At this point, it seems that with each passing day, we find ourselves thinking: Donald Trump could not possibly get any worse. The scandals couldn’t get any crazier. He can’t have possibly done anything worse than what we already know about now.
We are always… always wrong.
Denver Riggleman recently sat down for a bombshell interview with 60 Minutes. Don’t know who Denver Riggleman is? He’s an ex-military intelligence officer and former Republican congressman from Virginia who formerly served as the senior technical adviser for the January 6 Committee. Riggleman was responsible for overseeing a high-key data-driven operation for the House Select Committee that included tracking down phone records and various other pieces of digital evidence that aided the House Panel in their investigation into the deadly Capitol attack, as Donald Trump’s personal role in inciting the violence on that fateful day. Denver worked with the January 6th House Select Committee until April.
In his new sit-down with 60 Minutes correspondent Bill Whitaker, Riggleman delivered one of the biggest bombshells we’ve seen to date in this mounting investigation when he revealed, “You get a real ‘a-ha’ moment when you see that the White House switchboard had connected to a rioter’s phone while it’s happening. That’s a big, pretty big ‘a-ha’ moment.”
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“I only know one end of that call,” Riggleman added. “I don’t know the White House end, which I believe is more important. But the thing is the American people need to know that there are link connections that need to be explored more.”
Precedent dictates that specific White House phone numbers are kept classified in an effort to protect each individual presidential administration. Riggleman, in his forthcoming new book, writes that he quite literally begged the J6 Committee to do all they could to push for the phone numbers to be identified.
Speaking to Whitaker, Riggleman said he did all he could to voice his concerns with the House Panel, “I was one of those individuals, sadly, at the beginning, you know, where I was very, very aggressive about these linked connections, getting those White House phone numbers.”
On the heels of the bombshell revelation, a spokesperson for the January 6 Committee made a statement to 60 Minutes “In his role on the Select Committee staff, Mr. Riggleman had limited knowledge of the committee’s investigation. 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…and a thorough report will be published by the end of the year.”
Riggleman said, “From my perspective…being in counterterrorism. If the White House, even if it’s a short call, and it’s a connected call, who is actually making that phone call?”
Whitaker pressed, “Is there a simple, innocent explanation for that?”
“Was it an accidental call?” Riggleman responded. “When the White House just happened to call numbers that somebody misdialed a rioter that day, on January 6th? Probably not.”
Riggleman was able to uncover the call after he assembled a mall team consisting of data miners and analysts that allowed the Committee to sift through 20 million different pieces of data, including emails, social media posts, phone records, and texts that allowed them to determine who did what in the days and hours leading up to and during the infamous Capitol insurrection.
We were able to do things, I think, in a way that had never been done before with millions of lines of data,” Riggleman said. “And to actually create a graph that shows how these groups actually intermingled.”
Denver went on to add that these groups included “Trump team, Trump family, rally goers, unaffiliated DOJ-charged defendants, Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, and others, which are state legislators, alternate electors, things like that.”
Riggleman’s full 60 Minutes interview with Whitaker will go live tomorrow.
Featured image via Flickr/The White House
