The Daily Signal - Inside the Surveillance State: Denver Riggleman and How the Jan. 6 Commission Threatened Our Rights

Episode Date: October 20, 2025

Former Congressman from Virginia’s 5th District Denver Riggleman took great pride in announcing that the January 6 Commission had asked him to take on the role of senior technical advisor. His role would be to use his experience as an Air Force intelligence officer to look for the participants and the organizers to get to the bottom of what happened that fateful day. Investigative Journalist John Solomon just published an expose that details how this association trampled all over the bill of rights and specifically how Riggleman’s efforts made that possible. One of the folks in that report is Mike Howell of “The Oversight Project” and he sits down with us to go into why each one of us is at risk in out digitally connected world and how the Bill of Rights survives. Keep Up With The Daily Signal   Sign up for our email newsletters:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.dailysignal.com/email⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠     Subscribe to our other shows:    The Tony Kinnett Cast: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL2284199939⁠ The Signal Sitdown: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL2026390376⁠   Problematic Women:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL7765680741⁠   Victor Davis Hanson: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL9809784327⁠     Follow The Daily Signal:    X:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠https://x.com/intent/user?screen_name=DailySignal⁠ Instagram:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/thedailysignal/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Facebook:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/TheDailySignalNews/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Truth Social:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://truthsocial.com/@DailySignal⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  YouTube:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1⁠    Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and never miss an episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We'd love to talk, business. Thanks for listening to this bonus episode of the Daily Signal podcast. I'm your host, Joe Thomas, Virginia correspondent for The Daily Signal. Before we dive into today's interview, I want to thank you for tuning in today. If you're a first-time listener, The Daily Signal, brings you fact-based reporting and conservative commentary on politics, policy, and culture. And I hope you join our band of regular listeners to our podcast. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and also take a

moment to rate and review us wherever you get your podcast. You can find additional content at DailySignal.com. Now, let's get started with today's conversation right after this. Last week, the great Horace Cooper used an expression I had not heard before. He called it a norm-busting event. He was speaking of the assassination of Charlie Kirk in the conversation I had with him. But we started to rattle off some of the all too frequent norm-busting events, events like the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, that get the popular opinion swaying towards allowing for things that we never would have allowed before. And January 6th is another one of those norm-busting dates. There was an expose published just.

this week regarding what we're now learning about what the commission that was seated to investigate January 6th, coincidentally missing the 274 FBI agents that were in the crowd that morning, but they were investigating. And one of those investigators was former Virginia 5th District Congressman Denver Riggleman. And he features prominently in the expose at just the news.com, as does our next guest, Mike Howell. Mike, welcome to the program there with the Oversight Project at it's yourgov.org. Mike, how are you doing? And thank you for taking some time for us today.

Hey, good to be with you. Doing great. So some of what we were reading in the expose didn't surprise some of us who are and have been in close association with Denver Wrigelman, at least until. He, I guess, to use the Star Wars parlance, went to the dark side. And maybe he was always there and just was very good at glad-handing and back-slapping. But he always told us of his acumen when it came to data mining and being able to find things in piles of ones and zeros. And it seems like that's what they employed him to do with the J6 Commission.

it's just how that all went about that seems to have come unraveled when it comes to the Bill of Rights. Am I correct? Well, you nailed it. I mean, Denver Rangelvin's an unhinged guy, and he was even too unhinged for the January 6th committee. He had an epic blow up with them, and they have since distanced themselves from him. And, yeah, he has made a show of, you know, he's a snake oil salesman. He's pretended he could find all these things in the zeros and ones. But what you tell me, what did the January 6th committee actually find?

nothing. I mean, it was just a lot of pompant circumstances and no findings. They wanted to tie the whole thing to President Trump saying, you go here, you go there, you do that, I'm in charge. And they did not do that. In fact, they cleared President Trump in my mind. And, you know, I had a long history of the J6 committee. I practiced against them, represented client against them. And what we're learning now is in their fits of trying to just grab as much info as they could and hopes they could prove the improvable, they basically got the telecoms to turn over 30 million lines of phone records, you know, so that's several devices, then all the calls between those phones. And that's a massive civil rights abuse. It was an attempt to basically map their political enemies under the pretext

of investigating January 6th and then entered Denver Wrigelman, who was in charge of finding something in there. And it didn't turn out that he found anything, you know. And so what's happened with this data and is what comes next. I think the telecoms shouldn't have done that, and they probably should be held accountable for working with such an unhinged and in wacko. Well, and on the other end of the leash for a while was Adam Kinsinger, who, you know, I think actually wakes up screaming the word Trump in the middle of the night. But as I read the piece, one of the things that jumped out of me is that there seems to be a constitutional question as to win these lines of data were acquired.

