widespread voter fraud that Trump was claiming. Barr said he thought Trump had become “detached from reality” if he really believed his own theories and said there was “never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were.”
“And my opinion then and my opinion now is that the election was not stolen by fraud and I haven’t seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that,” Barr said.
A tense conversation
One question going into the hearings was what Trump and Vice President Mike Pence talked about in a phone call the morning of Jan. 6. The conversation came after Trump had pressured his vice president for weeks to try and somehow object or delay as he presided over Biden’s certification. Pence firmly resisted and would gavel down Trump’s defeat — and his own — in the early hours of Jan. 7, after rioters had been cleared from the Capitol.
While only Trump and Pence were on the Jan. 6 call, White House aides filled in some details at the committee’s third hearing by recounting what they heard Trump say on his end of the line.
“Wimp is the word I remember,” said former Trump aide Nicholas Luna. “You’re not tough enough,” recalled Keith Kellogg, Pence’s national security adviser. “It became heated” after starting out in a calmer tone, said White House lawyer Eric Herschmann.
“It was a different tone than I’d heard him take with the vice president before,” said Ivanka Trump.
40 feet away
Encouraged by Trump’s tweet, after the attack had started, that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done,” rioters at the Capitol singled out the vice president. Many chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” as they moved through the building. Pence evacuated the Senate just minutes before the chamber was breached, and later was rushed to safety as rioters were just 40 feet away.
Greg Jacob, the president’s lawyer, testified at the third hearing and said he had not known they were that close.
Jacob said Secret Service agents wanted them to leave the building but Pence refused to get in the car. “The vice president didn’t want to take any chance” that the world would see him leaving the Capitol, Jacob said.
‘I will not break my oath’
At the committee’s fourth hearing, state officials detailed the extraordinary pressure the president put on them to overturn their states’ legitimate and certified results. Rusty Bowers (pictured), Arizona’s House speaker, told the committee how Trump asked him directly to appoint alternate electors, falsely stating that he had won the state of Arizona and not Biden.
Bowers detailed additional calls with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. “I will not do it,” Bowers told him, adding: “You are asking me to do something against my oath, and I will not break my oath.”
Lives upended
Georgia election workers Wandrea “Shaye” Moss (left) and her mother, Ruby Freeman, also testified in the fourth hearing, describing constant threats after Trump and his allies spread false rumors that they introduced suitcases of illegal ballots and committed other acts of election fraud. The Justice Department debunked those claims.
The two women said they had their lives upended by Trump’s false claims and his efforts to go after them personally. Through tears, Moss told lawmakers that she no longer leaves her house.
In videotaped testimony, Freeman said there is “nowhere I feel safe” after the harassment she experienced.
Justice Department resists the scheme
When his efforts to overturn his defeat failed in the courts and in the states, Trump turned his focus to the leadership of the Justice Department.
Richard Donoghue (right), the acting No. 2 at the time, testified about his resistance to entreaties by another department official, Jeffrey Clark, who was circulating a draft letter recommending that battleground states reconsider the election results. Trump at one point floated replacing then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen (center) with Clark, but backed down after Donoghue and others threatened to resign.
“For the department to insert itself into the political process this way, I think would have had grave consequences for the country,” Donoghue testified. “It may very well have spiraled us into a constitutional crisis.”
‘They’re not here to hurt me’
In a surprise sixth hearing, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson (pictured) recounted some of Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, including his dismissive response when told that some in the crowd waiting for him to speak outside the White House were armed.
“I was in the vicinity of a conversation where I overheard the president say something to the effect of, ‘I don’t effing care that they have weapons,’” Hutchinson said. “’They’re not here to hurt me. Take the effin’ mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here.’”
Upset that the crowd didn’t appear larger, Trump told his aides to take the metal-detecting magnetometers away. In the coming hours, he would step on the stage and tell them to “fight like hell.”
Hutchinson also described Trump’s anger after security officials told him he couldn’t go to the Capitol with his supporters after he had told them he would. She said she was told that the president even grabbed the steering wheel in the presidential SUV when he was told he couldn’t go.
For the president to have visited the Capitol during Biden’s certification, and as his supporters descended on the building, would have been unprecedented.
‘Unhinged’ White House meeting
At its seventh hearing, the committee painstakingly reconstructed a Dec. 18 meeting at the White House where outside advisers to Trump pushing election fraud claims clashed with White House lawyers and others who were telling him to give up the fight.
The six-hour meeting featured profanity, screaming and threats of fisticuffs, according to the participants, as Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and others threw out conspiracy theories, including that the Democrats were working with Venezuelans and that voting machines were hacked. Pat Cipollone (pictured), the top White House lawyer, testified that he kept asking for evidence, to no avail.
Hours later, at 1:42 a.m., Trump sent a tweet urging supporters to come for a “big protest” on Jan. 6: “Will be wild,” Trump promised.
187 minutes
The final hearing focused on what Trump was doing for 187 minutes that afternoon, between his speech at the rally and when he finally released a video telling the rioters to go home at 4:17 p.m.
They showed that Trump was sitting at a dining room table near the Oval Office, watching Fox News coverage of the violence. But he made no calls for help — not to the Defense Department, the Homeland Security Department or the attorney general — even as his aides repeatedly told him to call it off.
In the video released at 4:17 p.m., as some of the worst of the fighting was still happening down the street, Trump told rioters to go home but said they were “very special.”
The committee showed never-before-seen outtakes of a speech Trump released on Jan. 7 in which he condemned the violence and promised an orderly transition of power. But he bristled at one line in the prepared script, telling his daughter Ivanka Trump and others in the room, “I don’t want to say the election is over.”
