The ex-junior Trump White House aide who reportedly escorted a group of conspiracy theorists into the White House for a now-infamous December meeting went on a foul-mouthed, live-streamed rant on Wednesday after completing testimony before the House January 6 select committee.
Garrett Ziegler, a former policy analyst who worked under then-White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, said in a nearly 30-minute live-stream posted to his Telegram channel that he’d declined to answer any of the select committee’s questions and had instead chosen to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Mr Ziegler claimed to have invoked his Fifth Amendment rights over 100 times during his session with the panel, which he admitted was an attempt to avoid being charged with criminal contempt of Congress like his former boss, Mr Navarro, or ex-White House strategist Steve Bannon.
“[Mr] Bannon and Peter are much older than me. They have a lot more resources. I got two little ones, they can pay attorneys to go to trial, I had to be very smart and circumspect, so my goal was to avoid a contempt of Congress charge … It's going to be very, very hard for them to pass a contempt charge on me when I've given them documents and I flew out to DC and sat in front of them,” he said.
The former White House aide proceeded to embark on a vulgar rant in which he accused the House select committee of being “Bolsheviks” who “hate the American founders and most white people in general”.
“This is a Bolshevik, anti-white campaign, if you can't see that your eyes are freakin closed,” said Mr Ziegler, who described himself as a “young Christian” who the panel could “try to basically scare”. He later added the caveat that he is “the least racist person” many of his listeners had ever met.
Mr Ziegler also accused the select committee of “going after” him because he was the “young guy in the room,” and compared his treatment unfavourably with how the panel had handled a group of female ex-Trump aides who’d testified voluntarily, including Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Mark Meadows, and ex-White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin.
He called his former colleagues “total hoes and thots,” and said Ms Griffin — who served as press secretary to then-vice president Mike Pence and Pentagon press secretary before finishing her Trump administration tenure as Mr Trump’s communications director — was a “hobag” who had “no clue” what she was talking about.
