Kinzinger admits he alerted FBI to phone data obtained by J6 committee as bureau investigated Trump

Former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger acknowledged Wednesday that he alerted the Biden-era FBI to tens of millions of lines of phone metadata obtained by the Democrat-led January 6 Committee, following a Just the News story Tuesday revealing the ex-congressman had talked to the bureau in 2023 about the information the committee had obtained as the bureau investigated Donald Trump.

Kinzinger released identical statements on X and Bluesky on Wednesday calling the Just the News story “recycled” and saying that “the Jan. 6 committee’s phone-metadata subpoenas were public and reported years ago.”

Just the News reported on Tuesday that Democrat-led congressional investigators collected 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 the private phone calls of Americans.

The mountainous collection of phone records were described to the FBI led by Chris Wray in late 2023 by Kinzinger, then a former GOP member who had been on the Democrat-run House Jan. 6 select committee. Kinzinger alerted the bureau of the cache on the eve of the 2024 presidential primary season, according to an FBI document memorializing the offer that was reviewed by Just the News.

The FBI memo says that Kinzinger told the FBI that the phone data had been collected by then-former Rep. Denver Riggleman, an ex-Republican who was a technical 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.

Kinzinger, a self-described “Proud RINO [Republican in Name Only],” wrote on Substack on Wednesday that “Congress used lawful subpoenas to obtain phone metadata in 2021. It was routine. It was reported. It was discussed openly. In 2023, I had a brief discussion with members of the FBI reminding them of this data if they needed it in their investigation. Regardless, they didn’t seem interested and that was that.”

“In 2021, the Jan. 6 Select Committee subpoenaed telecom and tech companies for phone metadata – the basic call logs that show who called whom, when, and for how long. No wiretaps. No recordings. Just routine investigative work,” Kinzinger also wrote on Wednesday. “These subpoenas were announced publicly, covered by every major outlet, and later detailed by Denver Riggleman, the committee’s technical adviser, in his book The Breach and in a 60 Minutes interview.”

Riggleman, who was a House Republican at the time of the committee's J6 investigation, indicated in his 2022 book that the select committee had obtained “eighteen million lines of data to sketch a portrait of the January 6th plot” – not the nearly doubled amount of 30 million lines of data that Kinzinger indicated to the FBI a year later.

"60 Minutes" reported in 2022, when interviewing Riggleman, that Riggleman’s team had to “comb through 20 million lines of data: e-mails, social media posts, phone records, texts, anything to learn who did what leading up to and on January 6th” – ten million fewer lines than Kinzinger alerted the FBI about the next year.

The bureau memo obtained by Just the News stated that Kinzinger told the FBI in 2023 that the J6 committee “collected and linked a substantial amount of telephone data, and noted the FBI may already possess such data.”

The FBI agents wrote in their memo that “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.”

“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 FBI memo continued.

“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 FBI agent who interviewed him said “that she would contact Kinzinger if any additional information was requested,” the memo stated.

Kinzinger did not respond to a request for comment sent to him by Just the News on Tuesday through a speaker’s bureau contact listed on his personal website. The former congressman said in a Substack video on Wednesday that “I got contacted yesterday about this thing, so I knew what they were going to try to do.”

“I’m going to be going after this whole story pretty aggressively,” Kinzinger added in the video. “I’m not going to go quiet… I’m going to triple down and get louder… I’m going to go to war on this.”

Separately, another unearthed FBI record from 2023 indicated that investigators at the bureau had “conducted preliminary toll analysis on limited toll records” tied to phone calls related to GOP Sens. Johnson, Lindsey Graham, South Carolina; Bill Hagerty, Tennessee; Josh Hawley, Missouri; Dan Sullivan, Alaska; Tommy Tuberville, Alabama; Cynthia Lummis, Wyoming; Marsha Blackburn, Tennessee; and GOP Rep. Mike Kelly, Pennsylvania.

“Deranged Jack Smith got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. A real sleazebag!!!” Trump said on Truth Social last week in response to the news.

“This document shows the Biden FBI spied on 8 of my Republican Senate colleagues during its Arctic Frost investigation into ‘election conspiracy’ Arctic Frost later became Jack Smith's elector case against Trump,” Grassley said in a Monday afternoon tweet as he shared the FBI record that had been provided to him by Patel. “BIDEN FBI WEAPONIZATION = WORSE THAN WATERGATE.”

Riggleman responded to last week’s revelation that Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith had obtained the phone records of Republican members of the House and Senate by hinting that he had helped make that happen.

“If people need to know about the difference in metadata & tapping phones, give me a call,” Riggleman tweeted in response to the news last week. “Also, I know the limitations the FBI most likely imposed — because the J6 committee tech team ‘very much’ assisted in crafting the subpoenas for J6 call records. There’s a book about it.”

Riggleman’s 2022 book laid out more details about the J6 committee’s phone data collection efforts.

“Part of the work I oversaw on the committee was the painstaking process of matching phone numbers to names, utilizing powerful law enforcement databases and other clues as we could find them,” Riggleman wrote. “My files included information on thousands of sensitive texts, language for subpoenas and preservation requests, as well as technical plans and documents related to advanced analysis.”

Riggleman wrote that “our team analyzed phone numbers that belonged to those in the Trump family, rallygoers, rally planners, influencers like [Mike] Flynn, [Roger] Stone, and [Steve] Bannon; and many others.”

“Our analysis identified targets – or, excuse me, persons of interest – that the committee had no idea about,” Riggleman claimed in the book. “We identified and validated addresses for subpoenas and hidden phone numbers. We built dossiers for the investigative team with robust profiles of these individuals.”

After his time as a staffer on the Jan. 6 committee, it was revealed in July 2023 that Riggleman was helping Hunter Biden’s legal team undercut investigations into Joe Biden’s son.