On January 6, 2021, while a mob was inside the Capitol, members of the House were moved into a large committee room and locked down together. It was the middle of a pandemic, months before most people could get a vaccine. Dozens of people, one room, no way out.

Delaware Democrat Lisa Blunt Rochester started walking the room with a handful of blue surgical masks, offering them to anyone who wasn't wearing one.

A video shot inside that room, published by Punchbowl News and reported by CNN, shows six House Republicans standing close together without masks. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Markwayne Mullin. Andy Biggs. Scott Perry. Doug LaMalfa. And Michael Cloud.

They all refused.

What Blunt Rochester was trying to prevent

Her own account, given to CNN two days later:

"Very concerned we were sitting in a super-spreader event but instead of sitting back and lamenting, I tried to go into action to try and persuade people to put them on."

"By the end of passing them out, I only had one left in my hand offering them to everyone. I was disappointed in those who didn't accept the masks but was encouraged by those who did. At least we were a little bit safer."

She was right about the risk. On January 10, the Capitol's attending physician, Dr. Brian Monahan, sent a notice to lawmakers. As Newsweek reported it, the notice said that "on Wednesday, January 6, many members of the House community were in protective isolation in a room located in a large committee hearing space," and that during that time "individuals may have been exposed to another occupant with coronavirus infection."

He told them to watch for symptoms, wear masks, keep their distance, and get tested.

Three of the people in that room got sick

Within days, three House Democrats who sheltered in that room tested positive for COVID-19: Pramila Jayapal, Brad Schneider and Bonnie Watson Coleman. ABC News reported their reaction, and named the six Republicans seen on video refusing masks. Cloud is on that list.

Schneider's words:

"It's more than arrogance, it's more than contempt. It's a desire to cause injury to others, is the only way I can describe it."

"I know that my exposure in that room was greater than at any other time through this entire pandemic."

Jayapal and Watson Coleman both reported mild, cold-like symptoms.

Nobody can prove which specific person infected which other person in a room that size. That's not the point, and it never was. The point is that a colleague came around with masks, said out loud that she was worried it was a superspreader event, and six people looked at her and said no — in the middle of a lockdown none of them had chosen to be in.

CNN asked all six for comment. Greene's office sent a statement calling masks a muzzle. The other five, including Cloud, did not respond.

To our knowledge, Michael Cloud has never explained it.

Why it still matters five years later

Two reasons.

First, because it wasn't a policy disagreement. Cloud has voted for plenty of things we've written about, and votes are arguments — you can win or lose them and move on. This was not a vote. This was a moment in a room, with a specific person asking, and it cost nothing to say yes. A mask was in her hand.

The people it put at risk were not abstractions. They were the colleagues standing eight feet away, and the Capitol Police and staff who had already spent that day being assaulted and were stuck in there too.

Second, because of where he ended up. In the Congress that followed, Cloud was named to the House Oversight Committee's Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic — the panel Republicans created to sit in judgment of how the country handled COVID: the mandates, the closures, the science, who got it wrong.

He was seated on the pandemic-accountability panel after being filmed refusing a mask during a lockdown that the Capitol physician then flagged as a possible exposure event.

The rest of that day

The mask is the part that has video. It is not the worst part.

Hours after that room was cleared, Cloud voted to reject the electoral votes of Arizona and Pennsylvania — voting to throw out the results of the election that had just been attacked. Weeks earlier he had signed the amicus brief backing Texas's lawsuit to throw out millions of votes in four other states.

He voted against impeaching Trump for inciting the mob, calling impeachment part of "the cancel culture movement of the left." And when the House voted to create the committee to investigate what happened that day, Cloud didn't vote at all.

The mask is a small thing next to that. But it's the small thing that tells you what the room was like: people who had just been evacuated from an attack, sitting shoulder to shoulder in a pandemic, and a handful of them deciding that even this was a chance to make a point.

Sources

CNN, "Video shows Republican members of Congress refuse to wear masks during Capitol insurrection", January 9, 2021. ABC News, "Democrats infected with COVID-19 following siege on Capitol furious at maskless Republicans", January 12, 2021. Newsweek, "Lawmakers Huddling in Capitol's Safe Room May Have Been Exposed to COVID, Warns Physician", January 10, 2021. Photo: CNN / Punchbowl News video still.