Jan 6 select committee hires former GOP rep Denver Riggleman as adviser

The House select committee investigating the Jan.6 attack on Capitol Hill is hiring former Rep. Denver Riggleman, R-Va., As an adviser to the panel, according to Chairman Bennie Thompson.

The former congressman, who lost his primary last summer, has become one of the few voices within the Republican Party to criticize the spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories, including the idea that the The 2020 presidential election was stolen, leading to the Capitol Riot.

Thompson also announced that Joseph Maher, the senior deputy general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security, will join senior officials on the committee.

“I thank these two officials for their willingness to support the important work of the select committee by joining our non-partisan staff,” Thompson, a congressman from Mississippi, said in a statement. “They understand how close our democracy was to disaster on January 6 and I applaud their commitment to ensuring that we never see a repeat of that day.”

Riggleman, who also served as an Air Force intelligence officer, is expected to help the committee catalog and track the falsehoods that circulated online and on social media before thousands of supporters of former President Donald Trump walked away. meet in Washington and descend on Capitol Hill in hopes of overturning the Election Results.

ABC News reported earlier this month that according to sources familiar with the discussions, Riggleman may join the committee staff in an advisory capacity.

The committee held its first hearing last week with several police officers who clashed with pro-Trump rioters on Capitol Hill in January. With the House now on vacation until August, the panel is focusing on defining the contours of its investigation and building its staff.

Thompson said the panel would issue “quite a few” subpoenas and could potentially seek to interview and obtain documents from former Trump administration officials and Republican lawmakers who contacted Trump before and on Jan.6. .

Asked whether the committee would like to question former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, following the release of handwritten notes from former Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue that appear to show Trump is trying to do Pressing the Justice Department to say there was a major fraud tainting the 2020 presidential election, Thompson said the committee had yet to determine who he wanted to hear.

“The president basically wanted to mobilize the entire US government apparatus to reinstall him as president,” Representative Jamie Raskin, D-Md., Another panel member, told reporters. “As a member, I am very interested in retracing the steps of what the president did to secure what he called his ‘stay in power’.”

Riggleman is the third Republican linked to the panel, along with Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, both of whom called for Trump to be impeached and accepted the invitation of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to join. to the inquiry into the efforts of GOP leaders to boycott him after Pelosi refused to sit in two main Tory lawmakers who voted to overturn the 2020 election.

In recent days, other Conservative lawmakers have sought to kick Cheney and Kinzinger out of the House GOP Conference and strip them of other committee duties from their committee work.