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All right, y'all welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of antiwar.com author of the book Fool's Aaron, time to end the war in Afghanistan and the brand new enough already time to end the war on terrorism.
And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003 almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scotthorton.org you can sign up for the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash Scott Horton show.
All right, y'all introducing Darren J.
Beatty from revolver.news.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing?
Great to be back here.
Thanks for having me.
Happy to have you here.
So you had written these two great stories about Ray Epps and other mysterious men involved in a seemingly organized plot to foment the J.
January 6th riot at the Capitol in 2021.
And then there've been some developments since then.
Stuart Rhodes has been indicted and not just for trespassing and low level charges like most of the others here, but he and his guys have been indicted for seditious conspiracy.
And so and then also I talked with Ken Bensinger Bensinger on the show from BuzzFeed and he of course had done the great reporting about the bogus Michigan kidnap plot there.
Yep.
And so I asked him for his take on whether he thought there were informants in the January 6th thing and whether Stuart Rhodes was one, et cetera, and what he had thought of your articles.
And he had some comments about that and I know you heard that.
So I brought you on to to discuss both of those things.
I guess, can we start with, can we start with does the Rhodes arrest and the other guys with him, does that include any or many of the people that you had written about or is that a separate issue?
And does it change your opinion of, uh, you know, your speculation of what was likely possibly, or I guess, however you phrased it behind the lack of arrest of those men that you had identified and the speculation that they were possibly federal informants.
Yeah, no, that's a, it's a great question and it's a great opportunity to clarify for I think a lot of people, some of whom, you know, just kind of casually digested our reporting and others who job it is to be on top of these things like, uh, what's his name?
Ken Bensinger, the Buzzfeed guy who should know better.
Um, and the argument that the, the sense that our reporting was essentially saying, um, X person is not indicted up to this point.
Therefore he's a fed.
And then, and that's that this thesis is falsifiable up to the point that anyone's indicted is absolutely ridiculous.
The underlying questions pertaining to Stuart Rhodes that catalyzed a reporting originally are only intensified in light of Rhodes's recent arrest.
They are not dissolved or discredited.
And let me just recapitulate what those questions are.
So, um, basically what happened is there the original oath keepers defendants for the most part, they got hit with a superseding indictment that includes seditious conspiracy and Rhodes, the founder and leader of the oath keepers was added to the indictment.
That's what's happened.
So the, the other people, the co-defendants say for maybe one or two, but for the most part, the co-defendants they've been charged since the beginning, just for the lesser charge of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding.
And this charge with the addition of Rhodes includes a superseding indictment of seditious conspiracy.
That's where one point, uh, does that make sense so far?
Yeah.
Okay.
So, so the question that really animated, uh, are reporting on Rhodes in addition to all his sort of background stuff, but the real questions that are intensified in light of his arrest and which need some explanation.
And again, my position is still very strongly that these questions demand explanation and the best explanation thus far in light of the evidence that we have is still that Rhodes is being protected.
Those questions are as follows.
Why take an entire year to indict him for anything?
Now the, either the disingenuous or the frankly ignorant and low information response to that would be, Oh, well, you know, for, for a serious charge like seditious conspiracy, they just need to build up a really strong case and that could take an entire year.
Nonsense.
First of all, they didn't need a seditious conspiracy to indict Stuart Rhodes.
They indicted, as we point out in our reporting, mid January, they indicted Thomas Caldwell for conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and the indictment and entire conspiracy.
If you look at the charging documents point to Stuart Rhodes's statements and actions as the person who initiated the conspiracy.
And so if they felt that that was enough to indict Caldwell from the very beginning, then that was enough to indict Rhodes for the lesser charge of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding.
And by doing so, they would have taken Rhodes off the street since he's this apparent danger, taken him off the street.
And they could have waited to build a superseding indictment with the additional leverage over him of having him indicted for a lesser charge.
And yet, so the question is why, if, if the government was just building this big seditious conspiracy case over an entire year, why did they forego the easy layup indictments of either conspiracy to obstruct, which they hit others with his co-defendants with very early on and trespassing.
Why forego the opportunity for a lesser indictment and wait an entire year where he could have been a flight risk where he could have done anything.
He could have been a danger or a flight risk.
Why?
And in fact, this isn't just a question that I'm re-upping that I'm re-engaging with in light of this arrest.
This is actually now the very question proposed by Stuart Rhodes' defense, because now the prosecution is acting as though, okay, we want to, we want it, we're doing a pretrial hearing and we want to keep Rhodes in prison because he's such a danger.
And Rhodes' attorney says quite reasonably, if he was such a danger, why the hell did you wait an entire year to arrest him with anything?
Why did you keep him on the streets for an entire year when all these other people you hit with trespassing charges and lesser charges?
Why?
No adequate explanation for that whatsoever.
So that's one question that remains unanswered.
And I think my answer is still overwhelmingly the most parsimonious and powerful and persuasive answer to that.
Another question that I think is even more bizarre and inexplicable and devoid of any kind of innocent conventional explanation is this.
So one thing that they bizarrely decided not to charge him with anything and waited a whole year.
It's quite another that they didn't even search him.
Okay.
The asterisk to that is that they searched him four months after January 6, taking a single cell phone from Stuart Rhodes.
