I just finished watching Chris Hayes interview Denver Riggleman. Riggleman is a conservative Republican and two-term Congressman. After he lost reelection in 2020, Liz Cheney put his name in as a staffer for the J6 committee because of his years working as an intelligence analyst. Riggleman worked for the committee for a few months and left in April 2022. Now he’s coming out with a book, The Breach (which I am not linking to), about his work and what he saw.
This is in violation of the agreements all staffers made with the committee not to talk about what is going on behind the scenes until the committee’s work is done. It also jeopardizes committee interviews, since the interviewees now have some idea what evidence the committee has found. SOP in an investigation is not to reveal the evidence until you’ve finished the investigation, for that reason.
On top of that, Riggleman left while the evidence he discusses was still being analyzed. He doesn’t know what the staffers found (or he shouldn’t know, at least) since he left that may bear on the credibility of what he is now reporting. For instance, his “aha” revelation that someone inside the White House called someone at the Capitol riot left doesn’t mention, so far as I have been able to learn, the fact that the call lasted only nine seconds. Now maybe that’s all that was needed, or maybe it was a wrong number. The point is, we don’t know, and it seems Riggleman doesn’t either.
Riggleman’s rush to reveal it also harms the investigation, as it provides an opening for attack. Nuances don’t matter here; what the committee actually knows about that call and plans to do about that call don’t matter here. It’s ammunition for an attack.
Chris Hayes knew this. He even played clips of Raskin and Schiff complaining, in their restrained way, about the difficulties Riggleman is causing them. And yet, Hayes went on to interview Riggleman with only a couple of questions about their comments, before moving on to what he really wanted to talk about — that phone call. (He didn’t mention it was only nine seconds, either, to my hearing.)
The thing that really irks me, though, was Riggleman’s casual statement, midway through the interview, that he had been a Congressman and a CEO and that he had probably forgotten more (about intelligence work) than the committee ever knew. (One of the things he evidently forgot is that Adam Schiff is also the chair of the House intelligence committee.) That was a total ego-trip. It was Riggleman telling the committee “I know better than all of you, and I wrote this book to prove it.”
And Hayes let it slide.
I also found this just now, from the New York Times (published an hour before Hayes went on the air) Trump White House Called Capitol Rioter on Jan. 6, Book Says:
[Riggleman] said he was cut out of meetings of top staff members, and demanded to be given access. He questioned why some Democrats — including Representatives Zoe Lofgren and Adam B. Schiff of California and Jamie Raskin of Maryland — were seated on the committee.
Sure sounds like he’s got a bit of a grudge there. That also came through in the Hayes interview, where Riggleman kept saying the committee was doing good work . . . but. Hayes skipped over that too.
Said the committee spokesman:
Mr. Mulvey also said 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.”
Yep.