And if subpoenas had been issued, if I'm reading the report correctly, is that they may have collected this data before they had the subpoenas because they knew very specifically who, Riggelman Braggs in his biography, biopic that he wrote about this period, that he told Kinsinger specifically the who. who's and where's of how to put the subpoenas out there. So it sounds like some of this stuff may have been done before the subpoenas and then they were back engineered because that would never happen, right, Mike? No, absolutely not.

I mean, I think it's beyond obvious and that the telecoms wanted to comply with these sorts of things. I mean, I did my time dealing with the lawyers at Verizon who were turning over stuff that related to my client at the time. And so they set up a system where basically they, they, wanted to work with the Democrats to go after the Republicans through the pretext of January 6th. Now there's a new subcommittee in Republican control to look at January 6th, and I hope it includes this in its purview and gets to the exact, you know, exchanges and timelines between all these entities. Now I know where the data ended up going, and it's a massive constitutional abuse.

I mean, Congress is in law enforcement. I know a lot of people like to, you know, jump up and yell, Congress investigate this, investigate that. but they have like a very constitutionally bound, you know, discovery function that has to be tied to what Congress is supposed to do. And that's right and past legislation. And so they tried playing mini FBI here. And the FBI liked them to do it because then you can get around some of the procedural safeguards that exist when you're actually, you know, criminal defendant versus the FBI. There's less in the congressional context. And so it was a creative way to work around the Constitution.

And for that, we need that coveted accountability. You remind me of that very important point when they were sat and they very clearly made a big show out of saying, oh, no, no, we're only doing this to try to come up with ways to write legislation because they had to stay within that constitutional boundaries. And next thing you know, it's primetime television. They say Washington is Hollywood for ugly people. Well, this certainly became primetime reality TV for not so attractive folks as well. But, yeah, it quickly devolved from, oh, we're just going to advise Congress on how to write legislation to prevent this from ever happening again into the witch hunt that we saw. You know, and Rigglman's case, Mike, is one that I think is about the elected officials, the government officials.

He brags about, you know, connecting them all back to White House phone extensions so he could figure out which White House. staffers and Mark Meadows and all of these folks and what they were ordering to happen in the White House. And as you said, nothing ever came of that. But your client, I believe, if I'm remembering correctly and correct me if I'm not, I wasn't prepped to necessarily talk about this per se. But the constitutional violations said so many people who just had their cell phone records pinged and then were hauled in for simply being in Washington, D.C., on January 6th is mind-boggling and still is mind-boggling to this day.

Oh, it's absolutely mind-boggling. It was such an asymmetrical system. I mean, the cost of fighting these things is in hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that's why they designed it this way. It was prohibitively expensive, and it ruined a lot of people's lives. And that's what the January 6th committee was also about, just inflicting compliance costs through, you know, these legal fees and, you know, discovery measures to just destroy people. It's truly an evil, evil exercise. It was bloodlust.

Well, and the leaking that came out of it and the headlines in local newspapers about, you know, so-and-so is arrested for storming the Capitol on January 6th rhetoric about, you know, drawing allusions to people's activities. And if they were guilty of assault and federal police officers, people's lives were ruined. Never mind, their back. bank accounts, Mike. That's absolutely right. And the pardons, while great in an act of absolute statesmanship from Donald Trump, they don't solve for every last thing.

They declare your federal criminal record. But, you know, people are still dealing with those consequences and the reputational slander associated with it, the financial costs of fighting these things. They ruined a lot of people's lives, to put it simply. And they did it because of batches bloodlust, their blind hatred of President Trump and all of his supporters. It was a very dark chapter. I mean, you know, the left likes to talk about McCarthyism as the worst thing that ever happened,

even though Joe McCarthy was pretty darn right when you see Chuck Schumer now promoting communist protests in New York City. But nevertheless, this was actually, you know, what people would describe to be McCarthyism in the worst possible way, who did a lot more damage than they could ever pretend happened in the, you know, red scare of the 50s. Well, and you mentioned McCarthy, you know, it's a dark period even for my industry. because certainly in his bloodlust to end McCarthy's investigations, Edward R. Murrow fumbled a ball so badly because they were there. We saw them. Uri Bejeminov confessed to them as a defector from the KGB that for three generations,

the government and the educational system had been infiltrated by communists. So McCarthy was right, and we have the testimony to prove it. and Murrow, you know, so blinded by his bloodlust to get McCarthy, didn't stop and do his journalistic duty, which may have been to say, okay, McCarthy may be going about it the wrong way, but look at what we found. We found all these communists there. And maybe he did it just because he didn't want to give McCarthy the win. But that's very much like what we just watched here. People who had to know what was going on and had to know the unconstitutionality of it, but just went along with it. either because they wanted to be seen on the commission or not wanted to run afoul of the commission, Mike? That's right. And then the institutional Republican Party allowed it to happen. They saw it as a convenient way to get rid of Trump and the new base of supporters that he ushered in. It's no difference than an offensive line, just letting the defensive line go through with a straight shot of the quarterback. And the lawyers didn't help.

