As Capitol Hill staffers were cleaning up the damage left behind by rioters on Jan. 7, 2021, people in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office began answering a rather, well, odd number of phone calls. Apparently, some of the rioters who participated in the failed siege were calling Pelosi’s office to perchance see if they left any items behind and were wanting to know if they could recover items that were left behind Slate reports.

Rep. Jamie Raskin told Insider that people who’d stormed the Capitol called “asking if there was a lost and found because they lost their phone there, or they left their purse there, or what have you.” As you might expect, the staffers handed the calls to law enforcement.

And of course, law enforcement was only too happy to respond.

“The officers quickly got on the phone and said ‘yeah, just give us your name, your address, you know, and we’ll tie up those loose ends, ” Raskin (D-Md.) said.

Raskin sits on the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot, said the episode shows that many of those who took part feel they haven’t done anything wrong.

My thoughts on this are considerably less charitable. I just think most of these people don’t have much upstairs.

“What’s so fascinating to me about that is there really were people who felt as if they had been summoned by the president,” Raskin said.

And the phone calls looking for lost items highlight one of the bigger problems the committee investigating the riot is facing.

“When they were told they were trespassing and invading the Capitol, they said the president invited them there,” Raskin said. “They didn’t have any kind of subtle understanding of the separation of powers. They just thought that the number one person in the government had invited them to be there, and therefore they had a right.”

Trump’s rally speech riled them up, that’s for sure, goading them into action. But as I said earlier, most of these folks were shortchanged at the intelligence bank, so it was easy to stir them up.

Raskin notes that the fact that so many of the rioters believed they were invited there “underscores the central role that Donald Trump” played in that tragic day. But it also complicates things for the committee because “it does create a problem for assigning guilt at different levels of conduct,” he said.

But there’s one thing that I think is pretty clear: If Trump hadn’t worked these people into a frenzy with his speech, Jan. 6, 2021, might not have become a dark day in U.S. history.