Former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA) began working on the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on Congress not long after it was established. His focus with his four-person team was in sifting through all of the phone calls, text messages and multimedia messages that were uncovered from Mark Meadows' as part of a committee subpoena.
While the 2,319 messages have been released, Riggleman's newly released book, The Breach, detailed that when the text messages came out in April people like Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) didn't look quite as bad as Riggleman said he is.
"In snippets, it was easy to misread the intention of the texts. Wrongdoers could come off as downright, well, if not saintly, decent," he wrote. "Utah senator Mike Lee and Texas congressman Chip Roy were quoted as souring on their colleagues’ efforts to keep Trump in power. They received kudos in the press for their apparent reasonableness during unreasonable times."
The truth is, he said, they were among those who actively worked to undermine the will of the people.
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"What other texts revealed was that on November 7, 2020, when the election was called for Biden, Mike Lee wrote Meadows asking that attorney Sidney Powell be brought into the White House," Riggleman said. "Powell had a difficult-to-define role in the postelection period. She dubbed the evidence of election fraud that she said she’d gathered, and eventually herself, as 'the Kraken,' a reference to a legendary Scandinavian sea monster—a colossal octopus—that is released from captivity to fight for the gods in the movie Clash of the Titans. For a time, she was a member of the Trump campaign’s legal team and one of Trump’s personal lawyers, and she appeared in those roles at a notorious press conference alongside Rudy Giuliani."
She has since been flooded with complaints that she be disbarred for false statements in court. She has also raised millions in a legal defense fund that has been used to pay for another disbarred lawyer to help militia members who are now fighting sedition charges.
"On the evening of November 9, Mike Lee sent Meadows a text saying he and other “Republican senators” had held a meeting with Powell at the Conservative Partnership Institute," Riggleman recalled.
"We had steering executive meeting at CPI tonight, with Sidney Powell as our guest speaker,” wrote Lee. “You have in us a group of ready and loyal advocates who will go to bat for him, but I fear this could prove short-lived unless you hire the right legal team and set them loose immediately.”
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Riggleman noted later in the book that even Meadows seemed "tepid" in Lee pushing Powell on the president.
"As Lee warned Meadows that Powell was complaining the Trump campaign lawyers were 'obstructing progress,' it’s likely those attorneys shared Meadows’s reservations," the book explains. "Nonetheless, Powell texted Meadows directly on November 10. She only sent an image. We don’t know what the file contained. It’s one of those messages in the log that remain a mystery. Still, the pair clearly had an open line of communication."
Lee is now running for reelection in Utah against former Republican aide Evan McMullin, who is running as an independent candidate. Powell is also part of the Georgia voter fraud investigation, but she refused to show up when the grand jury subpoenaed.
Riggleman's book was released this week and Raw Story has full coverage here.