On today's show, we have a special guest on the show to discuss a question that has been on everyone's mind since the events of January 6th: Was the FBI involved in instigating criminal activity on that day, and even before that, on the evening before, on January 5th? And was there evidence of federal agents or assets present on those two days?
00:01:11.000Is then the next day directing people to the Capitol.
00:01:19.000And as far as we can find, this individual has not been charged with anything.
00:01:23.000You said this is one of the most sweeping investigations in history.
00:01:27.000Have you seen that video or those frames from that video?
00:01:31.000So as I said at the outset, one of the norms of the Justice Department is to not comment on impending investigations,
00:01:40.000and particularly not to comment about particular scenes or particular individuals.
00:01:46.000I was hoping today to give you an opportunity to put to rest the concerns that people have that there were federal agents or assets of the federal government present on January 5th and January 6th.
00:01:58.000Can you tell us, without talking about particular incidents or particular videos, how many agents or assets of the federal government were present on January 6th, whether they agitated to go into the Capitol and if any of them did?
00:02:12.000So I'm not going to violate this norm of the rule of law.
00:02:17.000I'm not going to comment on an investigation that's ongoing.
00:02:21.000The biggest story in the world right now is on revolver.news.
00:02:26.000The question's been asked for quite some time by members of Congress, by journalists.
00:02:31.000Was the FBI involved in animating criminal activity on January 6th and even perhaps before that on the evening of January 5th?
00:02:40.000And the most detailed, thorough reporting on this question right now found on revolver.
00:02:46.000We have with us our good friend, the publisher of revolver news, my former senior advisor, Dr. Darren Beattie.
00:02:52.000And Darren, really, I want to start with this story in the middle, because I think there's an experience that you describe in the piece that creates the right lens and frame to evaluate some of these people like Ray Epps.
00:03:05.000And it's the story of Jeremy Brown. Jeremy Brown is a Florida man who is joining the Oath Keepers, right?
00:03:15.000He's signing up for this group and he gets an approach from federal law enforcement and a solicitation, really, to join their ranks, to inform on the Oath Keepers, to be a part of that organization.
00:03:28.000And so it is not a question whether or not federal law enforcement was trying to infiltrate the Oath Keepers.
00:03:34.000We know that from Jeremy Brown. Revolver.News has had a piece on Jeremy Brown.
00:03:39.000Before we get into Ray Epps and the rest of the piece, just set the frame on what we know about what federal law enforcement was trying to do before January to try to get into some of these militia groups.
00:03:51.000Well, that's a great question. And the story is very broad one.
00:03:55.000And incidentally, we have a major follow up piece coming up that really dives into the Jeremy Brown situation.
00:04:03.000And I would say this follow up piece is going to be pretty much a smoking gun in the very concrete sense of that term.
00:04:12.000As for Jeremy Brown, for listeners who might not be aware, he is a Green Beret.
00:04:18.000He was a member of the Oath Keepers militia, and he made some noise several months ago by going public with the fact that prior to January 6th,
00:04:33.000he had some elements of, I believe it was the JTTF, approached him and basically made a very hard pitch to say, look, you know, you make a little bit of extra money, work with us, inform on us.
00:04:48.000And to his credit, I would say to his great credit, not only did he refuse this offer, but he went public with it and presented video evidence of exactly what the proposal was,
00:05:00.000it was almost like Project Veritas style. It's quite a remarkable video in its own right.
00:05:06.000You and you being a former guy or whatever, you hearing stuff or you being around your group and someone's like,
00:05:12.000hey, we're training tonight and it's wild, some shit's going to go down.
00:05:15.000You calling us and letting us know and we can prevent the next big thing.
00:05:23.000We're also here if you want to work with us in the future.
00:05:25.000And we hear stuff in your circles that bothers us, but not ex-wife, your stuff, because we can't get involved in civil matters.
00:05:32.000But if you hear of a pending, permanent situation in Tampa, we'd love to hear from you.
00:05:37.000And if we can, and again, I can't make any promises, but if you provide information and prevent something big, the government pays for that.
00:05:44.000And I don't want to overwhelm you, and I don't want to say we get your fingerprint picture to sign you up today, but we think that we can help you, you can help us, and we can definitely on this side of things, less aggravation.