They give him four months, this guy who's so serious that they're allegedly holding everything off to build this grand seditious conspiracy case over a year.
He's so serious.
He's so important.
They're just spending all of their time to cross, you know, cross the T's, dot the I's, do everything.
And he's not even important enough for them to search.
They wait four months to allow him to destroy any evidence that could be useful in their big, important, ultimately year long seditious conspiracy investigation.
And then at the end of four months they take a single phone.
Whereas Rhodes is on record in interviews talking about quote unquote OPSEC burner phones, so forth.
It's not as though he could have had any additional phones, right?
Well, and they're claiming the indictment that he stopped and bought a bunch of firearms on the way to DC and this kind of thing.
So it seems like those would be on or they should be.
I mean that, that would have, uh, they, the search warrant as far as been publicly reported.
And as far as anyone has ever said, as far as I've been able to confirm from any of the defense attorneys, anything is that they took a single cell phone from him four months after January six.
And then after that single search in May, they wait an additional eight months of no search.
Okay.
That is inconceivable.
Let me tell you what they did just that's the standard procedure, what they did to Thomas Caldwell, what they did to Thomas Caldwell, who again was hit with this lesser conspiracy charge in mid January with the charge all teed up and ready to go on, you know, that, the charge that was based almost exclusively on Rhodes, his own statements and actions.
The feds give him the full treatment.
The feds bust down his door, stick a gun in his face, stick a gun in his wife's face, raid his entire place, take every electronic imaginable.
That's how, and they do it.
They don't wait four months to do it.
They did it just weeks after January six.
That's what it looks like when they're seriously trying to collect evidence on someone.
And yet for some bizarre reason, maybe the same reason that the feds decided not to charge Rhodes at all for an entire year, when they could have gotten him on multiple charges that they gave other lower profile people, they decide to not even search him.
They give him four months to destroy evidence.
And he's been on, you know, interviews saying like, Oh yeah, use burner phones, do this, do that.
He's, they give him four months to destroy evidence.
They take a single cell phone and then they give him an additional eight months to destroy evidence.
So, well, you know, on the other hand, you'd think that if he really was an informant, they would do a better job of pretending that he wasn't or something that they would go ahead and do a larger search for performance reasons.
Only if only look there, if it weren't for revolver news, nobody would even be thinking about this.
They weren't expecting Stuart Rhodes to become an issue at all.
They weren't expecting the narrative of January 6th being a potential fed operation to become a thing at all.
They were expecting it for good reason, because they want just kind of loyal lapdogs, like the Buzzfeed guy who will, you know, report some things, but do very, very aggressive sort of narrative guard walling to make sure no one asked these additional questions, which are frankly obvious.
And we can get into that in the future.
They weren't expecting people to ask these questions.
And for the most part, you know, they were right to do so.
And so they take a single cell phone and guess what?
They don't want the full range of his communications because the less they collect, the less liability it is.
Because to the extent that they're collecting his communications and his burner phones or whatever he may have been using to communicate to anyone, that becomes evidence that under Brady rules and other rules, the prosecution is obliged to turn over to the defense.
And in fact, it's on the basis of leaked text messages that in many cases in the Michigan issue, that's how the, you know, the informants got revealed.
And so the less electronic communication they collect, the better off they are.
And now we haven't heard, have we heard from his lawyer?
I mean, obviously it would be, you know, a card that he might be waiting to play, but his lawyer hasn't said yet that, Hey, whatever Stewart did, he did so in full cooperation with the FBI.
So leave him alone, which might be an obvious thing to say if his client is sitting in jail right now.
Right?
Well, no, it wouldn't, it would be an obvious thing to say if these charges were genuine and Rhodes thought he was being burned.
Yeah.
Like if he was really going to prison, I could see them waiting to play that one, but I'm just asking, we don't have any indication from his camp though, that that's his defense yet.
Right?
No.
And I think it's fully likely that there'll be some other cover stories to why these charges are not pursued to Rhodes going to prison.
There are a number of other options that they could have to say, they might say, Oh, you know what?
Rhodes is cooperating.
He's telling us, you know, things that we want to know about Alex Jones or Roger Stone or the Trump inner circle.
And so we're going to give him a pass and, you know, ease up on these charges.
And he'll ultimately do like four months in prison if that.
So now going back to your articles here, I mean, this guy Epps, you demonstrate is a partner with Rhodes going back.
And so I guess back to one of my original questions there, which I asked you too many questions at once at the beginning was how much overlap is there between the mysterious men you identified in the videos and in your reporting there, uh, and the men in the indictment accused by the government, at least one of those guys is a good question, right?
Yep.
It's a good question.
Let, let me get to that.
But first let me address the question of why isn't Rhodes at this point saying, wait a minute, the, the government you're charging me with seditious conspiracy.
What the hell I was working for you the whole time.
And again, that does happen.
There's precedent for that sort of thing happening where informants get, get burned.
I don't think that that's the case yet with Rhodes.
I think the feds have a very delicate game to play.
I think if they spook him too much, that could be a possibility.
I don't think we're there yet.
I think that this indictment occurred on the basis of some kind of understanding that one way or another, the indictment looks serious.
