Denver Riggleman - The Breach: The Untold Story of the Investigation Into January 6th

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To my wife, Christine, my daughters, and my granddaughters

This book is not the January 6th committee report. While I played a part in the investigation, I was not aware of every aspect of the committees work. I do not mean to present this book as a complete account of that day. Instead, I hope to build on the publics knowledge of what happened when the Capitol was attacked. I also hope to add to the conversation about January 6th. Its something we cant look away from.

While this is just one mans story, I do believe my time advising the committee and my own life experience, including decades of military intelligence work and two years spent as a Republican member of Congress, give me a unique vantage point and insight into how our country went down this dark roadand how we might prevent something like January 6th from happening ever again.

I had to pick and choose how to explain complex topics in a way thats understandable to anyone reading this book. It was impossible to include every person and contingency. I also left out sensitive data that could affect the January 6th committee. I ask all open-source intelligence researchers and others who are studying January 6th extensively to please forgive me for excluding certain individuals and events.

This book makes a simple case. There is a growing militant, far-right, Christian nationalist movement that is being fueled by online disinformation. That movement now constitutes an extremist wing of the Republican Partythe party that I once belonged toand it poses a serious danger to our democracy. Fringe movements of any political stripe can turn violent. The Left is not immune and certainly not blameless. However, at the moment, the Far Right is more organized and more militant. My story lays out the concrete proof and data showing the scope of this threat and what I hope is the beginning of a blueprint for how we can confront it.

Memory is only human. I described the events and recounted the conversations in this book to the best of my abilities. Whenever possible, I augmented my own recollections with original records, video footage, news coverage, and official reports. This book includes many text messages. No alterations were made to their content apart from some capitalization at the beginning of quotes, inserting bracketed ellipses to indicate where they have been shortened for readability, and adding some periods at their ends.

The text messages from former White House chief of staff Mark Meadowss phones that are included in this book werent given to us with the names of the people who sent and received them attached. As Ill explain in more detail in the chapters to come, part of the work I oversaw on the committee was the painstaking process of matching phone numbers to names, utilizing powerful law enforcement databases and other clues as we could find them. While my team maintained rigorous standards and made attributions only where there was a very high degree of certaintyand while I have the highest confidence in our workwe cant entirely exclude the possibility that this identification process could have introduced unintended errors because of an undiscovered flaw in our source data or our methods. Moreover, we also cant rule out the fairly rare circumstance when a message is sent by a person from a phone number they dont ordinarily usesuch as when the phone is shared or borrowedand we dont detect it. Although this was a possibility, all these texts were sent to the phone number of the White House chief of staff, all of the texts in this book were part of the evidence considered by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, and many of them were introduced in the committees public hearings.

I am an intelligence officer by training. There is nothing more valuable than raw data. I tried my best to get out of its way. I am not asking you to like me or even to trust me. I want to let the data do the talking. Through countless ones and zeroes, it paints a clear and disturbing picture.

As the United States Capitol was attacked on January 6, 2021, the White House went dark for seven hours and thirty-seven minutes. It was my job to turn the lights on.

One year after the siege, the National Archives turned over more than seven hundred pages of White House records requested by the investigators of the US House of Representatives Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. I was one of those investigators. And embedded in those pages were the call diaries for the former president Donald J. Trump.

Heres what the call logs showed: According to those records, on January 6, 2021, there were no phone calls in or out of the White House from 11:17 a.m. through 6:54 p.m.

Im a former air force intelligence officer and National Security Agency consultant. I have extensive training in analyzing military operations, counterterrorism tactics, cyber warfare, and generally finding secrets my enemies dont want found. But it didnt take an intelligence genius to look at that call diary and know something was off. The Oval Office never goes quiet that long. That void also happened to overlap with the hours when Trump supporters brawled with police, smashed windows, and rampaged through Congress as Trumps election loss to Joe Biden was being certified. This was a hell of a coincidence.

The White House is technically required to keep track of the commander in chiefs calls, thanks to the Presidential Records Act, which was enacted in the wake of Watergate. But like so many of our campaign finance and ethics regulations, the PRA is essentially toothless. The regulations require the West Wing to preserve records, but it leaves it up to the president and their staff to determine what exactly that meansand how to do it. This leaves a lot of room for negligence, carelessness, and, sometimes, deliberate misconduct.

I didnt know why the White House went dark and I didnt really care. As an intelligence officer, you learn not to make assumptions. It might have been an innocent mistake; it could have been a cover-up. What mattered to meas the senior technical advisor to the committee and as an Americanwas why they stopped tracking the calls, and what happened next.

I had signed on to the select committee six months earlier, and had put together a top-notch team of telecommunications analysts and intelligence researchers, some of whom had worked on counterterrorism with the NSA and a whole host of secretive three-letter agencies. Our mission was simple: get the data.

The stakes were clear. Anyone with a screen could see our democracy was in peril. And the rift between Trumps wing of the Republican Party and objective reality didnt begin with the election. There had been an explosion of far-right conspiracy theories during the Trump years: QAnon, Pizzagate, and anti-vaccine pandemic paranoia. They spread like wildfire as social media algorithms ensured that susceptible audiences received a steady dose of them. This digital outrage cycle also presented an opportunity for all kinds of hustlers, who fueled the fire while generating cash through clicks and selling all manner of merchandise from T-shirts to questionable vitamin supplements.