Former GOP lawmaker rips party for following 'basement dwellers' down election conspiracy rabbit hole

On Thursday's edition of MSNBC's "Deadline: White House," former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA), a top staffer to the House Select Committee on January 6, broke down why he came out with a book about what he had seen — and scorched his longtime party for believing conspiracy theories about the election.

Riggleman previously was the source of the revelation that there was a brief White House switchboard call to one of the Capitol rioters — a leak that reportedly angered members of the committee.

"Fear, you know, really fear," said Riggleman, when host Nicolle Wallace asked him why he wrote the book. "You know, it's been 14 months and I think part of it was intensely personal, you know, what had happened to me. The fact is the military and the government has trained me at a level to do this that's pretty neat, you know, and this is my kind of thing. And I love data ... the data shows the committee is in an incredibly strong position and they're going in the right direction and I wanted to prove to people, listen, the littlest pieces of data, what people are doing right now, we need more resources and a new way of looking at this problem."

Riggleman added that he didn't want to be accused of sitting on important information about possible wrongdoing in the Trump White House — a constant source of controversy for top reporters who release books on the administration — and added that the whole experience "terrified" him: "We have a diseased system and we've got to get out in front of it."

READ MORE: Experts slam Judge Cannon's latest pro-Trump ruling: ‘Hilarious, corrupt, shameless, and obvious’

"And it's only on one side. It's on the Republican side," agreed Wallace. "I think there's something that former Republicans feel more — they see — they see how far the party has fallen and how dangerous they can be. Is that part of what you feel?"

"How dare they, right?" said Riggleman. "I think that's what it is, is how dare somebody make things up to win regardless, right? Try to destroy our institutions because you believe in some troll farm nonsense coming from, you know, basement dwellers, you know, talking about Stop the Steal conspiracy theories. That's all based on another basement dweller like Roger Stone ... got to Ginni Thomas, got to members of Congress, got to senators. I don't think what hasn't come out — I was very careful about that, just the hundreds of links attached to these text messages. Videos that would just shock the country. You'd be like, there's no way a sitting member would send these videos."

Watch the video below or at this link.

Denver Riggleman says GOP believe "troll farm nonsense" from "basement dwellers"www.youtube.com