It accomplishes many things that the government wants to accomplish, but ultimately Rhodes is still being protected or from his perspective, he's still being protected.
It might not be the case from the fed's perspective, but from his perspective, he's still being protected and the charges aren't serious and he's not ready to go nuclear.
But interestingly enough, there have been interviews with Rhodes in which he evoked this concept of, you know what, if the feds come after me, we're going to go through discovery and they're going to be screwed, which is a very weird thing to say in the context of a criminal indictment that he was contemplating.
Discovery is usually something that people use in that context for like civil suits and so forth to say discovery could be bad for the government.
If they decide to charge him is an interesting thing to say, to be the least.
Well, it's kind of a, just sort of a truism, right, Darren, that if someone is a compromised FBI informant or flip States witness that in a sense, depending on what it is that they do, they could have compromised the FBI right back, right?
So somebody who's been turned into an informant who then goes and robs a bunch of banks or something like that, he makes his handlers look bad for him getting away with that on their watch.
Think about this.
If it turns out that again, that the best explanation for the questions that I raised, why it was protected for a whole year from search and any lesser indictment was that he has some relationship with the government that, you know, they don't want to be known.
That's hugely embarrassing to them, especially because Rhodes is not just anybody.
Rhodes is the founder and leader of the oath keepers, which is the most prosecuted militia group imputed to one six, which is responsible with it for this whole stupid stack thing that the media has been amplifying since day one as evidence of the most dangerous insurrection, the aspect of one six, if it turns out that the head of this whole militia organization was effectively a fed, whether formally or informally through cutouts or some kind of arrangement that is absolutely devastating.
Right.
And for the critics, you know, critics might say, well, you're just, you know, going too far in the speculation here, but I don't think you're necessarily implying that the feds had orchestrated his actions that day, but just that if he was working for them while he was doing that, that would be enough to cover up right there.
There are a range of possibilities and that's in the speculative territory.
What I'm confident in saying is that the most reasonable and likely explanation for the questions that I raised pertaining to the bizarre discrepancies in the treatment of Rhodes for the entire year is that he's being protected by the government.
And he's because he has some type of arrangement with some federal agency.
And that doesn't even mean that he's directly working for them.
It could mean that there's an understanding whereby he regularly gives them information in exchange for protection.
Maybe he's working for some kind of cutout.
There are a lot of arrangements that could sustain that basic position, but still I'm even more so in light of his indictment convinced absent any alternative explanation for those two questions that I raised and additionally, so given his background of, you know, basically injecting himself into these types of events and coming out unscathed when multiple people around him are indicted.
This is, I think, the most powerful and reasonable explanation for it.
And I don't think that Rhodes is being burned at this point.
I don't think he thinks of himself as being burned if he thought that and he were brave, he would go rogue and potentially use his the leverage that he might have on the government in terms of what his relationship actually was.
So in that sense, at this stage, I think it's more likely than not that these seditious conspiracy charges are not genuine in the sense that there's no serious intention of putting him in jail for the 20 years that, you know, attaches to this.
There's an understanding that, look, this is for show.
This is for the headline.
There'll be some public story that accounts for why they don't ultimately pursue these serious charges to put him in jail.
He might end up serving four months for some lesser thing.
The public story might be that he's cooperating against a Trump inner circle.
There are other potential stories.
But I don't think Rhodes thinks of himself as being burned at this point, because if he did, I think it would be likely that he would he would use the leverage that I think he has.
Yeah.
Hang on just one second.
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Now, OK, back to the question of the overlap here between the guys you identified in your articles and the guys in the new indictment here.
Right.
OK, so the thing with apps is I view these as two different dimensions of the same larger story.
Again, this I want to be careful to to say that this is purely speculative on my part, but my intuition, my gut says I don't think that Ray Epps and were coordinating.
Ray Epps was a president of the Arizona chapter of the Oath Keepers many, many, many years ago.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if Rhodes and Epps did not maintain kind of close relationship at all.
I think it's quite possible that Rhodes and Epps were acting more or less independently, but in effect in concert because Rhodes and Epps played different roles.
Rhodes is the head of the Oath Keepers, who in some way or I should say just allegedly now to be careful, but in some way would have been associated with the QRF stuff and associated with the stack stuff because it was the Oath Keepers who did who did the stack, whereas Ray Epps and his, quote unquote, breach team were cataloged extensively and in detail, you know, a lot of video stuff in the revolver piece.
They were responsible in two things, taking down the barriers to create this booby trap situation where the whole crowd technically trespasses without even knowing it yet.
And secondly, in the case of Scaffold Commander, who remains unindicted, unidentified even, which is interesting.
People like that to mobilize the crowd.
They have their bullhorns.
They're saying move forward, move forward, move forward and use crowd control techniques to help to engineer proximity to the capital and the ultimate penetration of the capital.
So I think that Epps and Rhodes played quite different but complementary roles.
And it's not necessarily my working hypothesis that they're, you know, in cahoots or coordinating or anything like that.
I think it's just as likely, maybe more likely that while, you know, they knew each other when Epps was president of Arizona chapter, that they just hadn't been in contact for several years at the at the time that January 6 occurred.
And then so now when you talk about the stacks and this and that, those are the guys in the indictment are clearly tied to Rhodes and and man for man are separate from the group that you identified in your stories, is that correct?