00:05:59.000We did a first piece on Mr. Brown, basically responding to a very curious development in his case, which is this, that very recently he was given the full kind of FBI treatment.
00:06:18.000They go, they turn over everything in your house, they search everything you have, they intimidate the hell out of you, and they arrested him for a very bizarre reason.
00:06:28.000It was a trespassing charge because he had been on the Capitol grounds, which in itself is an important point.
00:06:36.000You're technically trespassing if you're on the Capitol grounds, and that's defined as being within the barriers set up for that specific day on January 6th.
00:06:47.000Trespassing, one might assume, meant you went into the Capitol.
00:06:51.000All it means is that you were technically past the basically artificial temporary barriers set up for January 6th.
00:06:59.000And this is an even more kind of egregious, petty, and really vindictive type charge.
00:07:06.000And this goes for everyone charged with this, not just Jeremy Brown, because as we show in this original Revolver news piece on Jeremy Brown, we have video of very mysterious, suspicious characters well in advance of everyone descending near the Capitol.
00:07:24.000We have video footage of people cutting up the fences.
00:07:29.000And so a lot of people who were technically breaking the law in the sense of trespassing on Capitol grounds didn't even know it because various actors had cut open the fences and removed a lot of the barriers.
00:07:43.000And so you had people set up in this booby trap where probably hundreds if not thousands of people were technically breaking the law.
00:07:50.000Now, so I'll pause in case you, I don't want to keep going on.
00:07:57.000The initial perspective that I think viewers and listeners need to have is that it was a clear objective of federal law enforcement to get into these militia groups before there was any riot, before there was any violence at the Capitol of any kind.
00:08:15.000And you and I had a previous discussion about how this is a modus operandi for federal law enforcement to infiltrate these groups and then to try to bring these groups across greater acuity levels of violations of federal criminal law to justify the continued actions of federal law enforcement.
00:08:34.000And that really brings us to the explosive moment that has all the world on revolver dot news right now.
00:08:41.000That is the story of Ray Epps when Attorney General Merrick Garland was coming into the Judiciary Committee, no less than the Lincoln project took note of the fact that Thomas Massey and I had gathered with other colleagues to review video that I think you had initially discussed on revolver news.
00:08:58.000A video of Ray Epps, this individual very clearly and in a very, I would say, organized way going from group to group the night of the fifth, trying to get people to agree that the unifying organizing principle of this rally was going to be to enter the Capitol building, not to have big cheers for Donald Trump, not to have booze outside for Nancy Pelosi, but in fact, to enter the envelope of the building.
00:09:27.000Tomorrow, we need to go into the Capitol, into the Capitol.
00:10:19.000When that became apparent, Massey showed it to us and said he was going to question Attorney General Garland on whether or not Ray Epps was an asset or an agent of the federal government in some way.
00:10:30.000And what was interesting was that the Attorney General did not take the opportunity to dispel this theory.
00:10:38.000You then have developed that theory out and there's something that I really pulled out of the piece that was specific.
00:10:45.000You talked about the lists of people who were wanted or who were identified by federal law enforcement and then Ray Epps just falls off the list.
00:10:57.000How should people think about that event?
00:11:00.000No, this is really a remarkable story.
00:11:03.000And just as a small bit of additional kind of table setting to provide context within which to understand this Epps piece.
00:11:11.000So with the case of Jeremy Brown, we know that they're looking for informants.
00:11:15.000And the New York Times incidentally did a piece fairly recently acknowledging that, yes, there were at least one, probably several informants.
00:11:24.000They acknowledged a proud boy member who was inside of the Capitol and texting with his FBI handler contemporaneously throughout the day.
00:11:51.000First of all, it would be bad enough if they had informants.
00:11:54.000They knew in advance what was going on and they did nothing to stop it and just allow the event to happen and exploit it for political reasons.
00:12:01.000But it's much darker if it's not simply that they're informed and do nothing.
00:12:06.000But the people who play a key proactive instigating role in having this happen are actually federal agents themselves.
00:12:16.000That, I think, escalates the severity of culpability on the part of the federal government.
00:12:21.000And it certainly seems like this might be the case with Epps.
00:12:26.000You described Epps as being a man walking about a psychological paradox as the events of January 6th are unfolding.
00:12:35.000Because he seems to be singularly driven by this desire to get people to enter the capital.
