“I can help.”
Amid the bedlam of 10,000 voices chanting, singing, and shouting on the east terrace of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, those three words cut through the haze like a lighthouse beam.
The target of the message was U.S. Capitol Police Lt. Tarik Khalid Johnson, 46, who scanned the crowd for someone to help with an urgent mission. The speaker was retired New York police sergeant Michael Joseph Nichols, 46, an Oath Keeper who knew all about riots and making decisions under fire.
Their mission’s success depended on a partnership of exhausted, besieged Capitol police and a group of Oath Keepers, a patriot organization that would soon be the target of an unrelenting war on alleged “domestic terror” by the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI….