The first person to draw significant attention to Ray Epps’s presence in D.C. in January 2021 was Darren Beattie. Once a speechwriter for President Donald Trump, Beattie was fired by the administration in 2018 after appearing on a panel with a white nationalist. He remained committed to Trump, though, both politically and rhetorically.
In October 2021, Beattie’s website Revolver published a lengthy article full of circumstantial evidence and question-begging innuendo. The charge: Epps, captured on video calling for people to go into the U.S. Capitol the evening before the Jan. 6 riot and then seen on Capitol grounds the following day, was a government agent tasked with inciting violence.
Epps offered sworn testimony that this wasn’t the case. He was interviewed by the FBI, which asserted in an unusual statement to “60 Minutes” that Epps was not in any way connected to the Bureau. The House select committee investigating the riot, which conducted the sworn interview, found nothing to link Epps to the government or to inciting the day’s violence. In fact, one of those who first attacked police at the Capitol told investigators that Epps had tried to talk him out of it.
In an objective sense, deciding where to assign one’s confidence here isn’t tricky. Beattie’s job in the Trump White House was providing pro-Trump rhetoric, a category into which “the Capitol riot wasn’t Trump’s fault” clearly falls. Epps, on the other hand, has done everything you might expect someone in his position to do to clear his name.
But Beattie and people like Fox News host Tucker Carlson (now former) — who has eagerly scapegoated Epps over the past 18 months — benefit from their arguments being unfalsifiable. Epps was a government stooge, they allege without evidence, and so any exoneration of Epps from any arm of government is suspect. Any attempt to explain the lack of evidence for their argument gets pivoted into evidence that the system is eager to clear Epps for suspicious reasons.
Then, on Sunday, we got an unusually strong argument against Epps’s culpability, from Epps himself. It came in the aforementioned “60 Minutes” segment, in which Epps spoke directly to the CBS audience.
He was asked why so many on the right wanted to portray him as culpable.
“To shift blame on somebody else,” Epps replied. “If you look at it: Fox News, [Georgia Rep.] Marjorie Taylor Greene, [Texas Sen.] Ted Cruz, [Florida Rep. Matt] Gaetz — they’re all telling us, before this thing, that it was stolen. So, you tell me: Who has more impact on people, them or me?”
This is a very good point. That video of Epps on Jan. 5 encouraging people to go into the Capitol the following day — peacefully, he added — was live-streamed and a snippet shared online. It’s not clear how many people viewed his entreaty over the internet, but the crowd within earshot as he was speaking numbered in the dozens. Video captured on Jan. 6 shows Epps encouraging people to go to the Capitol after Trump’s speech and then, at the Capitol, speaking to one of the first people to attack a police officer — the person who said that Epps was trying to get him to calm down.
Now we contrast it to the people Epps identified by name.
Carlson, for example, repeatedly elevated skepticism about the election results. On Nov. 10, 2020, he suggested that polling errors were a form of voter suppression.
“We don’t know how many votes were stolen on Tuesday night. We don’t know anything about the software that many say was rigged. We don’t know. We ought to find out,” Carlson told viewers. “But here’s what we do know. On a larger level, at the highest levels, actually, our system isn’t what we thought it was. It’s not as fair as it should be. Not even close.”
About 4.7 million people watched that show.
The next night, he argued that Democrats had allowed dead people to vote, pointing at examples in Georgia. This report led to a rare response: Carlson admitting that it was wrong. But, again, 4.7 million people saw the original show.
Carlson was responsible for one of the first on-air debunkings of Trump attorney Sidney Powell’s false claims about voting machines. But he was still arguing that the election was rigged against Trump, as he did on Nov. 23, for example. That show had 3.4 million viewers.
Epps has sought a retraction from Carlson and Fox News. As this article was being edited, it was announced that Carlson would be leaving the channel.
As the defamation lawsuit filed against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems (the target of Powell’s false claims) made clear, elevation of unfounded claims about fraud in the election were commonplace on the network. In fact, they were apparently seen as existential, something the network had to do to retain viewers being wooed by further-right channels such as Newsmax.
From Fox News, it would trickle out into other online outlets. Consider comments made by Cruz on the Jan. 3, 2021, episode of the Maria Bartiromo-hosted “Sunday Morning Futures.” He’d announced his plans to object to electoral votes during the joint session of Congress three days later, attributing the need for such action to doubt about the election — doubt that had been elevated by the channel on which he was appearing.
“Dismissing these claims” of fraud, Cruz said, “does real violence to our democratic system.”
The Sunday morning show didn’t do Carlson-in-prime-time numbers, but it did get picked up, including by sites like the Daily Caller. Their write-up was then shared by Cruz himself. This was the point of Cruz’s objection, of course: to generate attention from this objection that curried favor with the right. Even as the crowd was gathering outside the Capitol, Cruz gave a speech elevating doubt about the election.
Cruz was not the first senator to announce he would object to the electoral votes. That dubious honor goes to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) whom Cruz then scrambled to match. Hawley framed his opposition in formal terms in his initial press release but then repeatedly talked about the need to “stand up” against the election results.
By Jan. 6, 2021, a clip of Hawley espousing this argument on Fox News had earned 11,000 retweets and 46,000 likes on Twitter. A separate tweet from Jan. 2, 2021, declaring that it was “time to STAND UP” had 21,000 retweets by Jan. 6.
Among those praising Hawley’s position was Gaetz, who’d already announced his intent to oppose the submitted electoral votes. His tweet praising the senator earned 8,000 retweets and 42,000 likes by Jan. 7, 2021.
At the time, Gaetz and Greene didn’t have the profile they currently enjoy. Greene, after all, was only a representative-elect. When she appeared on Newsmax to state that Jan. 6 was “our 1776 moment” — that is, a new revolution — it had relatively limited reach on Twitter. A clip shared on Facebook has 157,000 views, but it’s not clear how many came after Jan. 6, 2021.
You’ll notice the person Epps didn’t identify, of course: Trump himself. One reason Hawley’s “time to STAND UP” tweet got so much attention was that Trump hyped it. He’d spent months arguing against confidence in the results of an election he thought he might lose, setting the playbook that elected officials and right-wing media followed. And, of course, he gave that speech on the morning of Jan. 6, arguing that his supporters needed to fight on his behalf — sprinkling in his own isolated mention of the need to be peaceful.
So much of the defense of Trump for the events of Jan. 6 hinge on drawing a distinction between all of his incitement — up to and including that speech — and the collapse into violence that happened a short distance away a short time later. But contrast that with Epps, who is not shown to have made any incitement to violence and who credibly denies having done so. He made little more of a call to action than Trump did during that speech and to an obviously smaller audience.
The “60 Minutes” interview with Epps had a predictable effect. Defenders of Trump, other people who extract personal value and trust from elevating skepticism about the government and the media, cited it as evidence that Epps was guilty after all.