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 Errand, 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 scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, introducing Darren J. Beattie.
He is the founder and the editor of Revolver at revolver.news.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm fantastic.
Thanks a lot for having me.
I'm a big fan of your show.
Oh, really?
Yeah, that's great to hear.
Thanks very much.
Well, I'm very happy to have you on it.
You've done some incredible work here on the January 6th riot at the Capitol last year, and what seems to have been going on behind it.
Well, some of it definite, and some very educated speculation here about what was going on, and the major articles and questions.
You're also featured, I should mention, in the Tucker Carlson documentary about this event as well.
Part one and two of the investigative series here, it's Meet Ray Epps, part one and part two.
And so just to sum up very briefly, you demonstrate in pretty certain terms that a group of four, five, or six men were working closely together to engineer the entry of the public there into the Capitol building, first onto restricted grounds and then into the Capitol building.
And then part two of this is the question of why these seem to be the least prosecuted men involved in this thing, when literally moms who were just standing around on the lawn outside are going to prison.
So this is really huge.
I guess take us through and start with who is Ray Epps, please.
That's a great question.
To some degree, he's become something of a household name, which I'm very pleased by.
But in case your listeners aren't familiar with this individual, Ray Epps, he is the person, the singular person, the sole person, who in the mountains of video and documentary evidence of January 6th and the days leading up to it, he's the only person caught on video, dead to rights, making an explicit call to go into the Capitol, stating an explicit mission to go into the Capitol.
And in fact, he does this repeatedly, marshalling multiple groups with different agendas on January 5th, the day before, saying, you know, there are a bunch of different groups, there are people clashing with Black Lives Matter.
There are a lot of people in Washington that day for a lot of different reasons.
And he was going to each group, insisting that they focus on the agenda that matters.
And that's going into the Capitol.
People were shocked.
In fact, in many occasions, people accused him of being a fed just because it was such a bizarre and radical suggestion.
Nonetheless, he persisted.
And this wasn't simply a one off of someone who may have been drunk and was just calling for nonsense.
And then we never heard of him.
On January 6th, the day after and the fateful day, the day of the so-called insurrection, the so-called Capitol siege, this same individual, Ray Epps, is a veritable where's Waldo figure.
He's everywhere.
He's everywhere directing people to, quote, go to the Capitol.
That's where our problems are.
Attention, folks, after Trump's speech, we're all going to the Capitol.
Spread the word, spread the word.
He's everywhere spreading this word all the way up to the point of seconds before the initial and decisive breach of Capitol grounds, that famous clip of the metal barricade being busted down by by rioters.
He's right there situated perfectly and conveniently.
He whispers into Ryan Samsell's ear.
And two seconds later, Samsell leads the charge of this initial breach.
So the same individual who's marshalling everyone to this bizarre and unheard of agenda to go into the Capitol.
Fast forward all the way to the next day at 1253 p.m.
Incidentally, Trump is still speaking.
All the Trump supporters are listening to Trump at this point.
But weirdly, Mr.
Ray Epps, who is wearing a Trump hat and is such a fan of Trump, presumably that he traveled all the way from Arizona to D.C., he just skipped the Trump speech altogether in order to follow through on his stated mission.
And he's standing right there and he whispers into an individual's ear.
And two seconds later, the initial decisive breach of the Capitol grounds occurred.
And what's amazing is this guy is not charged with anything.
He's not indicted.
The vaunted January 6 Commission has interest in seemingly anyone who set foot within a mile radius of D.C. having their full communication record.
They want nothing to do with him.
The feds initially put him on one of the top 20 people on their most wanted list.
But after he got attention, after he was actually identified, after Revolver.
News ran a piece on his fellow Oath Keeper, Stuart Rhodes, whom we could talk about as well.
The day after that, the feds very quietly scrubbed the name and the face and the public profile of Ray Epps off of their database completely.
And since then, they deny knowing who he even is.
So that's the mystery of Ray Epps, who's just one of the suspicious scandals of many covered in this Revolver.
News series.
All right.
And there is so much there.
But I want to focus on one point really quick, which is the side issue on this story.
But it's so important.
And this is also my guilty conscience talking because I haven't covered this on the show, but it is huge.
Can you give us just a paragraph about the regular people who've been arrested for being either in the Capitol or on the grounds, but essentially just being mom and dad Trump supporters who followed the crowd and didn't really do anything or doing, you know, being held without bail for, you know, almost a year now straight and this kind of thing.
It seems pretty egregious.
And and fairly uncovered.
Of course, no, that's such an important question because these are two sides of the same coin.
What's damningly suspicious, what is inexplicable in relation to people like Ray Epps and these others, is the selective non-prosecution when you compare to the shock and awe draconian treatment visited on grandmas taking selfies for trivial offenses.
Many people still rotting away in solitary confinement under Abu Ghraib like really violate Geneva violation level conditions here for trivial offenses.
And you look at the other side of the coin of major figures like Ray Epps and others who we could get into who haven't been charged, haven't been searched.
There's zero interest in them.
And so we cover this in the Revolver dot news piece.
We show that the FBI is still looking for like grandmas who are sitting around.
There's one individual that I've taken an interest in.
His name is Thomas Caldwell.
He's in his 60s.
He's a disabled veteran.
And thankfully, he's finally been let out on bail.
But he spent time in solitary confinement.
The government is throwing very serious stacked conspiracy charges at him, and his situation is a scandal unto itself because the core of the government's case against him is using the statements and actions of the founder and head of the Oath Keepers militia group, using someone else's statements and actions as constitutive of the conspiracy in which he was allegedly involved.
And yet this guy, who's a fellow traveler, not even an underling, is hit with conspiracy charges and thrown in prison.
And the founder and head of the militia group in question, the Oath Keepers, his name is Stuart Rhodes, remains untouched.
He remains unindicted.
And the sole extent of the government's interest in him at all was four months after January 6th, they took a single cell phone from him.
And that's it.
So he hasn't even been properly searched.
So there's another egregious case of severe selective prosecution and selective non-prosecution in which the head of the whole militia group, whose actions are the basis of the conspiracy that they're charging this poor guy, Thomas Caldwell, with, they're not even interested in his full communications record.
So again, we see the similar pattern that we see with Ray Epps and others, is that key people who, by the government's own case in many instances, played instrumental, decisive role in making this insurrection happen are just you know, they're just walking free, the big fish walking free.
Meanwhile, the little fish, the minnows, are rotting away in solitary confinement and hit with very serious stacking charges of conspiracy and worse.
And now, Darren, just to be clear, it doesn't seem like there's any indication that these guys have been arrested and threatened that you better be available as a witness for the prosecution when these trials start or else you're going to the pen.
It doesn't seem like that at all.
We won't be surprised if they testify, but it's because they're informants all along, almost certainly, it seems.
Yes, I mean, that's that's an interesting question.
And if we had time, I'd love to game out the various ways that this could play out.
And, you know, I'm I know you do great work and this isn't your first rodeo.
You're familiar generally with how the government works in this regard.
And you know better than anyone that this isn't the government's first rodeo in terms of its programmatic infiltration operations into militia groups.
And if you look at antecedents, for instance, the Oklahoma City case, you see instances of informants and there are various ways things can play out with informants.
And I've tried the best that I can to game out those various possibilities in relation to the key individuals that are really on my radar and on January 6th.
But but yes, it's it's it'll be a very interesting question to see how things develop with these unindicted, untouched and in many cases even unsearched, which is unfathomable key figures in this so-called insurrection.
Yeah, it's very strange.
It seems like they would at least have some kind of plan for how they're going to cover this up.
But they never got that far in the planning before the day came, I guess.
Their plan was actually pretty good because I hate to say it, but it's like without Revolver.
News covering this stuff, nobody would know about it.
Nobody would think in those terms before Revolver.
News ran our first decisive and really narrative shaping piece in mid-June, the conversation even on the right was, oh, you know, there's a combination of it's just people taking selfies and there's you know, there is a truth to that.
And then the bad actors were just Antifa infiltrators.
There was no real cognizance, certainly no focused attention on the very distinct and indeed now overwhelmingly likely explanation that this was actually a Fed operation, just like the Feds have been doing for decades now.
Simply that that aspect of how our government works and how our country works, unfortunately, is largely lost on the on the right.
And it's just starting to catch up to the sober and dark ways that things actually work.
All right.
So I want to talk about Red Hat guy who I think already named Sam Sell, but then there's Black Beanie guy who I if I remember it right is the guy that took down the fencing.
But before we do that, let's talk a little bit more about Stuart Rhodes.
I met him one time about a decade ago in Florida at a Ron Paul event.
And well, I never trust him or had him on the show or anything like that.
But, you know, there are some libertarians who certainly like the theory of cops who, you know, are willing to obey the law as written by the Constitutional Convention of 1787 over the edicts of some lunatic in their local jurisdiction.
Sounds good, but.
Thing always was suspicious to me, I don't know, and to a lot of people, but you have I forget, I think it's in part one where you really show, I think, that he seemed to be a real, you know, centerpiece in the, you know, maybe a spoke and wheel type thing where he is in contact.
Do I have that right?
That it's proven that he was in contact with all these different people who seem to be running this operation.
Right, well, I mean, there's because I guess let me just say real quick, if you if you just forget that they work for the FBI, maybe for a second, it's pretty clear that there is a tight knit crew that's running this operation with that clearly have planned this out and have talked in depth about what they're going to do and how they're going to make it happen and everything like that.
And it's just the fact that there seem to be the leaders of it seem to be getting away with it completely scot free is what makes it seem like they must be all informants.
Just on the coordination here, if you could help us see the picture of who these guys all are and who, as far as you can tell, is running what here?
Well, coordination is, you know, because I sort of shoulder the weight of responsibility for this narrative, I really try to be careful and precise about kind of what I claim and what I'm not claiming.
And, you know, when I'm being speculative.
And so my understanding of the way that these kind of infiltration operations work, the way that agencies run things is that the these operations are absolutely saturated with feds for one.
And we see this actually in the Michigan kidnapping plot, which is something that Revolver News covered first in light of January 6 as as a kind of motivating intuition for what January 6 was.
And for your listeners who don't know, just very quickly, there is this so-called plot by three percenter militia members to kidnap the governor of Michigan.
That plot also involved a plan, conveniently enough, to storm the Michigan state capital.
And it turns out that of the 26 so-called plotters, 12 out of the 26 were either informants or undercover agents.
And in fact, if people want to go and look this up for themselves independently, I don't want to get too sidetracked, but several of these agents and undercover informants, one of the key agents on the case, got arrested for beating his wife after he was on his way back from a swingers organization.
Another key informant who actually played a very active instigative role, his name is Steve Robson.
He's been hit with a gun charge and a fraud charge.
And so the whole case is falling apart.
But what's absolutely clear now and what the defense is actually incorporating into their strategy is a very clear kind of entrapment operation.
Oh, yeah.
And the head of the Detroit FBI field office, who is running this whole Michigan operation, the day after the so-called plotters, most of whom were agents, were arrested, FBI Director Christopher Wray promoted him to the D.C. field office, where he went on to oversee the January 6th investigations.
And so...
Importantly, too, is that this was an October surprise.
Oh, look, a bunch of Trump supporters are going to kidnap and murder a governor.
Exactly.
And the media went nuts about it.
The media went nuts.
And even now it's to the point where it's simply undeniable.
It's so egregious.
And so the media is doing damage control by acknowledging what a fed operation this was.
But being very clear, just because this was a fed operation involving one of the same key militia groups, involving the same type of plot to storm the state capitol, that's been fed infiltrated 12 out of 26.
And just because the head of the Detroit field office happened to be promoted to D.C., where he went on to oversee 1-6, don't you dare make any kind of extrapolations or inferences as to whether or not there could be a similarity between January 6th and the Michigan plot, which was literally like two months before.
It's ridiculous on many levels.
But I really bring that up to us to say that this is consistent with a pattern of how the government works going back decades, is the feds are like cockroaches.
There's never just one.
There's always multiple.
And this gets to the question of coordination and why I want to be very careful.
Now, I am very, I have 100% certainty about Rhodes and Epps.
However, I'm not prepared to say that they were coordinating in any precise sense.
In fact, it's often the case in these types of operations where people are put into place, the pawns are put into place, pieces are put into place, and they're not necessarily told about each other.
They're there to do a specific job.
And they all have a specific purpose.
And those purposes kind of are complementary and so forth.
I don't necessarily think, for instance, that all of the colorful individuals who played a key role in setting the stage for the rally to become a riot that we cover in Ray Epps Part Two, I'm not convinced that they all absolutely knew who each other were in advance.
I think it's very possible that the government, because they're monitoring the Proud Boys, because the leaders of the Proud Boys themselves are acknowledged informants.
Enrico Itario is an acknowledged informant.
Joe Biggs has acknowledged that he's in regular communication with the FBI as to their activities.
I think it's very likely that the feds knew where the Proud Boys were planning to be.
And they sent text messages to these key individuals that we cover in the Revolver.
News piece.
They all happened to be loitering around at the same place at the same time, ready for the action to take place.
And they all had a job and they all did their jobs.
And that collectively amounted to what we saw.
So I'm just saying that it might sound a little bit pedantic or precise.
But I just want to err on the side of course, of precision in that regard.
So such as to say that it's not necessarily the case that they were all just like meeting beforehand and knew exactly who each other were that that's not always how this happens.
But I'm absolutely convinced that they were told by whatever handlers be here at this place at this time, and given a job to do.
And it's pretty clear that that's precisely what they did.
Hang on just one second.
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Well, let's go back to Epps and Samsel.
Epps leans over, puts his arm around Samsel and says something, something in his ear.
And Samsel says, all right, that's it.
Come on, everybody.
And that's when they push against the gate and win.
Right.
Push the cops back.
Right.
No, it's so those two knew each other.
And then so tell us more about Samsel, because actually they're going after him, right?
