On 60 Minutes last night Bill Whitaker interviewed Denver Riggleman, who was a technical adviser for the House Select Committee investigating the 6January2021 attack on the Capitol. He was in charge of making sense of digital clues, and using more than 2,000 text messages provided to the committee by President Donald Trump's Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, he deciphered a roadmap to an attempted coup. Said Riggleman:
The "a-ha" moment for him came when his team discovered the White House switchboard connected a call to a Capitol rioter's phone on January 6, 2021.
Riggleman is not your ordinary staff member, for he served one term representing Virginia in the U.S. House, and is a Republican, or maybe today was.
- He was a member of the House Freedom Caucus.
- He lost his bid for re-election in 2020, even though he was endorsed by Trump.
- Previously he served in the U.S. Air Force for 15 years, and was an intelligence officer.
- While he has been called a Big Foot scholar, he said that no one is dumb enough to think this is real.
- When he was in the House, he was the only member of the Republican party to speak on the floor against QAnon.
- He thinks the Republican party in Virginia is broken.
With all that background and baggage, he was hired on 6August2021 to serve as a senior staffer for the House January 6 committee. He left that position in April of 2022 to help the people of Ukraine in their war against Russia.
He was interviewed by CNN's Anderson Cooper on 2June2022, and was criticized for discussing the work of this House special committee. Notwithstanding, he went on 60 Minutes with what Riggleman said was irrefutable proof of a plot to overturn the November 2020 presidential election. Not sure why this second appearance has made such an impact, for he essentially said the same thing nearly four months ago. Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was intimately involved in these text messages. One line of fear was that the Supreme Court was thus also a partner in the coup. In short, Riggleman's initial bemusement about what was happening turned to horror.
In any case, the Select Committee staff since the departure of Riggleman ran down more leads, and this whole story will be presented at Noon EDT on Wednesday. Ginni Thomas will not be interviewed for this hearing, but that link will in time be an important part of the attempt. She was in the crowd surrounding the Capitol on January 6, but left before the attack. The Committee has email correspondence involving G. Thomas with Donald Trump, John Eastman and Mark Meadows in the planning and promotion of that event.
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Well, Ian is finally a hurricane, and will rapidly intensify into a Category 3, strike western Cuba early Tuesday morning, strengthen further to a Category 4, and weaken a bit to now strike the Florida panhandle.
However, for the past week I've been hinting that there could be a fork in the road as shown here:
However, at this time there is no hint of a leftish turn towards New Orleans. Ian is a large storm, with a diameter of around 500 miles.
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