Yeah, that's that's a different component of the story.
Just again, speaking in generalities, but to help people get a broad sense of the pictures, Ray Epps and his team allegedly appear to have coordinated the initial breach of the capital grounds to create the conditions that would allow for the ultimate penetration of the capital, whereas the Oath Keepers group that's associated with the QRF and some of the the scary gun stuff and also the stack that the media has made such a big deal about.
Right.
OK, now one of those guys, am I right?
One of the guys who seem to be associated with Epps has also been indicted.
Am I right?
It was the guy that he whispered in his ear.
Go now or whatever it was.
And the guy charged the cops and the bike racks there.
Is that correct?
Well, there are two people that at least two people like, you know, depends what you mean by associated.
But there are two people that I think are relevant who were part, you know, kind of coordinating with Epps, working with Epps.
That one guy is Ryan Samsell.
And he's the person that Epps whispers into his ear.
And then two seconds later, he breaks down that barricade at twelve fifty three p.m.
Ryan Samsell was indicted and he's served time.
He's been in prison.
And he's actually I think I mentioned this last time in your program.
He's actually been really brutalized.
And I would say, you know, he certainly acted in an imprudent way on January six.
I think that's fair to say.
But, you know, we're not in some, you know, I don't want this to be some kind of Abu Ghraib type, you know, country where people are just brutalized in prison like that.
And so I think the treatment of Samsell has been shameful.
And even though he was imprudent on that day, you know, he doesn't nobody deserves to be brutalized in prison.
And so and by the way, he's keeping a very, very tight hold on what Ray Epps whispered in his ear.
When when we all like to know what that was.
But well, all might be very tight.
You might be abusing the term all there.
I mean, possibly some of us want to know some of us don't.
Sure.
I mean, OK.
And there's another individual called Maroon Proud Boy, who's also an interesting case.
And again, like for for Epps.
So the guy he whispers in his ear, that's Ryan Samsell.
There's another guy who is really an egregious case.
And Epps says to him, he says.
When we go in.
Believe this here, we don't want to get shot.
Right now, that remark alone is quite something.
Given the history of prosecutions and indictments, an individual called George Tanios, I think I mentioned him.
He was facing 50 years or something crazy for a conspiracy to assault an officer might have even been a more serious charge.
And the overt act in this in George Tanios, his conspiracy was saying no, no, not yet.
When his friend tried to reach for his bear spray.
The yet part constituted the overt act, whereas Ray Epps, who says when we go in, leave this here.
I mean, it the parallels are striking.
In addition to all the other evidence on Epps.
But for Epps, I think it's we can talk about the Epps case separately and the kind of pathetic damage control tour that the government's trying to do through the January 6th committee and so forth.
But well, I mean, this is my point.
I wasn't just trying to be cute there about who's not interested in what the previous gentleman has to say here.
The obvious thing would be if if we're just talking about a random prosecutor with no agenda here, they would be using these two men to implicate the third.
And in this case, there's no indication.
I think you said this guy's already pleaded guilty and been sent to prison and was not made to turn against Epps or apparently anyone else.
I don't think he's pled guilty.
I think he was convicted of the other people in the January 6th gulag.
So he's just been held in pretrial detention.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I thought you said he was in prison as opposed to in jail.
So I'm sorry I misunderstood you there.
I see what you mean.
Yeah.
But which is also, you know, in violation of their right to a speedy trial and all that.
And in fact, I don't know if you've really covered the violations here.
That's a whole other aspect of this, of this real scandalous situation.
But I think we're focused on the in some ways the most, you know, the juicy part, which is the federal involvement question.
And on that note, maybe we can turn in more detail and I can address some of the remarks of a previous guest of yours, the BuzzFeed guy.
Yeah.
In fact, before you do, I wanted to say, Darren, that, you know, I'm a nonpartisan type kind of guy here.
And my point of view is that you guys are kind of both sort of rude in the way that he talked about you.
And I guess you guys have a history going back and whatever.
But the way I look at it was that you're, you know, being honest and upfront in saying I've identified some serious questions that remain unanswered, but that also, you know, obviously give rise to speculative questions about what the answer might be as a working hypothesis.
It's not like you're going off making claims that you can't back up.
While on the other hand, he's saying, well, I'm just not in the business of asking questions that I don't know the answer to yet.
My journalism is different than that.
And I'll leave that to him.
So he was kind of talking smack while he said that.
But I think that your writing and his writing are both are both kind of perfectly legitimate ways of going about it.
And I don't really see too big of a of a split there.
So he I think he was being unfair in saying that you were asking unfair questions.
But at the same time, I don't think that he was really wrong to say that, well, look, I'll start calling people informants as soon as I have evidence that they're informants, rather than just speculative, you know, informed questions.
Right, right.
Well, look, I appreciate your your diplomacy in the matter.
And I will proceed to address his remarks in in a manner that has exactly the amount of diplomacy that I think is is due on on the occasion.
So and I wish we could play, you know, some of his his remarks, some of it.
I have the interview up and I'll want to play it, but some of it I can just paraphrase and you can kind of correct me if I'm not representing it accurately.
But let's let's talk about some key components.
One thing he was saying, first of all, is.
He was saying that, you know what, there's no evidence.
