Jan. 6 committee called staff 'uninformed' for attacking Liz Cheney — but former GOP official doesn't buy it
Former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA) was "stunned" when he read the recent Washington Post report about staffers on the House Select Committee working to uncover the attempt to change the 2020 election and attack the Capitol. According to the Post, the staff said that the committee turned to become the 2024 Liz Cheney presidential campaign and go directly after Donald Trump and not focus the report on a broad effort to uncover all of the people involved from the House to the Senate and White House.
"Fifteen former and current staffers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, expressed concerns that important findings unrelated to Trump will not become available to the American public," said the Post.
The staffers were told to draft a report that would focus almost entirely on Trump. Left out would be the "Blue Team," a group of staff and officials "that dug into the law enforcement and intelligence community’s failure to assess the looming threat and prepare for the well-forecast attack on the Capitol. The proposed report would also cut back on much of the work of the Green Team, which looked at financing for the Jan. 6 attack, and the Purple Team, which examined militia groups and extremism."
But it was the committee's spokesperson, Tim Mulvey, that made Riggleman concerned. In a statement, Mulvey said that the committee has been a “historic, bipartisan fact-finding effort speaks for itself, and that won’t be changed by a handful of disgruntled staff who are uninformed about many parts of the committee’s ongoing work.”
Riggleman was concerned about why there would be key staffers uninformed about anything after working for almost a year on the efforts.
"I'm a little stunned that many people talking about it," Riggleman said of the report. "I think what got to me is the committee remarks to the staffers. I don't know the outline of the report. I don't know what the appendices are and going with it. I don't know what it will look like but if you have the committee talking about staffers uninformed, why are they un uninformed? They thought that they needed to go in another direction and the committee didn't."
He also noted that Cheney is one of many on the committee, and she doesn't run the show.
"What bothers me more than the leaks in that report which did stun me a little to be reported is that we're close to a final committee report and you have people or the leadership saying that they have uninformed staffers," Riggleman continued. "As someone who led people in battle and CEO and looked at the targeting of terrorist programs, I wonder if there's a leadership challenge not met with communication in the staff and the leadership element. For me, it is difficult because I'm not there anymore."
Riggleman went on to rail against Donald Trump for pretending like he didn't know a white supremacist and Holocaust denier was joining them for a meal. In the aftermath, Riggleman said that Fuentes and his host, Kanye West were mocking Trump just as expected from a reality show.
"If you look at Kanye and Fuentes is saying it's a merging of groups," said Riggleman noting that the merging of groups was really just Nazis and white supremacists. "They leave Mar-a-Lago and then they start talking smack about Donald Trump and it has to do with the fact to make money. It's always the root cause of this."
Trump attacked West after the meeting, calling him a "seriously troubled man." Prior to that, however, Trump cheered Fuentes saying, "he gets me."
"But they're hateful individuals with xenophobic and racist ideologies out there. My guess is they will support Donald Trump after all this because this is a reality show. This is pathetic that anybody would think that Donald Trump didn't know who was sitting at the table," Riggleman continued.
See the discussion below:
