Mark Meadows ‘flipped hard’ on Trump: ex-January 6 committee adviser
WASHINGTON — The U.S. House January 6 select committee had a lot of power.
But it never could access White House call records, which the Department of Justice now seems to rely on in its latest federal indictment against former President Donald Trump over his alleged involvement in Jan. 6, 2021, and quest to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
“First reaction? They got the other end of the call records,” former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA) – a senior adviser to the January 6 committee – exclusively told Raw Story on Tuesday evening.
Riggleman’s second reaction?
“Somebody flipped hard,” Riggleman says.
In his New York Times bestseller, “The Breach,” Riggleman calls former White House Chief of Staff Meadows’ 2,319 text messages in the weeks before January 6 the “crown jewels”.
“Think about the Mark Meadows text messages. I never got his call detail records, but I'm pretty damn sure the DOJ did and that is a huge, huge thing,” Riggleman says. “And when you're looking at the indictment for the co-conspirators, I did not see a description for Mark Meadows in there.”
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Riggleman, who was a military intelligence officer before coming to Congress, says the calls are damning.
“I think they got more data on the other end of the White House calls with the interaction between Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and White House staff and rally planners, alternate electors,” Riggleman told Raw Story. “I think they put together sort of a map of everybody who was involved. They had the metadata on the other side of the calls, and I think people flipped that they could validate that they weren't lying based on the data.”
Without warrants or law enforcement authority, Riggleman and the committee couldn’t get geolocation data and other information he viewed as vital.
“We couldn’t get the White House numbers which were part of the call records, which I thought were the smoking gun. When you have Oath Keepers texting Andrew Giuliani, the son of Rudy Giuliani, in November/December of 2020, that’s a pretty big indicator,” Riggleman said. “They seem very confident, when you look at a 45-page indictment, my guess is they did get the other end of communications.”
While in office, Riggleman served as a Republican, but he no longer calls the party home. He’s hoping some of his former GOP colleagues look in the mirror and stop peddling dangerous conspiracy theories.
“As this evidence comes out, I think you're gonna have people getting angry or angrier because they know that they were part of this ridiculousness,” Riggleman tells Raw Story. “That type of dangerous rhetoric and pushing fantasy to their base, this is what happens, and that just means that you have some incredibly irresponsible legislators.”