Big issue, I think the first thing that, again, kind of I don't know if there's an antagonism, but I kind of I guess trolled him a little bit for what I think he's got to be either disingenuous or some kind of weird robot mind to not make any type of link between the Michigan case in January six.
And so just and he's been very emphatic on, you know, just building this epistemic wall, you know, saying, you know, now that now that the cat's out of the bag already.
With the Michigan case, and let's be clear of the timeline here, he says, oh, what revolve reporting on our stuff?
Nope.
We talked about the Michigan case before BuzzFeed did.
The only outlet that was talking about the Michigan case in any context who actually covered it quite well, albeit not as extensively as BuzzFeed ended up doing was Jacobin.
Jacobin covered the Michigan case and covered it pretty fairly and pretty reasonably and said, look, this this looks like an entrapment issue, a lot like what they were doing to the Muslims in the war on war on terror.
Revolver News picked that up, covered the Michigan case, added to it.
And.
Situated it contextually in relation to January six.
Now, this is in the view of the objective neutrality man BuzzFeed, which, by the way, is a kind of blog that I think got its name from doing like cat listicles and things.
So very serious outlet there.
But in the view of Mr.from the Mount Olympus of cat, you know, cat food listicle BuzzFeed.
The inferential step that is to be avoided at all costs is linking.
The Michigan case of January six, when one.
It involves one of the three same major militia groups involved in both cases.
When two, even though it's colloquially referred to as a kidnapping plot, there was a plot to storm the Michigan state capitol.
So you have this plot to storm a capitol.
You have one of the same militia groups.
And as Revolver was the first to point out Contra, BuzzFeed's claim that we're not doing any original reporting on this.
As we were the first to point out, the head of the Detroit field office who oversaw that went on immediately after to oversee January six prosecutions.
So you have the same militia group, which was fed, infiltrated up the wazoo in Michigan.
You have the same plot to storm state capitol.
And you have the same guy playing a major role in overseeing both incidents.
And you have the events occurring just months apart.
And in the Michigan case, you have a fed infiltration ratio that turns out to be like 12 out of 26.
And so I don't think it's any kind of far flung exercise of kind of tinfoil speculation to say, gee.
Maybe there are some parallels here.
And in fact, in a recent New York Times piece on the Michigan case, they bring one of their experts who says, yeah, there are parallels there.
And so I think the aggressiveness and the insistence of BuzzFeed, again, BuzzFeed didn't break the story that they're a bunch of informants.
Once the cat was out of the bag, that the Michigan case was totally just messed up and just a cluster with all of these informants and agents who are doing weird stuff on the side such that they're not even able to testify.
Once that was already out of the bag a little bit, then BuzzFeed came along to provide additional detail.
But in addition, say, wait a minute, guys, you better not make any inferences to January 6th, because these are totally different issues.
Right.
And you have to be, you know, and at the Mount Olympus of cat listicle journalism that is BuzzFeed, we wouldn't dare make any inferences of that sort.
But we will say pretty confidently that there's no connection.
And we will say pretty confidently that January 6th had nothing of the sort because it's OK to make speculative inferences, even extremely unlikely ones.
So long as they're in the direction of the government's position.
So so that's one thing I'll say about that.
I mean, this this fiction that is really selectively practiced, that's promoted by this this BuzzFeed guy that, oh, you know, they're involved in speculation.
We're just in facts.
I just need the document right in front of me.
There's no such thing as facts mean nothing without a narrative, without making sense of how they link together, without telling a story, without making some inferences as the motivations, without looking at historical parallels and everything like that.
If you're just in the business of copy and pasting facts that maybe, you know, government sources give you, you're not doing journalism.
You're doing damage control.
Sorry.
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This is so cool.
The great Mike Swanson's new book is finally out.
He's been working on this thing for years.
And I admit I haven't read it yet.
I'm going to get to it as soon as I can.
But I know you guys are going to want to beat me to it.
It's called Why the Vietnam War, Nuclear Bombs and Nation Building in Southeast Asia, 1945 through 61.
And as he explains on the back here, all of our popular culture and our retellings and our history and our movies are all about the height of the American war there in, say, 1964 through 1974.
But how do we get there?
Why is this all Harry Truman's fault?
Find out in Why the Vietnam War by the great Mike Swanson.
Available now.
Well, a huge part of it is just knowing which questions to ask or which documents to try to get.
Exactly.
I mean, whether people are informants or not, is that a question or isn't that a question?
So the idea that but it's not just asking it in a vacuum.
Right.
It's asking with extremely concrete context, which I just adduced.
Yeah.
So it's also pretty obvious here to Darren that for what did happen that day and for the deal that's been made out of it, where, you know, the Republic almost fell that day and all this stuff as the way TV portrays it.
It's pretty clear why they would clamp down as hard as they could on any information about things happen just months, you know, within a month's span of each other.
So, again, the idea that we don't want to make any connections between the Michigan thing and the January 6th thing again, and that's not the argument that arrests I do, you know, analysis specifically on January 6th.
But to pretend like the Michigan case that involves one of the same militia groups that involves the same plot to storm state capital that had one of the same guys who played an active role in in both one is the head of the Detroit field office who went on to oversee January 6th investigation.
