Former Republican on CNN Compares Pelosi Attacker to Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows

Former Republican congressman Denver Riggleman told CNN’s Jim Acosta on Saturday that there really isn’t much difference between what the suspect in the attack on Paul Pelosi has said and what Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, had to say in texts that were made public this year.

Riggleman was an advisor to the January 6th committee and has written a book about the investigation in the Capitol attack. Acosta asked the former Republican for his reaction to the brutal hammer attack that put Speaker Nancy Pelosi‘s husband in the hospital. Some in media are blaming the attack on the Republican party, and so Acosta also asked whether Riggleman has spoken to any of his former colleagues for their reaction.

Riggleman said he has, and that the attack is a “horror” and related it to his own experiences. He also said that it is not a surprise, to which Acosta expressed agreement.

Acosta mentioned reporting that the suspect repeatedly said “where’s Nancy” during the attack, saying he was “echoing what was being said in the halls of Congress on January 6.”

Saying that Riggleman has access to “the data” on January 6, he asked “what does the threat matrix look like?”

Riggleman replied that he is worried about election day, and then compared the suspect in the attack to both Mark Meadows and Ginni Thomas.

“You know, I looked at the, I looked at the blog posts from the individual who attacked Pelosi. And you talk about data, Jim, and me and you again have had these discussions about data,” he said. “But what he put on his blog post weren’t much different than the Meadows text messages. Hell, they weren’t much different than Ginni Thomas’s text messages.”

He was then able to rope in several other big talking points among Democrats, such as “hateful speech” on Twitter, supposed “danger” to school board members from concerned parents, and a vague reference to people “going after transgender individuals.”

As Acosta began fishing for Riggleman to directly blame elected Republicans a few weeks before the midterm elections, he was thwarted by technical problems that cut the interview short.

RIGGLEMAN: I did. And it’s horror. It’s tragic. And, you know, this happened to my family a little over two years ago, you know, when somebody thought it would be appropriate to mess with my vehicle in a very dangerous way. And my daughter ended up driving it and we had an investigation into that.

So when I saw what happened to Paul, I can’t imagine what Nancy must have been feeling when she was on that airplane. Because there’s not just fear for family members, but there’s this fury, this anger of how dare somebody, you know, do this when you’re a public official and you’re trying to serve your constituents.

So for me, it hit me pretty hard to see that happen. But, you know, Jim and you have talked before, this was not a surprise. Not at all.

ACOSTA: Right. And that leads me to my next question. We’re not even two years out from January 6th and we see this kind of an attack, the intruder saying things like, where’s Nancy? Where’s Nancy? Almost echoing what was being said in the halls of Congress on January 6. And as you know, Congressman Adam Kinzinger told CNN that when he asked for more security for his family, he was told essentially get in line. You looked at a lot of the data that was coming in as part of that January 6th investigation. What does the threat matrix look like for members of congress, you know here we are almost two years out from what happened on January 6th.

RIGGLEMAN: Yeah, I mean, I’m always worried through November 8th. I mean, we have about ten days until election. And and I would say, you know, for me at this point, I would have my head on a swivel. You know, I looked at the, I looked at the blog posts from the individual who attacked Pelosi. And you talk about data, Jim and me and you again have had these discussions about data. But what he put on his blog post weren’t much different than the Meadows text messages. Hell, they weren’t much different than Ginni Thomas’s text messages.

And that’s that’s, when we talk about online radicalization or the radicalization pipeline, that’s something I think we need to look at much more deeply. We need to look at the data on what’s happening. I mean, just with Twitter, we’ve seen a rise in hate. You know, really hateful speech, violent language. I think you’re seeing that carry over. And I just think that this is sadly, this isn’t a culmination of anything, Jim. This is a tragic data point in the violence that we’ve seen even before January 6th. Heck, we go back to the Nashville bomber who thought there were reptilian humanoids, you know, controlling the government. So I think we have a real problem right now. And I think a lot of that is in the data. And I think if we don’t understand the radicalization pipeline, we’re in for more of it.

ACOSTA: Right. There are all these insane conspiracy theories out there. Apparently the assailant in the Paul Pelosi case was blogging about January 6th and, you know, election conspiracies and that sort of thing.

I was talking with Michael Fanone and Phil Mudd about this issue. And over the last couple of hours, we were talking with Fanone about whether or not security needs to be stepped up for members of Congress and their families. I talked to Phil Mudd about this just overall climate, that the climate is so volatile, it is so hyperbolic that you can put you can put members of Congress under detail everywhere they go and their families. And it still doesn’t deal with the climate that we’re in. What do you think about that?

RIGGLEMAN: Phil was right. I was listening to him. You know, there’s 435 members of Congress. There’s 100 members of the Senate. What about local officials or officials? I think the threat might be just as high with people that are on school boards right now. I think they’re just as high with local officials who are being called groomers, the type of, you know, sort of the metastasizing of crazy that has happened, you know, even before January six. And I think we need to look at elected officials as being culpable who are pushing this kind of nonsense.

Because, again, Jim, I guess I’m not maybe I’m not asserting as strongly enough, maybe not emphasizing this enough. The language used by DePape when he attacked Pelosi or the blogs that he had not only mimic January six, but sound like a lot of our elected officials today.

And that is what I’ve been trying to warn about for probably over two years now, especially with QAnon. And, you know, when you look at terror organizations, when you look at radicalization, when you look at hate and you look at anti-Semitism and racism, when you look at people going after, you know, transgender individuals, all of this has to do with the specific sort of targeted speech that is even coming from some elected officials. And we have to get that under control because, again, you know, I just this is not an isolated incident.

Watch the clip above, via CNN.