Denver Riggleman says he is no longer a Republican: “I think the party left me some time ago.”

Rigelman, who served as a technical adviser to the House of Representatives committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, later confirmed to CNN that he had left the Republican Party and would never run again. Republican. Rigelman said he now considers himself independent. He told CNN he “made the decision in private a month or two ago”, but officially announced on Sunday that he had left the party.

For The State of the Union, Riglman spoke of the impact of some of the evidence he saw while advising the commission on his decision.

“What I saw behind the scenes repulsed me even more. The fact that the party has moved away from conservative principles to this cult of personality that Liz Cheney is talking about. She is absolutely right,” he said, referring to the Wyoming congresswoman. who served as deputy chairman of the committee and lost her Republican leadership in the House of Representatives last year over criticism of former President Donald Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 attack.

“And when you see him behind the door, when you see the data, when you see the investigation, when you see those smart people and what they come up with, Jake, that’s absolutely stunning about this cult of personality and the belief systems. “I don’t think a true conservative could follow at some point.”

“What people have embraced is absolutely insane. “If you look at Stop the Theft, if you look, you know, some of Covid’s problems with vaccination conspiracy theories, when you look at it all, in general, a lot of it is pushed out by people around the president,” he said. Trump.

CNN reported in April that Rigelman would step down on the committee on Jan. 6 to work with a nonprofit in Ukraine. Two sources familiar with the move told CNN that Rigleman’s impending departure was “in a friendly way.” Rigleman was the 5th Congressional District of Virginia for a one-term term from 2019 to 2021. He lost his Republican nomination for his seat in central Virginia in 2020 until now. Bob Good, who criticized his opponent’s decision to give a wedding to a same-sex couple. After leaving Congress, Rigleman was an outspoken critic of Trump and the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives.

CNN’s Ryan Nobles contributed to this report.