Did Federal Agents Provocateurs Incite J6 Violence?

While federal officials refuse to answer vital questions, media propagandists continue to cover up mounting evidence of disturbing government involvement.

By William F. Jasper

On January 5, the day before the giant Stop the Steal rally on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., a tall, middle-aged man dressed in tan military-style clothing and sporting a backpack and red MAGA cap was circulating among the pro-Trump patriots assembling for the event. His military bearing and authoritative manner might have given the impression that he was one of the event’s organizers. However, his militancy and constant insistence to rallygoers that the next day, on January 6, they must “go into the Capitol! Go into the Capitol!” caused suspicion in many who heard and observed his agitating calls to action. He caused so much concern that some of the attendees around him believed he must be a federal agent provocateur. As can be seen on videos that have gone viral, people began pointing at him and chanting “Fed! Fed! Fed!” to warn fellow patriots not to follow his advice.

He was identified as one Ray Epps of Arizona, a former U.S. Marine and state leader of the Oath Keepers organization. Epps can be seen on video taken January 6 yelling, “OK, folks, spread the word! As soon as the president is done speaking, we go to the Capitol. The Capitol is this direction.” Other video footage shows him apparently taking a leadership role in breaching the Capitol Police perimeter and directing other protesters to surge into the Capitol, where the congressional count of state electoral votes was being conducted. But after the four-hour siege/riot (commonly referred to as an “insurrection”) ended, a strange thing happened: Ray Epps, the most conspicuously visible and prominent agitator among the “insurrectionists,” was given a pass by federal authorities, while FBI SWAT units descended on the homes of grannies, physicians, and businessmen across the country, arresting hundreds of people, many of whom had not even gone into the Capitol.

The privileged treatment accorded to Ray Epps confirmed to many observers that he was indeed an agent provocateur on January 6 (hereafter noted as J6). However, he was not alone. Far from it. Indeed, contrary to the insistence of the media lie machine and their “fact checkers,” there is abundant evidence that it was federal agents, undercover assets, and leftist Antifa activists who orchestrated and led the assault on the Capitol. We will return to Ray Epps and his confederates in a moment, along with the damning evidence that is steadily mounting, but first we should ask and answer the question that immediately comes to mind: Why would federal authorities (DOJ, FBI, DHS, and other three-letter agencies) do such a thing? The answer is obvious: They wanted to sabotage the proceedings of the electoral vote count in order to discredit and vilify President Trump and his supporters, thus providing a pretext for fully rolling out the totalitarian war on “domestic extremism” that the Biden administration has unveiled.

Cui Bono? Who Benefits?

Has the J6 scheme worked? It would be foolish to argue that it hasn’t. As a result of the violence and chaos unleashed at the Capitol, Republican members of the House and Senate who had previously said they would support challenges to electors reversed course after the melee and voted to confirm Joe Biden as president of the United States. No one wanted to be crucified by the national and local media as an ally of violent “insurrectionists.” Among those who flipped were Republican Senators Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, Mike Braun of Indiana, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, James Lankford of Oklahoma, and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee.

Was President Donald Trump foolish enough to believe that he could carry off a successful coup with a mob of unarmed civilians? How likely is that? Whatever negatives his opponents attribute to him, stupidity is not one of them. He is a shrewd, politically astute, media-savvy man. His plan appears to have been to convince enough senators to refuse to certify the electoral count, which would then have sent the matter back to the states to correct problematic issues or put the contest into the House of Representatives. Although the Pelosi Democrats have the advantage in the current House for normal legislative business, for the purpose of electoral votes, Trump held the trump card and could have won an Electoral College vote.

Reasonable people may argue whether the plan had a chance of succeeding, or whether it was constitutional, but, clearly, the violent siege did nothing to help Trump’s efforts. What it did help was the Biden-Pelosi-media cabal’s campaign to demonize and criminalize their opposition. Keep in mind that we had witnessed a five-year run of nonstop dirty tricks by the Deep State cabal to destroy Trump and remove him from the Oval Office: the Steele Dossier, the fraudulent FBI evidence used to obtain a FISA warrant for illegal spying on the Trump campaign, the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, the Trump-Ukraine collusion hoax, a steady drip of illegal leaks of classified data to the anti-Trump media, and much more. This subversive coup effort involved then-serving and former federal officials and Deep State operatives within the alphabet agencies, including John Brennan, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Bruce Ohr, Lisa Page, Sally Yates, and many others.

With all that subterfuge as prelude, should it surprise anyone that the same forces would attempt to hijack Trump’s Stop the Steal rally and turn it into a weapon against him — and against our constitutional order? The available evidence suggests that is precisely what happened. In the limited space we have available here, it is possible to present only a brief introduction to the copious data — court documents, eyewitness accounts, videos and photographs, expert analysis, FBI/DOJ equivocation and deception — indicating that the “insurrection” was a setup, a provocation, a false-flag operation. We present below some of the most inconvenient facts, troubling connections, and startling revelations that have surfaced thus far, while pointing out that, at one year out, this is still very much a series of developing stories, with new developments breaking almost every day.

