If Meadows' texts he turned over were that bad — imagine how damaging the ones are he didn't turn over: Riggleman
WASHINGTON — In April, the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on Congress revealed that Donald Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows, turned over 2,319 text messages that showed the conversations he was having from the November 2020 election through the insurrection.
Former Rep. Denver Riggleman's (R-VA), who joined the Jan. 6 committee staff after being voted out of Congress, penned a book that detailed his piece of the investigation, which centered around phone calls, text messages and multimedia messages.
"If this was what Meadows was willing to turn over, I can’t imagine how bad it got in the messages he didn’t want the committee to read," wrote Riggleman. "The sprawling spreadsheet left me with an uneasy feeling that everything the messages were telling us about extremism and authoritarianism in the Trump-era Republican Party was just the tip of the iceberg."
He detailed a Nov. 4 group text with Rick Perry, Ben Carson, Meadows and Sunny Perdue, where Perry outlined the idea that state legislatures in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia could simply declare Trump the winner before the counting was over.
"Interesting," Carson responded.
A large text was sent from Donald Trump Jr. on Nov. 6, which purported to be "the strategy." It was the same strategy as Perry, even mentioning the same states. The text was previously reported in April, but Riggleman noted that after not responding, Don Jr. sent the text to Meadows a second time. It was
“Much of this had merit,” Meadows belatedly replied. “Working on this for pa, ga and nc already (sic).”
Riggleman wrote that the Meadows conversations brought together every conspiracy on the darkest parts of QAnon websites and message boards.
"The texts showed Meadows eagerly searching for examples of fraud to provide a basis for challenging the result. He didn’t seem to care how questionable the source was or how thin the evidence was. It was all-hands-on-deck and Meadows wanted anything that could be used to question the vote," Riggleman wrote.
Riggleman dared to click the links that were being shared with Meadows. Somewhere in between diet pill ads and doomsday food supplies, were conspiracy theories that made it all the way to the White House.
"I was truly astounded that some of our government officials were getting their information from such far-out sources," the book detailed. "Republican Arizona congressman Paul Gosar sent Meadows several texts between November and December 2020 warning about 'dead voters' and Dominion, the voting machines destined to become a lightning rod in the months to come. (It was a line of inquiry that even Meadows repeatedly indicated he doubted in emails to other associates.) One of Gosar’s texts included a link to a movie about 'cyber warfare' and voting machines from an anti-vaccine conspiracy blog called 'Some B*tch Told Me.' Republicans in Washington mined briefings from very dubious sources."
While Riggleman may have described it as QAnon "buffoonery," he noted that the horrifying reality was that this was the "digital virus" that took over "the psyche of the Republican Party."
Riggleman's new book, The Breach, was released Tuesday, and you can read more about it here.
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