January 6th witness Garrett Ziegler livestreams white nationalist grievances after contentious hearing

After invoking the Fifth Amendment and executive privilege more than 100 times to refuse to answer questions from the January 6th Committee on Tuesday, former White House aide Garrett Ziegler opened a livestream to vent his frustrations to his followers in a nearly 30-minute rant laden with white nationalist grievance on Telegram.

Ziegler complained that he has less resources to fight the committee than his older cohorts, including his boss former Trade Advisor Peter Navarro, who is suing the committee, and former White House strategist Steve Bannon, who is being prosecuted for contempt.

“They can pay their attorneys to go to trial,” Ziegler said. “I had to be very smart and circumspect. My goal was to avoid a contempt of Congress charge…. It’s going to be very, very hard for them to pass a contempt of Congress charge on me when I’ve given them documents, and I flew out to DC and sat in front of them. If they have a problem with me, they have a problem with the f***ing Fifth Amendment.

Citing his decision to invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination, Ziegler portrayed himself as a victim of left-wing persecution.

“They’re Bolsheviks so they probably do hate the Fifth Amendment, and most white people in general,” he said. “This is a Bolshevist, anti-white campaign…. They see me as a young Christian who they can basically try to scare.”

Ziegler, who reshares white nationalist Nicholas Fuentes’ content and has called Cambodia a “s***hole country” on his Telegram channel, quickly added: “I’m the least racist person that many of you have ever met, by the way. I have no bigotry. I just try to see the world for where it is.”

Then, his rant veered into misogyny when he lamented that no one else in his generation was defying the January 6th committee, because “the other people in the White House are total hos and thots.” He specifically named Cassidy Hutchinson, the former aide to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows whose bombshell testimony revealed that President Trump wanted to let supporters with guns into the rally at the Ellipse, and Alyssa Farah Griffin, the former White House director of strategic communications and assistant to the president who reportedly showed up to support Hutchinson when she testified.

Ziegler reported that Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) logged in to the interview by teleconference, but ducked out when he realized he wasn’t going to learn any new information.

“It was a boring hour,” Ziegler said. "It was an awkward hour. I loathe these people.”

While spurning the committee, Ziegler provided additional detail about his role in facilitating a heated meeting at the White House on Dec. 18, 2020 in which attorney Sidney Powell, retired Lt. General Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne urged President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and order the National Guard to seize ballots and re-run the election.

“What I did is I sent them a URL to a form to fill out to then they can request to the Secret Service to be admitted onto the property,” Ziegler said on Tuesday. “That’s exactly what I did. I did nothing more. I wasn’t even at the White House grounds when that meeting occurred. I had gone home because it was very late at night. I had no idea what they were discussing. I hoped that — my reason for sending the URL to the form was that somebody would advise the president to make a call to governors to get the National Guard to hand-count the paper ballots. I had no idea about the machines.”

Previously, Ziegler has told fellow election denier David K. Clements that he and Patrick Weaver, another White House aide in the National Security Council, worked together to let Powell, Flynn and Byrne into the White House.

“Basically, I had the visitor access,” Ziegler said. “And he went down and got General Flynn and Sidney Powell.”