Questions arise around the role of the FBI in the January 6 riot
Did FBI assets instigate the breach of the Capitol?
Last week, I took a look at the cyber odyssey of Kanekoa the Great, a citizen journalist/social media influencer who was banished from Twitter for posting evidence of potential fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
His ban came less than a week after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot—the same time President Trump was kicked off the platform.
In June, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a new J6-inspired strategy to combat “domestic terrorism,” but by the time the AG appeared before the House of Representatives 10 days ago, the Jan. 6 “insurrection” narrative propagated by the mainstream media and Biden administration was coming under intense scrutiny.
At that Oct. 21 House hearing, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) questioned the AG about the FBI’s involvement in the riot.
In a meticulously researched report published a few days later, Revolver News made a compelling case that a former Marine sergeant, Ray Epps, had been a lead figure in the breach of the Capitol. According to Revolver:
Epps appears to have led the “breach team” that committed the very first illegal acts on that fateful day. What’s more, Epps and his “breach team” did all their dirty work with 10 minutes still remaining in President Trump’s National Mall speech, and with the vast majority of Trump supporters still 30 minutes away from the Capitol.
Secondly, Revolver also determined, and will prove below, that the the FBI stealthily removed Ray Epps from its Capitol Violence Most Wanted List on July 1, just one day after Revolver exposed the inexplicable and puzzlesome FBI protection of known Epps associate and Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes.
The Epps report was the latest of a series of investigations undertaken by Revolver that have laid out, in a pretty thorough manner, evidence that FBI agents had infiltrated the three main groups alleged to have spearheaded the Jan. 6 riot (The Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and Three Percenters).
You can read the initial report that broke the story here. That report was followed up with another investigation focused on Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, who along with a handful of other individuals responsible for orchestrating the Capitol breach has remained uncharged—even as the feds have aggressively pursued many Jan. 6 protesters for comparatively low-level offenses.
In June, the journalist Glenn Greenwald penned the following:
What would be shocking and strange is not if the FBI had embedded informants and other infiltrators in the groups planning the January 6 Capitol riot. What would be shocking and strange — bizarre and inexplicable — is if the FBI did not have those groups under tight control. And yet the suggestion that FBI informants may have played some role in the planning of the January 6 riot was instantly depicted as something akin to, say, 9/11 truth theories or questions about the CIA’s role in JFK’s assassination or, until a few weeks ago, the COVID lab-leak theory: as something that, from the perspective of Respectable Serious Circles, only a barely-sane, tin-foil-hat-wearing lunatic would even entertain.
This reaction is particularly confounding given how often the FBI did exactly this during the first War on Terror, and how commonplace discussions of this tactic were in mainstream liberal circles.
So what, ultimately, is the significance of the Ray Epps story?
From the latest Revolver report:
If Revolver News’s previous reporting points to a proactive role of the federal government in relation to the conspiracy cases against Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, the Ray Epps story that follows suggests a similar, yet more egregious, explicit, direct and immediate degree of federal involvement in the breach of the Capitol itself.
The same report goes on to conclude:
Given the damning evidence in this and previous Revolver reports, there is increasingly little doubt that key agencies in the federal government — and key figures such as AG Merrick Garland — take the same approach to infiltration operations today as they did in the 90s. In order to defeat the boogeyman of right-wing “patriot” militia groups, the government has to become them. In order to preempt the fictional possibility of a right-wing insurrection, then, we might say the feds had to become that insurrection.
The New York Times, which earlier this month described the Jan. 6 protesters as waging a “medieval civil war,” has itself acknowledged that an informant—a Proud Boys member—communicated with his FBI handler over the course of the day.