Former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) said he was "sobbing" while watching the Jan. 6, 2021 attacks on the U.S. Capitol, according to an excerpt of a soon-to-be released book obtained by CNN.
In journalist Mark Leibovich's new book, "Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission," which will be released on Tuesday, according to USA Today, Ryan told him why he was overcome with emotion when the Capitol was under attack.
"I spent my whole adult life in that building," Ryan said, according to the book. "And I saw my friends, a lot of cops, some of my old security detail -- I'm still friends with a bunch of those guys. It really disturbed me, foundationally."
Ryan represented Wisconsin's 1st congressional district from 1999-2019, and served as the House Speaker from October 2015 to January 2019. He also ran alongside Mitt Romney as the vice presidential nominee in the 2012 election.
He told Leibovich that "something snapped in him" while watching the Jan. 6 riots and added that he does not cry often. Leibovich wrote that Ryan did not expect anything like the attacks to happen following former-President Donald Trump's loss in the 2020 election.
"Ryan figured the president would b***h and moan and maybe make a big show of 'fighting' for his supporters for a while. Everyone could feel good and victimized. But eventually Trump would just leave; hopefully, he would know to do this on his own. And everyone could then just get on with their lives," Leibovich writes in the book.
Leibovich's book focuses on the "slavishly devoted Republicans whom Trump drew to his side," he writes, according to The Washington Post.
"The idea [of the book] is to tell the story of this ordeal through the supplicant fanboys who permitted Donald Trump’s depravity to be inflicted on the rest of us," Leibovich writes.
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