Former 1/6 investigator Denver Riggleman said that Trump should be very worried that Special Counsel Jack Smith has recovered the former president’s phone data.
MSNBC’s Katie Phang asked Riggleman how concerned Trump should be that Jack Smith has his phone data.
Riggleman answered, ” He should be very concerned. I mean it, it really does depend on what’s in the phone. But Katie, you know, when you do a cell phone, cell phone exploitation, whether it’s, you know, a physical exploitation or some type of logical exploitation, what you can see is sometimes deleted files. And I think that’s the thing that people don’t understand. So you can see text messages, you can see other types of communications that you might not see in something like call detail records, call detail records are metadata. So that’s the difference, right? You can actually see content, you can see people that you might not have seen before and if it’s people that’s close to him, you might be able to see some types of coordination.”
Video:
Denver Riggleman on why Trump should be concerned that Jack Smith has his phone data, “You can actually see content, you could see people you might not have seen before. And if it’s people that are close to him you might be able to see some sort of subordination.” pic.twitter.com/x8KH3GPlRh
— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) December 16, 2023
Former Rep. Riggleman later expanded on the power of phone data, “The incredible thing about ones and zeros is that they make the best witnesses, there’s really no way to get out of that. So now what you can see is say, for instance, there’s an intermediary that intermediary hasn’t been seen before, hasn’t been investigated just by having that phone, you can actually identify that intermediary and then go get their cell phone records, go get their devices and see who they were talking to.”
Jack Smith having his cell phone data is bad news for Trump because the former president has been mostly able to hide the physical evidence related to what he was doing before and during the 1/6 attack.
The 1/6 Committee had to rely on witness testimony and cell phone records that Mark Meadows turned over to piece together what was happening in the White House.
Special Counsel Smith has Trump’s phone data and likely others’.
The criminal prosecution will know precisely what was going on and be able to debunk Trump’s defenses and potential lies.
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Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association