And in one, you have a fed infiltration ratio of 12 out of 26.
And to pretend that that doesn't shed any valuable context on January 6th is you either have to be incredibly disingenuous or just an idiot.
And you can take your pick as to which one the BuzzFeed guy is.
And so that's that's one part that I wanted to cover.
The other part is, again, it's either disingenuous or just a maybe an IQ problem, cognitive problem of representing the argument of revolvers, as to say, it's as simple as saying, oh, so and so is not indicted at this particular time.
Therefore, he's a fed in such a way that if this person is indicted the next day, that sort of falsifies the entire thesis.
That was never the argument.
And for I keep forgetting his name, but so I call him the BuzzFeed guy.
But Ken, Ken Bensinger, Ken Bensinger for for for Bensinger to say, oh, yeah, you know, revolvers, just their argument was this guy, Stuart Rhodes, wasn't arrested, therefore not give me a break.
I it's very clear it doesn't take it doesn't take you know, it's it's a little bit higher than the BuzzFeed level of, you know, reading comprehension, but it doesn't require a genius to understand what the revolver article was, if someone actually read it.
And what it was is raising the questions that I just recapitulated to you earlier, which is why did they take so long and why didn't they search him?
And these are questions that even came up with no adequate answer in the pretrial hearing for Rhodes himself.
And and these are questions that, you know, first of all, it seems like Bensinger is not interested in.
And second of all, he disingenuously ignores those questions and pretends like, oh, revolver was simply saying this guy is not arrested.
Therefore, therefore, he's a fed, which was never the argument.
Yeah.
Although part of that part of that might have been somewhat my fault in terms of me sort of paraphrasing your argument, as I put it to him.
Maybe I'll take, you know, at least partial responsibility for this guy's job is to be on top of all this stuff and to read this stuff.
Revolvers probably I'd say not even controversial to say that revolvers done more than any other news media outlet to kind of advance the national conversation on this question.
And so even if he thinks we're not up to the journalistic standards of catalysticals, it's his professional obligation to be on top of our reporting and to represent it accurately.
And if he thinks that there's a compelling alternative explanation to our working hypothesis, then it's, you know, it's it's his invitation to provide that, which, of course, which, of course, he didn't do.
Another thing that I think is interesting about how we approach the issues just to give them this, give a sense of how either disingenuous or just kind of out to lunch he is or just kind of disconnected, or maybe, frankly, he's a lot better than he seems.
But this is just the pound of flesh he has to give in order for BuzzFeed to allow him to to continue writing, because BuzzFeed isn't his media outlet in the way that revolvers mine.
So maybe he needs to give the pound of flesh and play the game in order to keep his job.
That's also a possibility.
But for but for him to say, oh, you know, in the in the case of, you know, Michigan, unlike the cases where there are poor defenseless Muslims there in this case, there are people with like, you know, more privilege or something like the people who are in all likelihood entrapped in the Michigan case or like completely destitute.
There's zero privilege whatsoever.
So so to pretend like this is some different case where the defendants in the Michigan case are somehow more privileged or less sympathetic than the case of the Muslims in War and Terror, that I think belies a certain bias that he brings to the table in analyzing these things.
And it's a bias that I think is reinforced by his really absurd remark that he says there's no evidence whatsoever that any of this stuff is politically motivated.
When the one of the FBI agents in the Michigan case, who is such a stand up guy, he this is the quality of person, by the way, that the FBI hires to run these operations is he was arrested for beating the hell out of his wife on the way back from the swingers party.
But he's on social media just like going off on Trump, going off on all these things.
And so and, you know, that's not to mention the whole contextual history of what the FBI and the CIA and other agencies were doing post election, which is to say, you know, these are not organizations that are institutionally aligned with Trump at all.
So for him to avoid the political side, again, not a huge issue, but I think it speaks to some of the biases that he brings to the table, whether he believes them or not.
Maybe it's just that BuzzFeed requires it.
But then a last thing that I think is really the cherry on top is this, is that after BuzzFeed, Bensinger, we'll just call him BuzzFeed Bensinger.
After BuzzFeed, Bensinger goes off on saying, you know what, I'm offended, Scott, that you would suggest that we're on the same level, which we're not.
I mean, Revolver's far superior to what he does.
But he says to how dare you, Scott, suggest that Revolver and I are the same level.
I engage in serious original reporting at BuzzFeed, and Revolver just does speculation and doesn't engage in facts.
And then immediately after that, he dismisses his inaccurately characterized position of what our reporting has been on Rhodes to say, Darren Beatty has a personal vendetta against Rhodes, because in 2014, he was at the Bundy Ranch and all this.
I was never at the Bundy Ranch.
He just goes on to make a completely false statement based on inaccurate information.
And again, like if I wanted to, I could probably, you know, get do legal action against him, but I'm not, you know, probably not going to do that.
But at the same time, I think that's the sort of thing that demands a formal correction on his part for him to literally go on right after saying that he engages in facts.
And he's this careful, objective guy who only brings the best and highest quality objective journalism to, you know, that belongs next to the cat listicles.
And then he goes on to say, oh, Darren Beatty just has an agenda against Stuart Rhodes, because he was at the Bundy Ranch.
And he feels, no, I wasn't at the Bundy Ranch.
