Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa journalist. He is the co-founder of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation and a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, where this article first appeared on The Iowa Mercury newsletter. His family operated the Carroll Times Herald for 93 years in Carroll, Iowa where Burns resides.

A Capitol Police officer who stood the ground between hundreds of members of Congress and insurrectionists during the January 6 attack is scheduled to be the keynote speaker at a Council Bluffs, Iowa political event Sunday, July 27.

Harry Dunn, a now-departed United States Capitol Police officer who testified before Congress about the attack on the capitol, became a high-profile representative of the experience for 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, an instant here or there, in the run of events, from happening.

“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 The Iowa Mercury. “We were a couple of right turns, and wrong turns by the insurrectionists, away from it being a bloodbath.”

Dunn will speak at an event hosted by the Pottawattamie County Democratic Party from 1 to 3:30 p.m. Sunday, July 27 at The Grass Wagon, 110 S. 29th St., Council Bluffs. Tickets can be purchased in advance here. Or at the door. The event is a fundraiser for the Pottawattamie County Democratic Party.

“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 though hell.’ I get death threats weekly. It used to be daily, but it’s kind of gone down a little bit.”

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. The PAC supports candidates who take on what the group calls “MAGA extremists and the massive Super PACs that undermine our democracy.”

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

Dunn lays the uprising at the Capitol squarely at the feet of President Donald Trump, whom he sees as a threat to democracy. On the the first day of his second term, Trump granted clemency to those involved in the January 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.

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

“I did everything I could to make sure we could get Donald Trump held accountable and we could stop him since the courts didn’t do it,” Dunn said.

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 going 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 Joe Biden provided a preemptive pardon to Dunn to protect him from potential MAGA retaliation for his actions on January 6, testimony before Congress, and continued advocacy.

President Joe Biden presents the Presidential Citizens Medal to U.S. Capitol Police Private First Class Harry Dunn during a ceremony on January 6, 2023, in the East Room of the White House. (official White House photo by Adam Schultz is available via Wikimedia Commons)

Dunn knows threats to his life lurk to this day. It’s a burden, but one he will carry, he said.

There is a racial dimension to the January 6 story, Dunn, who is Black, said in the interview. 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.

Looking at the 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 and screeds 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 it is everything is conspiracy theories,” Dunn said. “It is making individuals paranoid. Paranoid individuals do what they did on January 6.”

He added, “Before January 6 you had people who thought satellites were following them or this and that. But Donald Trump has honed in on it and created a whole new population of people who — and I don’t mean this literally, but maybe — have found a hill to die on on conspiracy theories. Ashli Babbitt would still be alive if she did not come to the capitol on January 6. If Donald Trump did not lie about the election being stolen January 6 would not have happened.”

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Top image: Harry Dunn speaks at the Veterans March at the National Mall in Washington, DC on March 14, 2025. He condemned Donald Trump’s role in the January 6 attack and cutting services for veterans. Photo by Adnan Masri is available via Wikimedia Commons.