Ex-congressman Riggleman: Exposing new facts or just cashing in?Denver Riggleman served one term in Congress and worked, for a short time, as a staff member of the Jan. 6 Select Committee investigating the Capitol Riot and Donald Trump's other criminal activities.![[Linked Image from capitolhillblue.com]](https://capitolhillblue.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/092622riggleman.jpg)
By DOUG THOMPSON
September 26, 2022Former GOP Virginia congressman Denver Riggleman, who worked a short time at the Jan. 6 Select Committee investigating Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Riot and the efforts of disgraced, criminal president Donald Trump, says his now “unaffiliated” in politics and no longer belongs to the Republican party.
Riggleman topped the stories on CBS’ “60 Minutes” Sunday night with revelations about a long list of text and voice phone contacts between the White House and participants of the Capitol riot before, during, and after the violent attack that trashed the Capitol, sent members of Congress into hiding and led to many injuries and too many deaths.
He lays the blame squarely on Trump, a president he supported with more than 90% of his votes, but he also said his questioning of what Trump had done to the Republican Party led them to help oust him after one term.
That party and the members and staff of the Select Committee are also upset, saying it claimed he has a powerful role that did not exist within the investigation.
“The work of the committee is not built on the bedrock of Denver’s efforts,” said a person familiar with his role, quoted by a source of The Washington Post.
Riggleman has a new book, “The Breach,” coming out Tuesday, one day before the final hearings by the committee, and has been on a tour of news outlets to promote the book and his time on the committee staff.
The Post also reports:
The appearances rattled others who worked with the committee, and Riggleman eventually drew some anger from Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who had initially pushed for his hiring, according to people familiar with the matter.
Riggleman, who split his time between Washington and rural Virginia, where he owned a distillery, hasdescribed himself as being in charge of the committee’s work analyzing call records, texts and online activities of those involved in the attack on the U.S. Capitol. But people familiar with his role note that the phone records were just one small piece of the sprawling and comprehensive investigation.
Committee staff members were infuriated by Riggleman’s cable news tour earlier this summer during which he revealed private details about the staff’s work, according to people involved with the investigation. In a committee-wide email, staff director David Buckley wrote that he was “deeply disappointed” in Riggleman’s decision to publicly discuss their work and that his appearance was “in direct contravention to his employment agreement.” “His specific discussion about the content of subpoenaed records, our contracts, contractors and methodologies, and your hard work is unnerving,” Buckley wrote at the time.
In one of his appearances on CNN, Riggleman detailed his team’s work to link names and numbers after receiving a cache of text messages from former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. Calling the messages “a road map,” he contended the data obtained from the messages allowed the committee to “structure the investigation.” The cache of Meadows’s texts was obtained by CNN earlier this spring.
“You get a real aha moment when you see that the White House switchboard had connected to a rioter’s phone while it’s happening,” Riggleman told “60 Minutes” in his interview Sunday night. “That’s a big, pretty big aha moment.”
Riggleman also claims he and others pushed the Select Committee staff to widen the probe into the phone calls and texts. “I was one of those individuals, sadly, in the beginning, you know, where I was very, very aggressive about these linked connections, getting those White House phone numbers.”
Committee spokesman Tim Mulvey, in a written statement in response to Riggleman’s claims, and others, say otherwise,
He departed from the staff in April prior to our hearings and much of our most important investigative work. Since his departure, the Committee has run down all the leads and digested and analyzed all the information that arose from his work. We will be presenting additional evidence to the public in our next hearing this coming Wednesday, and a thorough report will be published by the end of the year.
On “Meet the Press” Sunday, Committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin said:
We are aware of lots of contacts between people in the White House and different people that were involved obviously in the coup attempt and the insurrection.
And that’s really what all of our hearings have been about. You know, we’ve had more than 20 hours explaining that this was an organized, coordinated attempt to subvert the electoral process.
On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) adds:
Some of the information we have found to various issues we’ll be presenting to the public for the first time in the hearing coming up. It will be the usual mix of information in the public domain and new information woven together to tell the story about one key thematic element of Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the election.
The Post report concludes:
Lawmakers on the panel had previously said they hoped to unearth more information around the Secret Service and Defense Department’s response to the Jan. 6 attack after the committee learned that the two agencies wiped communications from phones of former and current officials.
Investigators also interviewed some of Trump’s Cabinet secretaries — including Mike Pompeo, Steven Mnuchin, Robert O’Brien and Elaine Chao — regarding internal conversations following the insurrection about invoking the 25th Amendment, which provides for the removal of a president on grounds of incapacitation, mental health or physical fitness.
Is Riggleman, whose book, “The Breach,” is set to release Tuesday, one day before the final hearing of the Jan. 6 committee, trying to cash in, or is he reporting valuable new facts about the White House’s involvement in the Capitol riot?
Probably a bit of both. Appearing outside of a “Never Trump” event outside the National Press Club in Washington earlier this year, he went semi-public about working for the committee and told reporters what the committee was finding was “explosive.”
“I wish I could tell you about it. If I did, you’d be more shocked than you could imagine,” he said.
“I’m going to rip apart their ecosystem,” he said of his then-planned book. “It’s all about the money.”
It usually is.
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