Would you have any previous relationship with Rhodes at all?
Zero.
I never heard of this guy before I started looking at the charging documents for the Oath Keepers cases.
I never even heard of the guy.
And the Buzzfeed guy says I was part of, you know, basically suggests or explicitly says that, you know, I was at Bundy Ranch and part of all this weird malicious stuff in 2014.
And that's why I have this vendetta.
No, man, you must be confusing me for someone else.
And so he's going to have to issue a formal correction, just for the record, because I, you know, I don't want some journalist, you know, being on the record saying that I was involved in weird malicious stuff when I wasn't in 2014.
And secondly, it's just such a beautiful encapsulation of how fake and disingenuous this guy is for him to engage in this egregious factual mischaracterization right after huffing and puffing about how he's on a different level from Revolver because he engages in facts and not speculation.
Yeah.
It's just you can't make this up.
You know, snobbery never works out.
It always backfires.
Just like if on Twitter you call somebody stupid, there's always a typo in it.
You know, it just doesn't ever work.
It doesn't work.
It doesn't work.
And especially like, you know, I can appreciate snobbery in the rare cases when someone has something to be snobby about.
But in the case of this guy, he's, you know, he's engaging in disingenuous arguments or just cognitively deficient arguments throughout.
And I address these point by point.
And then he encapsulates it with this totally factually inaccurate thing.
And he works for BuzzFeed, for God's sake.
So I do think it's incumbent on him both from a legal perspective and simply from a journalistic ethics perspective.
He should do the right thing and issue, you know, tail between the legs, whatever.
I won't spike the football too much.
But I do think it's incumbent on him to issue a formal correction to his remark, clarifying that I wasn't at Bunny Ranch in 2014, any of that weird stuff that he really directly imputed to me in order to discredit his mischaracterization of my reporting on Stuart Rhodes.
So I hope he does that and we don't have to kind of take it to any more aggressive level.
Because, you know, I do think in his own little sphere, he does interesting work and valuable work.
Like, I think it's probably for a purpose of damage control, because he's so aggressively and frankly, inadequately attempting to police, like the the contours of the narrative, basically saying, yeah, we know that the Michigan case was fed infiltrated up the wazoo.
But come on, you know, you got to be an objective reporter and not use, you know, not avail yourself of the gift of logical inference and just, you know, report isolated facts as they're given to you and don't connect any of the dots and just like completely abandon any kind of narrative or context or common sense.
Well, you know, Darren, I think he probably will retract that particular claim, because that was obviously just a careless mistake there that he had confused you for somebody else or something like that.
So that should be an easy one for him to walk back if nothing else.
I don't think it was malicious.
I think it was, it was too dumb to have been malicious.
It was, if it was malicious, it would probably have been more sophisticated.
It was just a simple, sloppy, careless mistake.
That, frankly, is a BuzzFeed tier mistake, but it totally, you know, flies in the face of the posture that he adopted, you know, immediately before that.
So I almost think that there's a poetic quality to it for him to culminate his series of misrepresentations and kind of ignorance on my reporting and the issue with just a blatant factual mischaracterization that was an attempt to discredit my work.
So enough about him.
There's really no bad blood.
You know, I'm, yeah, I don't really care about him either way.
I think his reporting, again, in its own really narrow little playpen, you know, his, he does a good job within the playpen that BuzzFeed gives him.
And I, you know, I commend him for the good job in his playpen.
All right, man.
Well, back to the story here.
I think anybody knows that the Department of Justice.
You think I was going too easy on this guy or what?
You know what?
I think he got even there, you know, for sure.
Now, but look, I mean, the three percenters, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and I don't know whatever other ones, there are some that are quite a bit further to the right than these guys.
Of course, the Department of Justice and the FBI ride herd on these guys as close as they can at all times, threaten them with long prison terms in order to turn them into informants against each other, as they always have done against the radical right and the radical left in this country.
So the idea that you would have a bunch of federal informants at the Capitol, as you said, this is just basic logic.
That's your starting point.
The question is, which one of these guys are informants?
Are they acting really as provocateurs?
Are they getting away with bloody murder because of a relationship with the cops or the cops put them up to this or to that?
These are all fair questions.
The only thing that's unreasonable is to just jump to conclusions, but that's not what you're doing.
So that's beside the point.
Right.
I'm not jumping to conclusions.
And again, just like getting very specific in the case of Stuart Rhodes, if somebody can provide a reasonable alternative explanation for number one, why they didn't hit him with a lesser conspiracy charge like they did with Caldwell right off the bat or trespassing charge like they did with others, Owen Schroer, Mark Ibrahim, right off the bat, and then just build their case as he's been indicted on a lesser charge and use that for additional leverage as they build their bigger seditious conspiracy case.
If someone can explain to me why they didn't do that, number one, and why this guy that they were so interested in and so worried about and so meticulous about that they needed to spend a whole year building a case before they did anything, why on top of that, they wouldn't even bother to search him, they would give him four months to destroy evidence, and then an additional eight months after looking at a single phone.
If someone can explain those things in some alternative explanation that is not he was being protected on the basis of some relationship with a federal agency.
I am fully and honestly and genuinely willing to entertain that.
But I haven't heard anything that comes remotely close to satisfactorily accounting for those things that is not the hypothesis that I've advanced.
