‘I’ve been through hell,’ says Jan. 6 Capitol Police officer

8/6/2025

A Capitol Police officer who stood the ground between hundreds of members of Congress and insurrectionists during the Jan. 6 attack says he thinks often about that day — a day that could have been his last.

Harry Dunn, a now-departed United States Capitol Police officer who testified before Congress on the 2021 siege at the capitol, became a high-profile representative of the experience for some other peace officers — many who were injured, some who died.

Dunn said the prospect of a full-scale slaughter of elected officials — some of the nation’s top leaders in both parties — was within literal feet from happening on Jan. 6.

“Members of Congress were being told to take their pins off because they didn’t know if people would recognize that,” Dunn said in a phone interview with Political Mercury. “We were a couple of right turns — and wrong turns by the insurrectionists — away from it being a bloodbath.

“There’s so much to do, and it’s not one person or two people that’s going to save the country,” Dunn said. “We need everybody. The message that I give is more a message of resilience. And I end it usually when I talk to people with, ‘I haven’t quit yet. And I’ve been through hell.’ I get death threats weekly. It used to be daily.”

For his part, Dunn is the author of the book “Standing My Ground: A Capitol Police Officer’s Fight for Accountability and Good Trouble After January 6th.”

Dunn ran for Congress as a Democrat in Maryland in 2024 but fell short in a primary before starting a political action committee, Democracy Defenders.

“After Jan. 6, my whole life changed — everything changed, as everybody saw on TV,” Dunn said in the interview.

On the first day of President Donald Trump’s second term in the Oval Office, he granted clemency to those involved in the Jan. 6 siege of the capitol.

“The reason why I continue to speak out is to seek accountability, to make sure that something like that never happens, that it didn’t get whitewashed,” Dunn said.

Dunn, a James Madison University graduate who played briefly in the Canadian Football League with the Montreal Alouettes, had nearly two decades on the Capitol Police force. He says he left that organization four years short of being able to collect a full pension so he could pursue advocacy for democracy.

Like others who have worked at the U.S. Capitol, Dunn said the grounds and history-around-every-corner atmosphere never grew old; such is the reverence he holds for the center of American democracy.

“To have it desecrated in the way that it was, it just took so much of the love and the passion away from me, and I turned it into what I’m doing now, just a continuing fight,” Dunn said. “I realized that I did all I could do as a police officer.”

Before he left office, President Biden provided a preemptive pardon to Dunn to protect him from potential retaliation for his actions on Jan. 6, his testimony before Congress and his continued commentary. Dunn knows threats to his very life lurk to this day. He said it is a burden, but one he will carry.

Dunn, who is Black, said there is a racial dimension to the Jan. 6 story. He recounts the torrent of slurs being hurled in his direction at the insurrection, words he never heard while wearing the police uniform until that day. He deeply details this in his book.

Big picture, Dunn said he has a rare insight into how conspiracy theories, even the wildest ones, work their way from computer and smart-phone screens into real life, how people are captured in cult-like fashion online and radicalized. He literally fought the flesh-and-blood results of conspiracy theories in the U.S. Capitol.

“Now, everything is conspiracy theories. It is making individuals paranoid. Paranoid individuals do what they did on Jan. 6. Before Jan. 6, you had people who thought satellites were following them or this and that,” Dunn said. 

“Ashli Babbitt would still be alive if she did not come to the capitol on Jan. 6,” Dunn said, referencing the Trump supporter and 35-year-old Air Force veteran who breached the United States Capitol and was shot by a Capitol Police officer. ♦

Douglas Burns of Carroll is fourth-generation journalist and founder of Mercury Boost, a marketing and public relations company.