• Ray Epps—Except for Jacob Chansley, the horned “QAnon Shaman,” Epps is the most recognizable face of the J6 “insurrection.” He originally appeared as suspect “#16” (out of several hundred) on the FBI’s Capitol Violence Most Wanted list. However, the FBI quietly removed him from their list on July 1, the day after Revolver News published an explosive article asking why Epps was not being arrested, since his identity was publicly known. In congressional hearings, Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI officials have been subjected to scorching questions about Ray Epps and other suspected agents provocateursby Representative Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and other legislators. The federal officials repeatedly refused to confirm or deny that Epps and other suspects were working in any capacity with, or for, the government.

Epps’ curiously charmed life got even more curious when he became something of a hero to Nancy Pelosi’s House J6 Committee. After he testified to a closed hearing, the committee released a statement saying Epps had informed them that he had never worked “for the FBI or any other law enforcement agency.” And the J6 Committee appears to have accepted that as gospel. In fact, Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), Liz Cheney’s RINO teammate on the committee, went on a Twitter storm defending Epps, arguing that he didn’t go into the Capitol and broke no laws by agitating others to do so. That argumentation is very curious, since Kinzinger and his fellow committee members are attempting to criminalize President Trump, Mark Meadows, and dozens of other people who also didn’t go into the building and, unlike Epps, didn’t encourage the violent takeover of the building.

Another curious element is the fact that Epps’ attorney, John Blischak, is a former FBI agent who boasts in his bio that his “biggest asset is his relation with prosecutors and law enforcement.” It does raise a question as to whether he is an FBI handler for Epps.

• John Sullivan (aka Activist John, aka JaydenX)—John Sullivan is a 26-year-old, anti-Trump Utah man who identifies as a “left-wing activist,” is the founder of Insurgence USA, and has been militantly active in Black Lives Matter protests and riots. He embedded himself as a video journalist among the pro-Trumpers on January 6, can be seen in the forefront of the invading mob at the Capitol, and can be seen and heard agitating and urging the mob on, as well as committing criminal acts such as breaking a Capitol window. He can be seen yelling “we about to burn this sh*t down,” and then leading the crowd in a chant of “it’s time for a revolution.”

• Jacob Chansley (aka QAnon Shaman, aka Jake Angeli)—Jacob Chansley pre-sents the perfect poster-boy image to fit the “right-wing, lunatic fringe” stereotype. It’s as if he were chosen by the Democratic National Committee’s central casting department for the J6 starring role — and perhaps he was. It may be remembered that top DNC operatives Bob Creamer and Scott Foval were caught on video by Project Veritas boasting about how they hire homeless and mentally ill people, as well as union thugs, to disrupt GOP events and “do sh*t” to make the opposition look bad. Creamer, the husband of Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), is the author of Stand Up Straight! How Progressives Can Win, a handbook of leftist tactics he wrote in prison while serving time for bank fraud. It has been compared to Marxist agitator Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the 1971 “classic” manual for social/political mayhem. Among the Alinskyite tactics Creamer advocates is infiltrating conservative groups and doing outlandish things to discredit them from within.

According to Chansley’s attorney, Chansley was discharged from the Navy due to mental problems and is in need of medical and psychological treatment. Was he recruited by DNC operatives (or the FBI) to carry out his J6 stunt? “We have mentally-ill people that we pay to do sh*t, make no mistake,” Scott Foval, Creamer’s top lieutenant, said on the Project Veritas video. “Over the last twenty years. I’ve paid off a few homeless guys to do crazy stuff.” In the same video, Foval and other DNC operatives brag about their successful infiltration and disruption of Trump rallies in Chicago and Arizona. As the Steele Dossier, the DNC computer hack, Spygate, and other scandals have shown, the FBI has had a politicized relationship with the DNC and has never bothered to investigate the illegal activities of which Creamer and Foval have boasted.

• The Proud Boys—While the FBI, DHS, and DOJ seem to take a relatively benign view of violent activities of Black Lives Matter and Antifa, they definitely view the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and “militia groups” as imminent national-security threats. On September 25, 2021, the New York Timesreported that the FBI had at least two informants inside the Proud Boys during the J6 siege. Three months prior to the Times story, in June 2021, Revolver News had reported on the mounting evidence that all three groups were infiltrated by federal operatives. In fact, it came out after the J6 attack that the national chairman of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, had served as an informant for the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies between 2012 and 2014. Was he working with or for the FBI or other agencies on January 6, 2021 and the period leading up to it? That would seem to be an important question. Many Proud Boys have been arrested for J6 activities, but there are still many unanswered questions about the roles that undercover agents and informants for the FBI and other agencies may have played in planning or instigating criminal activities for which Proud Boys members are being prosecuted.