Yeah, I want to go back to something that you said last time on the show, which was when people read these articles, who is Ray Epps one and two at Revolver News there, you got to watch the YouTubes embedded in the footage there and look at this 90% of the lifting if not 95%.
Yeah.
So I'm interested most in the guy that cut down the fencing and then took the metal poles for the temporary fencing and wiggle them until they were loose and pulled them out of the ground and then went and hit all that stuff out of the way so that people who were just getting there would have no idea they're even walking on to so called restricted space at all at that time.
That guy's so far unindicted, correct?
Yeah, no, I mean, there are there are other people who seem to coordinate with Epps to effect that first decisive initial breach at 12 53pm.
You're referring to the fence cutter guy just coolly and methodically cuts the fences.
There's another guy that I'm actually more interested in, which by the way, I'm not sitting here pining for anyone to go to jail.
I'm just interested in who these guys are and what happened.
Yeah, look, you know, that's another thing I'd like to clarify.
People are saying, oh, great.
Yeah, great stuff.
Stuart Rhodes is arrested.
I'm not looking for these guys to go in jail.
I don't want anyone to go in jail.
I think the whole thing is ridiculous.
But when I see egregious, selective non-prosecution and just profoundly different standards for someone like Caldwell and someone like Epps, someone like Caldwell, someone like Rhodes, and I have the context that I do.
I demand an explanation for this and the remark of, oh, you know, this person wasn't indicted for a year or oh, Ray Epps isn't indicted, that isn't like saying, please indict him to satisfy my need for these people who are indicted.
No, what what I need to be satisfied is the questions of why these people receive one kind of treatment, whereas the other people received a vastly different type of treatment.
And that's what I seek to answer.
And even for the case of Rhodes and Epps, I have no vendetta against these guys.
I think that they are pawns in a much larger thing.
I think they themselves may have been manipulated, even deceived by whoever their handlers were.
And I think there's still a redemption arc that's possible for these people.
Again, if they come forward and say, look, I was used, I was manipulated, here's what I know, and here's what the American public needs to know.
Yeah, fair enough.
Sounds like to me.
And look, especially for the big deal that's being made out of this by the Congress, by, you know, the center right and the Democratic left there, where this is, you know, the greatest thing that, you know, the biggest worst thing by great is what I mean.
Exactly.
Like the great worst thing since 9-11.
Yeah, they compared it directly.
I mean, in many cases said it was worse than 9-11.
So this is worse than 9-11, worse than Pearl Harbor.
And yet, for some reason, the only guy who's on video repeatedly saying we need to go into the Capitol is untouched.
And, and again, just a quick, quick points on the damage control tour of Epps.
First of all, they went through his lawyer, his lawyer, incidentally, and again, this might mean nothing, but his lawyer is a former FBI guy who worked for 10 years for the Phoenix field office.
And I think another field office, he's a 10 year FBI guy, literally, which would be a hilarious troll on Epps's part.
So I have to like tip my hat to that.
But yeah, his lawyer is a 10 year FBI guy.
And his is through his lawyer, I guess spoke to the, you know, January 6 committee, apparently Epps talked to them in November, we're supposed to be satisfied by this statement that we don't even have the exact statement.
We don't know what the circumstances are for the statement, whether it was under oath or what.
And the statement is carefully worded to the extent that it's given to the public through, you know, hearsay and not even directly.
And the statement seems to lean very heavily on the notion that Epps never worked for a law enforcement agency.
Well, I think it's another opportunity to clarify that this isn't necessarily about the FBI.
You know, there are a number of other organizations in the United States federal government that could be complicit here that are not, technically speaking, law enforcement.
And he could be an informant without ever being paid a dime.
And they could sit there and say, well, he wasn't working for us.
I mean, we're just gonna put him in prison if he didn't do what we said.
That's all.
There are a lot of arrangements that could sustain this, assuming they're going by the book and just not lying, which is, of course, a possibility.
The best part of that, though, was all the fact checkers saying this is now an established fact, like the sun is round, because we heard that his lawyer said that to the Congress, and that'll be good enough for you, they announced.
Right, right.
This, yeah, he's debunked because his former FBI agent lawyer said under, maybe under oath, maybe not under oath, and we don't have the exact statement, said that he never worked for a law enforcement agency, which, of course, leads up to the possibility that it was something run out of the Department of Defense, maybe Army counterintelligence cut out, maybe it was Department of Homeland Security, maybe it was this, maybe or not.
Maybe it was some kind of contract work that was a cut out of multiple degrees removed from whoever was running it.
You know, but it's debunked because the lawyer says he never worked for a law enforcement agency.
And that's how the media reports it, by the way.
Um, so that's kind of what we're dealing with, which is kind of ridiculous and, and sad, frankly, but, um, you know, of course, we're going to watch this very closely and monitor how all of this plays out for unforced errors, which I think they will surely make, and we will do everything we can to exploit those unforced errors in order to further bring the truth to the American public.
Great.
All right, you guys, that's Darren Beatty.
He is at revolver.news.
And check out both of them.
It's really worth your time.
Who is Ray Epps, one and two.
Thank you very much, sir.
Thank you, sir.
Appreciate it.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APS radio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