00:12:41.000But then he is overwhelmingly concerned with no harm to officers or nothing that would impair the operations of potentially other people that could have been acting at the behest of the federal government.
00:12:55.000But when you dug deeper into the video, what were the tells that this didn't strike you as a genuine MAGA grandfather who merely showed up to this out of support for Donald Trump?
00:13:07.000No, I mean, that's that's an excellent question.
00:13:09.000And I think what really kind of sells this piece and sells this story, really, not just the piece, is the video footage itself.
00:13:17.000So I'd strongly encourage you to play some of the footage so the audience can see in the Revolver News piece.
00:13:23.000I think it has the most comprehensive kind of database of all the footage we have.
00:13:28.000One of our clips is called like a Where's Waldo, where we follow Ray Epps throughout his journey to the capital starting January 5th and then going into January 6th.
00:14:21.000This was the same guy who was on who was at the barricade on January 6th as Trump was giving his speech.
00:14:28.000So before the crowd went there and the very first breach of the capital occurred literally two seconds after this same Ray Epps whispers into somebody's ear.
00:14:38.000And as for his demeanor and disposition, I think this is a really good point that you also gesture toward.
00:16:23.000And again, there's so many little gems in this piece.
00:16:28.000And one of them that you alluded to is that even though now it seems like the feds are entirely uninterested in this guy who, by all accounts, by all what it seems from looking at the video, it's apparent that if anyone's a kind of major orchestrator in the first act of this so-called breach of the capital, it would be him.
00:16:50.000And it's curious that the feds don't seem to be interested.
00:16:54.000But what's even more curious is that initially they were.
00:16:57.000And Epps' face was actually one of the first 20 faces that the FBI put on their January 6th most wanted list that anyone in D.C. would have seen like they had the posters everywhere.
00:17:08.000They were very interested and they did their usual shtick where they say, we are calling on the public's help.
00:17:16.000And then the Internet, being what the Internet is, a remarkable vehicle, identified him within days and then crickets.
00:17:24.000The feds weren't interested in nothing about him until five months later they scrubbed his face and name completely from their public database.
00:17:34.000And we were able to interpolate the exact day that they scrubbed it.
00:17:39.000And just by coincidence happened to be the very day after Revolver News ran an extensive piece on his former fellow Oath Keeper, Stuart Rhodes.
00:17:50.000Well, there were there were these three principal militia groups that the federal government discussed as animating the violence, the Proud Boys, the three percenters and the Oath Keepers.
00:17:59.000But we keep coming back to the Oath Keepers. It was a revolver piece that really exposed Stuart Rhodes as kind of the the Forrest Gump of federal law enforcement activity.
00:18:12.000He kind of appears everywhere randomly and then seems to always evade any type of consequence or capture.
00:18:19.000He's the founder of the Oath Keepers. And then we see the Jeremy Brown piece where someone who is involved with the Oath Keepers getting involved with the Oath Keepers is is recruited by the federal government with actual video evidence.
00:18:33.000And then you also see this this Ray Epps individual as the Arizona head of the Oath Keepers.
00:18:40.000I asked you in a prior discussion whether or not the Oath Keepers itself was a fed operation.
00:18:46.000And you said that you surmised probably there are a lot of people that just joined the Oath Keepers because they thought politicians ought to keep their oaths and that it was a way for them to express their political view.
00:18:57.000But from a leadership standpoint, there really are questions here. I'll share with you this.
00:19:02.000Thomas Massey became very skeptical of the Ray Epps cover story when he was advertised as a man who had a grass fed dairy farm on five acres in Arizona.
00:19:13.000And since Thomas Massey actually has a working cattle operation, he saw how ridiculous it could be that someone actually would have grass fed cattle in Arizona on such a small plot of land as to sufficiently scale it.
00:19:28.000It almost looked like the type of story someone would create as a cover story.
00:19:33.000Darren, the most instructive part of the revolver piece was actually your direction to me, to the Congress, to follow up with Merit Garland on a specific question.
00:19:44.000Now that we've had this hearing, now that Garland has really demurred on the opportunity to clear all this up, what is the operative question?
00:19:53.000Well, I mean, there are several operative questions. I think the question that you allude to in the revolver news piece simply refers to have there ever been people who have been put on their most wanted list who actually turned out to be informants.
