In April 2022, former Republican Representative Denver Riggleman resigns from the committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol to work with a nonprofit organization in Ukraine. (Credit: Bloomberg)
Congressional investigators collected a stunning 30 million lines of phone data mapping contacts between conservatives and the Trump White House in the name of investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol breach, a massive dragnet that raises civil liberty concerns about the lack of limits on the ability of lawmakers to snoop on Americans’ private phone calls.
Adam Kinzinger (Credit: public domain)
The mountainous collection of phone records were revealed to the FBI led by Chris Wray in late 2023 by former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a GOP member on the Democrat-run House Jan. 6 select committee. The cache was offered to the bureau on the eve of the 2024 presidential election as evidence without requiring a warrant, according to an FBI document memorializing the offer that was reviewed by Just the News.
The memo says Kinzinger told the FBI that the phone data had been collected by then-former Rep. Denver Riggleman, an ex-Republican who was a staffer on the Capitol riot committee and who later helped Hunter Biden’s legal team in its efforts to cast doubt on the laptop belonging to Joe Biden’s son.
Congressional powers used to conduct lawfare against Trump
The FBI memo does not reveal whether the bureau ever took Kinzinger up on his offer, but it does reveal the sheer magnitude of a phone surveillance project the Democrats ran by using congressional subpoenas to gather phone records about Americans’ contacts with the Trump White House.
Kinzinger told the FBI that the J6 committee “collected and linked a substantial amount of telephone data, and noted the FBI may already possess such data. While former congressman Denver Riggleman worked with the Select Committee he (Riggleman) had a contact and was able to obtain toll information including for White House root or switchboard numbers via congressional subpoena,” the FBI agents wrote in their memo summarizing the offer.
“Kinzinger noted that he (Kinzinger) did not conduct the analysis himself but that Riggleman had identified certain telephone connections between numbers identified as being associated with the White House and certain individuals,” the memo continued.
(…) The newly-released memo on Kinzinger and Riggleman was recently uncovered by current FBI Director Kash Patel and has garnered significant attention inside the bureau because of the timing of the contact between the agents and the former lawmaker in December 2023.
By that time, Kinzinger had already left Congress and the committee he worked for had ended its probe a year earlier. But the 2024 presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden was heating up with the first presidential primaries just weeks away from starting.
Agents noted that Kinzinger seemed eager to help the FBI at that moment and that Congress had not figured out what to do with the massive collection of data.
“Kinzinger indicated that Riggleman may have never received direction on what to do with the toll data, which included approximately 30 million lines of data,” the FBI memo stated. “Kinzinger believed it was in an electronic format but did not know if it was the original subpoena returns.”
The agent who interviewed him said “that she would contact Kinzinger if any additional information was requested,” the memo stated.
Kinzinger did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent to him through the speaker’s bureau contact listed on his personal website. Riggleman did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent to him through his LinkedIn page.