Van Orden foe calls for release of Capitol security footage after cursing incident
David Sivak
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Rep. Derrick Van Orden’s (R-WI) biggest antagonist in the House is calling for the release of security footage after he berated a group of Senate pages in the Capitol Rotunda on Wednesday.
Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) sent a letter to the House Administration Committee on Tuesday requesting that Chairman Bryan Steil (R-WI) release tapes from that night as a matter of “transparency.” Van Orden is reported to have cursed out the teenagers, calling them “lazy s****” as they lay on the ground to take photos of the iconic Capitol dome. The footage is necessary, Pocan wrote, to determine if the congressman engaged in “verbal harassment and physical intimidation.”
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“It is critical that members of the public, including his constituents in Wisconsin’s Third Congressional District, know the truth of what happened that evening,” he said.
Lawmakers of both parties rebuked Van Orden, most notably the top Republican and Democrat in the Senate, which has long run a program for high school students to intern as pages. The House shut down its own page program in 2011.
But it was no surprise to see Pocan denounce the conduct of Van Orden, who declined to apologize for the incident. Pocan, a former co-chair of the Progressive Congressional Caucus, regularly traded barbs with Van Orden on X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter, during the midterm elections.
Van Orden, who flipped a rural district red in 2022, told Spectrum News he had extended an olive branch to his Wisconsin colleague upon arriving in Congress, an overture Pocan said he would not accept until Van Orden apologized for “participating in the insurrection.” The Republican attended the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021, but says he did not enter the Capitol and has called those who did “buffoons.”
Pocan invoked the Capitol riot in his letter, saying Van Orden’s defense — he said the pages were “defiling” the Rotunda by treating it like a “frat house common room” — was “an interesting choice of words for a man who stood shoulder to shoulder with insurrectionists outside the Capitol.”
But his letter also appeared to challenge Steil, whose committee released more than 44,000 hours of Capitol riot footage to ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson earlier this year.
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Steil’s office did not respond to a request for comment. Van Orden’s simply referred the Washington Examiner to the statement he released last week.
“Threatening a congressman with bad press to excuse poor behavior is a reminder of everything that’s wrong with Washington,” he said at the time. “Luckily, bad press has never bothered me, and if it’s the price I pay to stand up for what’s right, then so be it.”