Harry Dunn’s new assignment

Former U.S. Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn at a Democratic club breakfast in Silver Spring Monday. Photo by Josh Kurtz.

Harry Dunn may not be joining Congress in January, as he had hoped.

But the former U.S. Capitol Police officer who battled insurrectionists on Jan. 6, 2021, is still an integral part of Democrats’ campaign to defeat former President Donald Trump in November and defend democracy.

Highly visible at 6-foot-9 and with a best-selling memoir under his belt, he’s become a celebrity surrogate for the president and other Democrats. And he’s involved in an array of political activities around the country and at home.

Last week, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution for their official acts, Dunn was part of a hastily assembled press call that President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign put together to denounce the justices’ decision.

“I don’t need nine Supreme Court justices to tell me that Donald Trump was responsible for Jan. 6 — I was there,” Dunn said on the call. “Those people that attacked us, they attacked us in his name, on his orders. I was there when Donald Trump encouraged a mob of supporters to march on the Capitol to try to overturn the results of a free and fair election.

“I remember it clearly while they were beating officers with flags. While they were there, they said they were there to ‘stop the steal.’ When we told them to leave they said, ‘The president told us to come,'” he said on that call.

The Capitol insurrection inspired Dunn to shed his law enforcement career and launch a political campaign of his own. But since losing the Democratic congressional primary in Maryland’s 3rd District in May, Dunn has been crisscrossing the country on Biden’s behalf. In fact, with Biden now struggling to convince party stalwarts that he should remain in the presidential race after stumbling badly in his recent debate with Trump, Dunn has become one of the president’s most prominent and vocal defenders.

“I don’t believe that we’re in trouble,” Dunn told a Democratic political club in Silver Spring Monday morning. “I’m not going to turn my back on him because of a 90-minute performance. I’m looking at what he’s done in his 3 1/2 years in office, in his 40-year, 50-year political career. I don’t think we need to throw in the towel on him because of a 90-minute speech.”

Even more emphatically, Dunn said: “I can’t imagine President Biden not being in office at this moment in time.”

When he isn’t being dispatched by the Biden campaign, Dunn has been stumping for Democratic congressional contenders. He recently set up a political action committee, Dunn’s Democracy Defenders, to help candidates running against pro-Trump Republicans.

Dunn is also not abandoning Maryland after his first high-profile, if ultimately unsuccessful, foray into state politics.

He attended last month’s Maryland Democratic Party gala in Greenbelt, his first. And he spoke at the District 18 Democratic Breakfast Club, one of the most active and opinionated party groups in the state, on Monday morning.

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Dunn is reflecting candidly about some of the lessons he learned — about the Maryland political scene and electoral politics more broadly — since finishing second to state Sen. Sarah K. Elfreth (D-Anne Arundel) in the 22-candidate 3rd District Democratic primary.

Dunn lives in Wheaton, which is within the 18th District — a fact that did not go unnoticed at Monday’s breakfast. He is not a resident of the 3rd Congressional District — though by law, he didn’t have to be — which led to some grumbling during the primary that he was a carpetbagger.

“You want to get engaged in District 18 and in Montgomery County, where you belong,” the president of the District 18 Democratic club, Susan Heltemes, told him Monday.

Dunn’s new PAC is actually not a new entity. He recently converted his congressional campaign committee, Harry Dunn for Congress, into Dunn’s Democracy Defenders.

Dunn raised more than $4.5 million for his congressional bid in five months — an astonishing sum for a first-time candidate in such a short period. But he said in an interview Monday that he essentially spent all of the campaign cash on his primary election and wasn’t sure how much he has raised since the May 14 primary.

The PAC must report its financial activities through June 30 to the Federal Election Commission by July 15 — a document that will also reflect the fundraising and spending of Dunn’s congressional campaign in the three weeks leading up to the primary. FEC spokesperson Myles G. Martin said that going forward, Dunn’s Democracy Defenders has the option of filing quarterly campaign finance reports or doing so every month.

Dunn said the PAC would soon be formally endorsing eight candidates in U.S. House and Senate races around the country and would also publicly release its criteria for making endorsements. Taylor Doggett, a young political strategist who was the manager of Dunn’s congressional campaign, has helped him launch the PAC and remains an adviser.

Dunn said U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego, the presumptive Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Arizona against MAGA celebrity Kari Lake, is a natural to receive the PAC’s support. But he emphasized that Dunn’s Democracy Defenders isn’t poised to drop huge sums of cash on its preferred candidates because it doesn’t want to be seen as putting its thumb on the scale.

“I learned a lot about that” during the congressional primary, he said. “I think elections need to come down to the people in the district.”

‘It’s clear I have a voice and a place now’

That’s a not-so-subtle reference to the influence AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel advocacy group, played in his congressional primary. The United Democracy Project, a PAC affiliated with AIPAC, dropped more than $4 million into the primary on Elfreth’s behalf.

Much of that money came in at a crucial time during that fast-moving campaign, when Dunn’s fundraising take was dwarfing Elfreth’s. His criticism of the super PAC spending became part of his pro-democracy message, augmenting the reminders that he had literally defended the Capitol on Jan. 6. But Elfreth was a good candidate with a history of toiling in local politics — “several candidates in the primary ran good races,” Dunn said Monday — and in the end, she took 36% to Dunn’s 25%.

Asked whether the AIPAC money was determinative in the primary, Dunn demurred, but did say, “Any time you’re able to amplify your message, it makes a difference.” And, he pointed out, “I thought I was going to win.”

But Dunn also expressed no regrets about entering the race or the kind of campaign he was able to run.

“We ran our race,” he said. “We ran it the way we wanted to. Coming in second with more than 20,000 votes — I don’t think that’s an anomaly.”

And Dunn said he wasn’t too troubled by losing. “Honestly, the Supreme Court decision on [presidential immunity] was a bigger gut punch.”

Which is why he’s expecting to take to the road throughout the fall campaign to boost Biden and other Democrats. Heltemes, the District 18 Democratic club leader, said she hopes he remains visible at home during this period.

“I hope that we see you again in Montgomery County and around the district,” she said. “We could use some firing up.”

Dunn is frequently asked about his political future and says he’s not ruling anything out. But he also told Maryland Matters he can’t see beyond Election Day 2024.

“I like to have a plan,” he said. “The only thing I’m focused on is Joe Biden. My mom would hate for me not to have a plan. I want to be effective. I want to be helpful.

“It’s clear I have a voice and a place now, but what that means down the line, I don’t know.”

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