Brianna Keilar Grills Republican Who Served on Jan. 6 Committee: ‘Is There Evidence of Crimes’ By Trump?
CNN New Day anchor Brianna Keilar grilled a former Republican congressman — who served on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol — over whether there is evidence former President Donald Trump committed crimes.
Keilar asked former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA), “Is there evidence of crimes by the former president, by Donald Trump?”
Riggleman said “that’s a great question,” before providing the following answer:
I think there’s certainly evidence of communications that led to certain types of activities that could lead to what I call coup-like movements, right? And that’s the thing that the committee and the challenge of the committee has right now is how do you put all of the data and all these interviews together to present a story.
The biggest challenge we have … is how do we compete with the story of fantasy? How do we compete with that compelling sort of fantastical apocalyptic conspiracy theory we have to take over the government or deep state or globalists or QAnon. Facts are boring. And I think the thing that we have to do is we have to be able to present those facts in a compelling way, and to merge that data with the amazing amount of interviews and I’d say the expertise of each of the committee investigative teams.
At the end of the day, said Riggleman, “I don’t know if the baseline’s going to be just about the criminal activity. I think it’s going to be about the belief systems that we have to combat in the future.”
Keilar asked Riggleman if the text messages between former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and GOP members of Congress and others “is the scaffolding on which so much of this investigation is built, is it clear through this investigation that those are really a direct line to President Trump? Does that pull him in there?”
“It’s very difficult to imagine that the chief of staff do not have a direct line to the president,” he said. “And I think people that say otherwise say ‘well, you don’t have specific proof of that contact or that communications’ is really interesting to me.”
“Between the texts and also, of course, there’s going to be, there’s testimony,” said Keilar.
“Yes,” said Riggleman.
“Is there evidence of crimes by the former president, do you think?” asked Keilar.
“I don’t know,” said Riggleman.
He continued:
You know, a lot of people, I think, want me to say, you know, something, you know, where I think there’s criminal activity. I think if you’re trying to obstruct congress, and that could be proven, that is criminal activity, and I believe, you know, looking at the data, that’s why I don’t want to take the thunder away from the committee because all the stuff we did with our technical team has been pushed to the committee.
So I want to let them make that judgment, but I can tell the American people this, what there is evidence of is multiple individuals and organizations communicating on a specific line of, I would say, a plan, a mission plan. And that’s the thing that really bothered me about what I saw was the — was the incredible amount of links.
Watch above, via CNN.
