At a press conference held on Thursday, the anniversary of the January 6 “Capitol breach” by protestors, House members Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) raised serious questions about that breach.
Gaetz explained the reason for the press conference:
Congresswoman Greene and I are not here to celebrate January 6. We are not here to obsess about it, but we are here to expose the truth, to ask key questions….
It’s very important for the Republican voice to be heard today, because it’s the Republican voice, and the Trump supporter, that has been smeared constantly over this past year.
We are here to expose the truth, to ask key questions about what happened on January 6, who animated the violence, the extent to which the federal government may have been involved.
We know this: January 6 last year wasn’t an insurrection. No one has been charged with insurrection. No one has been charged with treason.
But it may very well have been a “fed-surrection.”
The pair presented evidence that there were numerous individuals involved — some on video that have surfaced on YouTube — who were not indicted, and others who were initially on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list and then inexplicably removed.
Specifically, there were three individuals initially placed on that list: “#GingerGun, #HarleyJacketBatonMan, and Ray Epps. The Washington Examiner provided the details:
#GingerGun was captured on camera with a crowd of rioters under a Capitol scaffolding on Jan. 6 while he attempted to conceal what appeared to be a beige handgun on his left hip.
Later during the riot, #GingerGun was filmed with a white bandanna over his face and an earpiece on his left ear.
The second, #HarleyJacketBatonMan, wrote the Examiner,
was filmed partaking in a brawl between rioters and Capitol police on Jan. 6, 2021. At one point, the man beat police officers with a baton, after which he was pictured bleeding above his left eyebrow.
The FBI added a headshot of #HarleyJacketBatonMan bleeding from above his left eyebrow and another picture of him swinging a baton at police officers to its most wanted list in early February as suspect 164. The FBI said the man was wanted for assaulting a federal law enforcement officer during the riot.
The third man, Ray Epps,
was filmed in the hours leading up to the riot urging Trump supporters to enter the Capitol to stop the certification of President Joe Biden’s election victory.
Epps has not been arrested or charged for his actions. His unexplained removal from the FBI’s most wanted list on July 1 has fueled speculation from a member of the House Judiciary Committee that Epps may have agitated people to storm the Capitol at the behest of the FBI.
For readers who have not seen the incriminating YouTube video, it is here. For readers who want only the essence, Epps can be clearly heard yelling to the crowd of spectators: “OK, folks, spread the word. As soon as the president is done speaking, we go to the Capitol, where our problems are.”
Chants of “Fed, Fed, Fed!” can also be heard as bystanders saw Epps as a federal official trying to inflame the crowd and instigate the riot.
Epps, as the Examiner noted, “went to work corralling people toward the Capitol. He was also part of the first group of rioters to break through a police barrier on Capitol grounds.”
What’s peculiar is that the FBI originally put Ray Epps’ face on its Capitol Violence “Most Wanted List” on January 8, 2021, just two days after the breach. It offered a cash reward for information leading to his arrest.
But although Internet “sleuths” had almost immediately identified him as living in Arizona, he was not arrested or charged, and no reward was paid. Instead, on July 1, his face was suddenly deleted from the FBI’s list with no explanation.
As Revolver News noted:
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.
As Gaetz noted in his joint press conference with Greene,
We’re worried there are a lot of folks who don’t understand the severity of what happened. Particularly, if it was so severe that it was animated and encouraged by assets of the federal government.
That would be a far greater scandal than anything the Democrats have talked about.
Gaetz suggested the answer: Once Republicans take the House in November, keep the faux January 6 investigating committee but put Representative Greene in charge:
I wouldn’t disband it. I would take it over. I would throw off the tyrants who are on that committee now. I would make Marjorie Taylor Greene the Chair … and then we would get the truth in front of the American people.
If by some miracle the committee were to be headed by Greene after the November elections put Republicans back in control of the House in January of 2023, then we might finally get answers to many of these key questions.