none of the powerful donors or institutions helps everyone just left everyone to fend for themselves you know it just results in guys like me hanging up a shingle and and jump it in the fray well bless you before taking on that task um mike pence i mean it went all the way up to mike pence there and that was sometimes the proof was like well all these republicans are with us so therefore there must be uh they are there on a grander question though how do we fix this because I've talked to privacy experts who said, well, and I bring up the Third Amendment. I had one guy say, oh, you're going the Third Amendment route because I read the Third Amendment and I look at our digital world and to me a CIA officer or an NSA officer is just a soldier

for the U.S. government and they're in my house through my technology without my permission. But this one Civil Liberties lawyer said, no, you've given them permission when you click I accept on the user documents in some new software or an app for your phone. How do we fix this informed or lack of informed consent on what we're allowing people into our digital world to surveil us because they seem to shrug and point saying, well, you clicked, I accept. Right. I mean, that is a complex question with complex answers.

But ultimately, it's going to involve some sort of thing. federal legislation and some constitutional safeguards being applied to it. I mean, yes, people click the contract of adhesion. They don't read it. They don't understand it. But I don't think anyone wants to live in a world of digital oligarchs controlling virtually every last thing about them. It's a profoundly negative consequences. Well, and that's what I'm saying is there's got to be some clarification of what informed consent is. And if you printed out some of these user agreements for these smartphone apps, they'd be 400 pages long. And, and that, you know, that, you know, the, we are going to allow third parties to view the data.

What about that data? Mike Howell is on with us from the Oversight Project and featured prominently in this expose of the January 6th Commission Investigator, Denver Riggleman. You know, their shrug was, oh, it's just data. There's no information. There's nothing really there. It just shows us what was going on. This abuse of FISA, though, what?

was in these 30 million lines of data? Yeah, so it's basically connections between cell phones. It's not the content of messages, as I understand it. It is the pin record. So cell phone one calls cell phone two, and you use that to map out an associational odd matrix between people. And so that's what's in the 30 million lines. I don't think it was the content of the messages themselves.

But then investigators knock on your door and say, okay, you spoke to so-and-so on this date at this time. And that's where it becomes frightening because if you misremember something, I've seen more than enough instances in just the January 6th cases where misremembering a date or a place has been lumped into the pile of lying under oath to a federal investigator, which is, you know, hard time. No, no, that's absolutely right. You create the process traps. You know, if someone misrememberes the date or a time or something, and it's an asymmetrical, you know, play with a feds have your whole digital history and you're expected to recollect every last aspect of it in real time.

It's insanity. So are there people, you talked about the commission that exists right now, looking into what the January 6th Commission did, but are there people in the oversight world, Congressman Comer, Congressman Jordan, Senate Intel committee members that are trying and working on stuff that will do, as you said, create a little bit more of a legislative guardrail on this? I don't know about the legislative guardrail, to be honest. I don't think that's really something that is discussed at the member level. It's something that we think about and then push for all the time, but we're not elected members of Congress and they're not ones to limit their own powers. And so I think we're in for a tough road ahead.

The solution will be in the courts. People successfully fighting the breadth scope and, you know, legality of these subpoenas, and so forth. The problem with that is it's a very expensive fight. You know, they take the full powers your taxpayer dollars versus, you know, an individual who has to stage that fight. And so it's an unfair fight, but it's a fight that needs to be fought. Well, thank you for doing it, Mike, at the Oversight Project.

Maybe we have you back for another visit to talk about the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center, two of my favorite organizations. Because as I don't know if you know, Chris Horner, at Gov Oversight and the author of all those climate books. He said how great the FBI is now outsourcing their enemies lists. And, you know, it's good times. You know, I'm sure it's cost efficiency to outsource your enemies list.

But I appreciate your visit with us this time around. And again, it's it's your gov.org. Correct? Online. That's right. And we're on XAT. It's your Gov as well. Well, bless you, sir.

you have a great day. Thank you very much. That'll do it for today's show. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button, so you never miss out on new episodes from The Daily Signal. Every weekday you can catch top news in 10 to keep up with the day's top headlines in just 10 minutes. And every weekday afternoon catch Victor Davis-Hanson's thoughtful analysis for the Daily Signal.

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