A senior adviser to the House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol has revealed that on the day of the riots, the White House switchboard called a rioter as the attack was taking place.
Denver Riggleman, who served as a senior technical adviser to the Jan. 6 panel, told 60 Minutes correspondent Bill Whitaker:
“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.”
Riggleman, a former GOP congressman from the state of Virginia who also served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Air Force, added:
“I only know one end of that call. 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.”
What remains to be seen, Riggleman noted, is who exactly in the White House reached out to a rioter right as the Capitol was under violent attack, and what that individual was trying to communicate:
“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?”
That led Whitaker to inquire:
“Is there a simple, innocent explanation for that?”
Riggleman:
“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.”
CBS News also notes that the House Select Committee has done extensive research on communications during the fateful events of Jan. 6 which resulted in the deaths of five people, including a member of the U.S. Capitol Police:
The call was uncovered after Riggleman assembled a small team of data miners and analysts for the committee to comb through 20 million lines of data: emails, social media posts, phone records, and texts, to learn who did what leading up to and on January 6th.
“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.”
Among those groups, Riggleman explained, were “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.”
The House Select Committee resumes its hearings on September 28.