• Stewart Rhodes and Oath Keepers—On January 13, 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that Stewart Rhodes, the founder and leader of Oath Keepers, along with 10 additional members of his group, had been indicted on charges of “Seditious Conspiracy and Other Offenses Related to U.S. Capitol Breach” of January 6, 2021. Rhodes’ arrest came six months after a scathing report by Revolver News detailing his long history of involvement in the thick of patriot/government altercations in which everyone except Rhodes seems to go to prison. In a June 30, 2021 report titled “Federal Protection of ‘Oath Keepers’ Kingpin Stewart Rhodes Breaks the Entire Capitol ‘Insurrection’ Lie Wide Open,” Revolver pointed out uncomfortable facts and asked a series of questions about Rhodes and his relationship with the FBI that must be answered if we are truly interested in getting to the truth of the J6 affair.

Some might suggest that Rhodes’ arrest should put to rest the suspicions that he is a federal operative. Not necessarily; law-enforcement agencies frequently arrest their own undercover assets, either to pressure them to perform or to take them out of circulation to make it more difficult for them to be subpoenaed for testifying in court. Rhodes did testify before the House J6 Committee via Zoom from an Oklahoma jail on February 2.

• Steven D’Antuono and the Michigan Kidnap Plotters— On October 8, 2020, the FBI made the dramatic announcement that it had foiled a plot by a militia group called the Wolverine Watchmen to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and overthrow the state government. Six of the 14 suspects arrested in the alleged plot have been charged in federal court, while the remaining eight have been charged in state court. The announcement made headlines worldwide, and for multiple news cycles it was used (and continues to be used) to tar President Trump with the charge that his “hateful rhetoric” encouraged and incited the alleged violent plot.

Two of the defendants in the federal case have pled guilty under plea bargains, and the remaining four are scheduled to go to trial in March. Certain to be an issue is the defense’s claim of entrapment by the federal government. They have a solid case. The left-tilted BuzzFeedNews broke the story open with a July 12, 2021 story titled “The FBI Allegedly Used at Least 12 Informants in The Michigan Kidnapping Case.” Subsequent stories by BuzzFeed, the Detroit News, and other outlets showed that the FBI not only used informants but had undercover FBI agents placed in the group. More importantly, the developing information indicates that the federal operatives were not merely collecting information, but were also actually directing, planning, and orchestrating the plot. From the information available thus far, it appears that the individuals being prosecuted had to be coaxed, prodded, and financed by the FBI to take the actions that are now being cited as the latest evidence of a wave of “domestic terrorism” by right-wing extremists.

The man in charge of the FBI caper known as the “Whitmer kidnap plot” was Steven D’Antuono, the head of the FBI field office in Detroit. On October 13, less than a week after sensationally “foiling” the dastardly plot, D’Antuono was promoted by FBI Director Christopher Wray to head the Washington Field Office, one of the most coveted posts in the bureau. And, conveniently, just in time to reprise the Michigan plot on a grander scale. A key element of the FBI-directed kidnap plot involved storming the Michigan Capitol. Was that a mini dress rehearsal for January 6? Members of the press, members of Congress, and the public should be demanding answers to that question. D’Antuono, Director Wray, Attorney General Garland, and other officials should not be allowed to get away with insulting “I can’t say” responses.

Insurrection or “Fedsurrection”?

If the Michigan plot was a model, we can expect that dozens, if not hundreds, of participants in the J6 chaos were, in one capacity or another, government agents.

In a speech delivered on the eve of the January 6 anniversary, Attorney General Garland declared that the DOJ is methodically pursuing all leads in the Capitol attack. “The Justice Department remains committed to holding all January 6 perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law — whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy,” he said. “We will follow the facts wherever they lead,” he continued. “But most important, we follow the facts — not an agenda or an assumption.”

However, Merrick Garland has a huge credibility problem. Are he, the DOJ, and the FBI truly “committed to holding all January 6 perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law”? All perpetrators, including federal agents provocateurs — and their DOJ/FBI supervisors?

What we know thus far about the use of agents provocateurs to instigate the J6 chaos has not come from the FBI, DOJ, or DHS — and certainly not from the “mainstream” media; it has come from Revolver News, Julie Kelly at American Greatness, The Epoch Times, and other alternative news outlets and independent investigators and bloggers.

Adam Andrzejewski of the watchdog group OpenTheBooks.com exposed the massive budgets of the federal government’s domestic spy guys in a Forbes article last year titled “FBI and Other Agencies Paid Informants $548 Million in Recent Years With Many Committing Authorized Crimes.” Andrzejewski noted, “Federal agencies paid out at least $548 million to informants working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), in recent years, according to government audits.”

Freedom of Information Act documents obtained by the Daily Dot revealed that, “In total, records obtained by reporters confirm the FBI authorized at least 22,823 crimes between 2011 and 2014.” That’s an awful lot of money sloshing around and an awful lot of crimes being authorized. Are we sure this is in our national interest? How can it be, when the evidence indicates that this awesome power is being weaponized as an instrument to advance a totalitarian agenda of demonizing, criminalizing, and punishing political opponents?

Published with Permission of thenewamerican.com