Former Rep. Denver Riggleman is joining the staff of the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, the third Republican that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has added to the panel that GOP leadership has attacked as a partisan endeavor.
Riggleman — a former Virginia congressman and Air Force intelligence officer who has been an outspoken critic of former President Donald Trump — will be a senior technical adviser for the committee, according to two sources familiar with the selection.
GOP Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are the only Republican lawmakers serving on the committee, which held its first hearing late last month. But as a former member, Riggleman brings a high profile, and his national security background will add additional legitimacy to the investigation.
“I have to say, doing this might be one of the biggest things I’ve ever done in my life,” Riggleman said in a video posted to Twitter Friday night touting his intelligence and data analytics experience.
A former member of the hardline House Freedom Caucus who was first elected to the House in 2018, Riggleman lost the GOP nomination for Virginia’s 5th District — despite having the backing of Trump — in a convention last year after his decision to officiate a same-sex wedding angered some local Republicans.
“We can’t worry about the color of the jerseys anymore, or whether we have an ‘R’ or a ‘D’ next to our name. It’s time for us to look in a fact-based way at what happened on January 6,” Riggleman continued in the video, “to see if we can prevent this from ever happening again in the future.”
