by Revolver News
Six weeks ago, Revolver News published a blockbuster investigative report
on Ray Epps — a man who, more than any other individual, appears to be
the key unlocking the question of active federal involvement in the
so-called “Capitol Siege” of January 6th.
Out of all of the thousands of January 6’s protesters, and the thousands
of hours of publicly available footage from that fateful day, Ray Epps
has turned out to be perhaps the only person nailed dead to rights
confessing on camera to plotting a pre-planned attack on the Capitol. On
both January 5 and January 6, Epps announced multiple times, at
multiple locations, his upcoming plot to breach the US Capitol. He then
spent hours attempting to recruit hundreds of others to join him. On top
of it all, Epps was seen leading key people and managing key aspects of
the initial breach of the Capitol grounds himself.
It would be one thing if Epps’s repeated calls on January 5 to “go into
the Capitol” had simply amounted to bluster. But Epps followed through
on his stated mission to shepherd others inside. In clips 4-6 of the
above compilation, we see Epps actively orchestrate elements of the very
first breach of the Capitol barricades at 12:50 p.m, while Trump still
had
20 minutes left in his rally speech.
It is noteworthy that this Ray Epps breach occurs just one minute
after Capitol Police began responding to reports of two “pipe bombs”
located at DNC and GOP headquarters, respectively. Rather conveniently,
the already-handicapped Capitol Police thus had still-fewer resources
with which to respond to the barricade breach in question.
While the “pipe bombs” turned out to be a dud, the Ray Epps breach proved fateful. Today, the official stories told by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the US Justice Department
all depict the apparent Ray Epps-orchestrated 12:50 p.m. initial breach
of metal barricades as the “Big Bang” event of January 6.
In large part, this description is hardly an exaggeration. Indeed, it was the 12:50 p.m. breach of the Capitol grounds, in conjunction with a handful of suspicious individuals ripping down fencing and signage, that set in motion the conditions allowing for 1/6 to turn from a rally into a riot.
In this report, we will blow open this network of
still-unindicted key operators who appear to have been at work either
with or around Ray Epps during the initial Capitol grounds breach. You,
dear reader, will be scandalized — though perhaps unsurprised — to learn
that none of the actors covered in this report have received attention
in the mainstream press, despite their active and indispensable roles in
the events of 1/6.
As we explained in detail in our previous report, the FBI originally
put Ray Epps’s face on its Capitol Violence “Most Wanted List” on
January 8, 2021, just two days after 1/6. They offered a
cash reward
for information leading to his arrest. In fact, rank-and-file FBI
agents initially deemed Epps’s role as an apparent riot organizer so
important that they named him Suspect #16—one of the first 20
high-profile FBI targets in a database now packed with more than 500
suspects.
Then, six months later on June 30, 2021, both Revolver News and The New York Times
published inconvenient stories that encouraged a more aggressive
interrogation of the “Ray Epps third rail,” leading reasonable people to
wonder why this publicly identified man on the Most Wanted List still
had no charges filed against him.
The FBI responded to these important media stories the very next day. But their response was to quietly purge all online Ray Epps files from their website, then switch to a posture of “What? Who? Ray Epps? Never heard of him.”
Agents of the FBI Field Office in Phoenix (where Epps lives) have gone so far as to explicitly deny knowledge that Ray Epps even exists. Instead of pursuing Epps, FBI agents have instead pursued journalists
who had the temerity to ask Epps in person if he was a government
operative. “I understand that, but I can’t say anything,” is all Epps
would tell them.
Here’s a quick visual synopsis of this timeline:
Then, six months later on June 30, 2021, both Revolver News and The New York Times
published inconvenient stories that encouraged a more aggressive
interrogation of the “Ray Epps third rail,” leading reasonable people to
wonder why this publicly identified man on the Most Wanted List still
had no charges filed against him.
The FBI responded to these important media stories the very next day. But their response was to quietly purge all online Ray Epps files from their website, then switch to a posture of “What? Who? Ray Epps? Never heard of him.”
Agents of the FBI Field Office in Phoenix (where Epps lives) have gone so far as to explicitly deny knowledge that Ray Epps even exists. Instead of pursuing Epps, FBI agents have instead pursued journalists
who had the temerity to ask Epps in person if he was a government
operative. “I understand that, but I can’t say anything,” is all Epps
would tell them.
Here’s a quick visual synopsis of this timeline:
The sham Congressional January 6 Commission seems to be going along
with the charade of Ray Epps denialism. For all of its recent
gesticulations about Mark Meadows’s benign text messages, the Commission has yet to express even a basic interest in Ray Epps or his communications leading up to and on January 6.
But the specter of Ray Epps, and the ominous questions his immunity
raises, loom too large to be memory-holed by poorly coordinated efforts
of government denial. In light of the above, it is both amusing and
symbolically appropriate that despite the FBI’s attempt to purge Epps’s
face from its “Wanted” database (and public denials of his existence
from authorized agents), the FBI DC Field Office still features Ray Epps
as a “Wanted” man in its current pinned Twitter image (look closely and you’ll find it).
If Epps turns out to have been some kind of government
operative, which at present is the only clean and simple explanation for
his immunity, it is game over for the official “MAGA insurrection”
narrative of 1/6. Epps was the day’s loudest riot recruiter, and its
apparent leader of the very first breach of Capitol grounds. If Ray Epps
is a Fed, the “Insurrection” becomes the “Fedsurrection” in one fell
swoop.
So if Ray Epps was instructed by the government to play his part in
various recruiting, breaching and crowd control efforts that day, we
would expect many other informants to be set up around him.
To test this hypothesis, Revolver spent the past six weeks
comprehensively mapping Ray Epps’s network of interactions on January 6,
and profiling the key people around him who complemented his efforts.
We did a deep dive into other key figures involved in the initial breach
of the Capitol grounds, as well as figures who played an instrumental
role in fence removal and crowd control. In short, we investigated key
players whose early actions on 1/6 turned the rally into a riot.
The bad news for Fedsurrection Deniers is the results are in, and they
look even worse for the FBI than Revolver’s already low expectations.
For brevity, we profile five of the most egregious cases in this report,
and tell the story of how they crossed paths and interacted with, and
in some cases coordinated with Ray Epps to make 1/6 possible. Some of
these cases are so wild as to constitute Epps-sized scandals unto
themselves.
