Former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-Va.), who staffed the Jan. 6 Committee until April, said on Friday that the White House switchboard connected with the phone of a rioter at the U.S. Capitol during the insurrection.
(The Hill) – Former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-Va.), who staffed the Jan. 6 Committee until April, said on Friday that the White House switchboard connected with the phone of a rioter at the U.S. Capitol during the insurrection.
“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,” said Riggleman, former senior technical adviser for the committee, according to a clip from CBS’s upcoming episode of "60 Minutes."
When asked by host Bill Whitaker to confirm that someone in the White House was calling an insurrectionist during the riot, Riggleman said: “On January 6th, absolutely.”
Riggleman, author of upcoming book “The Breach,” said that the call raised a red flag from his perspective as a former military intelligence officer working in counterterrorism.
“I only know one end of that call. I don't know the White House end, which I believe is more important,” he said.
“But the thing is, the American people need to know that there are link connections that need to be explored more.”
Whitaker inquired whether there is a “simple, innocent explanation” for the call, to which Riggleman responded: “Was it an accidental call?”
“When the White House just happened to call numbers, that somebody misdialed a rioter that day, on January 6th? Probably not,” he continued.
Riggleman was ousted from his congressional seat in 2020 after outrage from members of his party that he officiated a same-sex wedding.
The former representative elaborated on his role as an adviser to the House select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol, where he led a digital investigation.
“We were able to do things, I think, in a way that had never been done before with millions of lines of data. And to actually create a graph that shows how these groups actually intermingled,” Riggleman told “60 Minutes.”
Communications have been highly scrutinized following the Capitol riot, including text messages from the phones of top Trump administration officials.
In August, a watchdog group reported that the Department of Defense failed to retain texts from a number of its top officials on Jan. 6. In addition, numerous officials from the Department of Homeland Security also had their messages erased during the transition, including former acting Secretary Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli.
The full episode of "60 Minutes" is set to air Sunday.