00:20:09.000And, you know, that's not a question that's going to lead to a kind of bombshell answer like, you know, was Ray Epps an asset or was Stuart Rhodes an asset?
00:20:18.000But it is something that has the advantage that it's it's not something that's directly related to one of their ongoing investigations.
00:20:27.000It's something it's a question that's tailored to kind of avoid that typical evasive response.
00:20:34.000But given their disposition and their interests, I don't see them being kind of cooperative in any type of question.
00:20:42.000I think really what what matters is increasing the pressure, increasing the exposure.
00:20:48.000And so I have to commend you. I have to commend Representative Massey for doing a great job and sort of setting this up to be the to be the kind of the popular piece that it was that now everyone's paying attention to.
00:21:03.000And I do think because the whole kind of tee up for the piece began with an interrogation of Attorney General Garland, I think this is important to say, and this is something we talk about in the conclusion of the revolver piece, is that this one six domestic war on terror Patriot Act 2.0 that they're setting up all Trump supporters to be domestic terrorists.
00:21:30.000This is not A.G. Garland's first rodeo.
00:21:34.000A.G. Garland is somebody who goes all the way back to the 90s.
00:21:38.000And he was, in fact, the preeminent domestic extremism prosecutor in the 90s under Clinton.
00:21:45.000He oversaw the prosecutions in the Oklahoma City cases, which is beyond the scope of this discussion that are extremely dark and extremely dirty.
00:21:54.000And remember, this was this period in the early 90s was right when the government started implementing a robust infiltration operation into militia groups started with an organization called PatCon, an operation called PatCon in which the feds literally set up a fake militia group as a honeypot.
00:22:18.000And in fact, in an excellent piece on foreign policy by a mainstream, quote unquote, domestic terrorism, domestic extremism researcher called Jay Berger, he describes it thusly.
00:22:31.200He said, in order to destroy the militia movement, the feds had to become the militia movement.
00:22:39.600And this is basically what Merrick Garland oversaw in the 90s.
00:23:02.680And the, you know, the parallels are simply unavoidable at this point.
00:23:07.880Everyone knows there were no good hits out of the 90s.
00:23:10.640But we will ask Merrick Garland the pointed question that revolver ripens.
00:23:15.540I'm announcing that I am sending a letter to the attorney general.
00:23:18.520And my suspicion is that my colleagues from the Judiciary Committee will be joining that letter asking this question.
00:23:24.800Following January 6th, were there people that you took off of any of the wanted lists that were federal assets or federal agents?
00:23:34.920Did any of the decisions to remove those people come as a consequence of cooperation between the federal government and the people that were animating the violence?
00:23:44.560And if he answers that question in the affirmative, we know it's EPS.
00:23:48.400And we know they weren't just there collecting intelligence.
00:23:51.020They were driving people into the building.
00:23:53.120And if the answer is that it wasn't, well, then we'll have to do more research to determine whether or not these questions raised in Revolver have the darkest possible answer.
00:24:01.520But when you look at the history of Michigan, when you look at the history that you just laid out of some of the top officials at DOJ, and when you look at that level of professionalism, I think you said in the piece, Ray Epps was a man on a mission.
00:24:17.080And his specific mission was to get people into that Capitol building.
00:24:20.700And he seemed to know exactly what he was doing.
00:24:24.920What are we going to – the Revolver has been the place that's been breaking all these stories.
00:24:29.340You mentioned earlier there may be a Jeremy Brown story coming.
00:24:32.980But what are the leads you're looking into to drill this thing down further?
00:24:37.840Well, as I alluded to, we have a smoking gun piece.
00:24:42.740I think this will be the most dispositive piece.
00:24:46.860Up until now, we've been presenting pieces that have shaped the narrative, that ask extremely disturbing questions that I think the American people deserve the answers to.
00:24:56.720But we have a piece coming up that goes beyond asking extremely pointed and disturbing and informed questions and just is a factual representation of really serious foreknowledge on the part of the federal government.
00:25:37.780So we did the Epps piece, and I think it was a tremendous success in great part to Massey's amplification of this and really, you know, you and it's just so important for people in Congress to take up this issue precisely, especially because the commission itself is such a corrupt disgrace.
00:26:01.680Well, thank you for the great work at Revolver.
00:26:04.540I will be enjoying that new smoking gun piece as a premium member.
00:26:08.820I've just signed up, so I get it all ad free.