Donald Trump hesitated and initially refused to tweet the words “stay peaceful” when his supporters breached the Capitol building and attacked police officers on 6 January last year, said a former aide.

My colleague Shweta Sharma reports:

Vice president Kamala Harris was reportedly inside the building on 6 January 2021 when a pipe bomb was discovered outside the Democratic National Convention (DNC) headquarters, after rioters struck the US’s Capitol Hill.

Capitol Police and Secret Service had evacuated a previously unnamed “protectee” at 1.14pm, just minutes after police started investigating the presence of a pipe bomb outside the DNC headquarters at 1.07pm, according to an official Capitol Police timeline of events.

Sravasti Dasgupta reports:

At one point on Thursday while representative Adam Kinzinger was recounting the US Capitol insurrection on CNN, and on MSNBC there was a report on the Justice Department’s probe into the riot, the Fox News Channel aired a video of a painting dog to illustrate a discussion about people maxing out on screen time, reports the Associated Press.

This snapshot of the day’s TV on 6 January highlights a divergence in the coverage of the first anniversary of the riot that was clear from Thursday’s earliest hours.

Between 6.20am and 9am, the Fox and Friends show mentioned the anniversary only twice.

While all the main broadcast and cable news networks, including Fox News, covered president Joe Biden’s anniversary speech live, differences in their coverage were stark. ABC anchor David Muir said: “You could clearly hear the passion in his voice as he was telling the American people what’s at stake.” NBC’s Savannah Guthrie said the attack on Trump was “pretty remarkable”.

Fox News’ commentary, on the other hand, referred to the speech as divisive and a missed opportunity. “We’ve got a lot of challenges that we’re dealing with,” said anchor Dana Perino. “You could have talked about the strength of our system.”

Newsmax’s Tom Basile said that the president believes that a country is defined by its worst moments. He said Mr Biden sees everyone involved in the attack as extremists and terrorists, “and I think the American people are going to chafe at that”.

Representative Pramila Jayapal said she “vividly” remembers when the rioters stormed through the US Capitol on 6 January, last year.

“I remember it incredibly vividly, I remember every detail,” said Ms Jayapal. “We were told to pull out our gas masks, which many of us had never seen, never knew how to use, and then we were told to get down onto the floor.”

Demanding accountability, the lawmaker said: “We need to get to the bottom of exactly what happened and who was involved and bring every single one, including those at the very top, to justice. It’s going to be very hard for us to assure that this is never going to happen again. And to allow the country to heal.”

Several Democrats have warned against the ongoing threat to democracy of Donald Trump’s election fraud claims, as they marked the one-year anniversary of the 6 January riots.

“We’re at a point now where the Big Lie is perpetuating itself,” said Senator Bob Casey in the Senate, according to the Philadelphia Enquirer.

“On January 6, 2021, we thwarted the attack on the Capitol. On January 6, 2022, the attack on our democracy continues,” said representative Tom Malinowski.

Representative Mary Gay Scanlon criticised Republicans for raising doubts about the election results, adding that those who “sit silently or make cowardly statements about not being sure about the election result,” are just as “guilty”.

ICYMI: As a violent mob marched on the US Capitol, The Independent’s Richard Hall walked with them.

Watch the five moments he’ll never forget from 6 January 2021.

Tabitha Raskin, the daughter of Democratic representative Jamie Raskin, in an interview with CNN recounted being “scared” as she hid under the desk in representative Steny Hoyer’s office with her husband Hank Kronick after the riots broke out.

“As soon as we heard them close, we immediately looked for someplace to hide. It was really the only good hiding spot,” she said, “So the two of us, we hid under his desk. We were under there for a while. I remember there was a hole in the desk for cords, and I was scared. I just imagined people coming in and like seeing us through the hole and then I remember trying to cover the hole.”

Democrats emotionally recounted the violence of the Capitol riot, while Republicans were mostly AWOL, Eric Garcia reports.

ICYMI: Around 57 per cent of Americans, including half of Republicans and seven out of 10 Democrats, believe there will be a repeat of the pro-Trump insurrection that occurred a year ago today.

According to poll by Axios-Momentive, 63 per cent of respondents also said that the attack changed the way that Americans thought about democratic government in the US.

It comes amid polling showing that as many as 81 per cent of Republican voters believed the 2020 election was not won fairly by Mr Biden and the Democrats – and a deepening divide on several other issues, as Graeme Massie writes.

Over 100 alleged participants of the Capitol riot are crowdfunding in an attempt to pay their soaring legal fees, with around $3 million being raised by the group so far.

As Daily Dot reports, they collectively hope to raise $13 million in total, with donations for each of the accused individuals fluctuating massively – as some haven’t garnered any donations at all.

Tom Fenton has the story.