Well, Samsel is a very interesting case.
So, yes, and he's like more or less the first person who is responsible for that initial and I say decisive breach, because that breach enabled these other actors to move forward to cut down fencing, remove fencing, effectively forming a booby trap.
Because remember, it's really crucial.
Understand this.
This breach occurred as Trump was still speaking as the whole Trump crowd was still away from the Capitol.
And this breach occurred precisely at the entrance that would be relevant for the people walking from the Trump speech to the Capitol.
And they walk there and they don't see the barricade.
The people were cutting down and methodically removing the fencing.
And it's a booby trap because ordinarily that part of the Capitol grounds is totally open to the public.
It was only on this specific day that it was a restricted area.
But if you remove the fencing completely and out of sight, people are walking into a booby trap such that they're technically committing a criminal offense of trespassing Capitol grounds and they don't even necessarily know it.
And so they're there.
And then you have people like the scaffold commander telling them to move forward.
And then wait on that last point, that just goes that just goes so much to premeditation there where the guy's got these clippers to take down the fencing and then they're pulling out the metal poles, you know, shaking back and forth to loosen the ground and hide them.
Right.
Don't take my word for it.
Really, I think what makes this revolver dot news piece so powerful and why it's resonated on a national scale, because the video evidence really speaks for itself.
I know that there's there's a lot of politics involved here.
It's a political story in the sense that the false narrative of this insurrection is being used by the American national security state for a political purpose.
But if people are able to suspend their political prejudices and allegiances and simply put on the common sense hat and soberly in a disinterested fashion, watch this video.
There's simply no way a reasonable person can say that this adds up because it doesn't.
You know, I mean, what it is, Darren, liberals won't buy it.
But leftists know the FBI will infiltrate your political movement.
And even during COINTELPRO, at the same time they were going after the Panthers, they were going after the Klan and other right wing groups, too.
That's what the FBI always does.
I'm so glad you said that because this gets to part of the heavy lifting that I have to do and my news organization has to do and and the others who have taken this narrative up is that the left historically far more savvy in terms of the injustices and the abuses of the national security state and how the national security apparatus injects itself in order to manipulate political organizations.
The right, because I think just the political psychology of people on the right is dispositionally one that they want to venerate just institutions of authority.
And so it's harder to accept the idea that these institutions are so corrupt to the point that they're really interfering in the political process in such a nefarious way.
And so traditionally, the best reporting on this type of activity has come from the kind of principled left, the left that is very attuned to the abuses of the national security state.
Unfortunately, in this case, because things are so polarized, so things are so politicized in this country.
And because I think it's part of the left's political psychology to need to think of itself as challenging, powerful institutions.
The notion that the powerful national security state is actually setting up and screwing Trump supporters the same way that they've screwed over Muslims and leftist movements in the past.
That's difficult for a lot of people on the left to embrace because it's counter to this notion of the left challenging powerful institutions.
And so there's blockages psychologically on both sides.
But I think the people who are able to look at this in a sober fashion, Glenn Greenwald, no right wing extremists has praised revolvers reporting on this regard.
He's had me for interviews and people of that bent who are able to suspend politics and just look at common sense and informed by his history and what the government's been doing for decades.
It's very clear what this is and it's nothing new.
And in fact, the actors aren't new either.
Merrick Garland himself was doing the same thing in the 90s.
Right.
And, you know, as far as the argument for right wingers to expand their imagination, just remember how you feel about the ATF.
Well, we're talking about the FBI.
And they're, in fact, the same ones who really you can blame John Brennan and CIA.
But really, the FBI took the lead on framing Trump for treason with the Kremlin, of all things.
Now, that's not your red pill, so to speak, to wake up that, hey, you know what?
National police organizations can be corrupt and dangerous to you, too.
Then I don't know what else to tell you.
And in this case, the question here really, Darren, is did they frame up Donald Trump again?
Right.
Because the narrative here was this is Donald Trump's Reichstag fire, when it seems to me it's more like Joe Biden and the Democrats' Reichstag fire.
Well, I would formulate it somewhat differently.
I think, yes, that's closer to the truth.
But I think even closer still is that this isn't a Democrat thing or Republican thing.
This gets to a deeper layer within our governmental apparatus.
This gets into the national security state.
And, frankly, I think we're at a stage in this country where the national security apparatus is a bottleneck to the political process functioning in the way that it has to function in order for us to call ourselves a democracy in any meaningful sense.
Until we bring the national security state to heel, politics in the way that we understand it is going to be fake and performative.
Yeah.
So I'll tell you, one of the things that is very interesting and compelling about this story is your coverage of the man on the tower that you mentioned there a minute ago, who seemed to be just absolutely crucial to the effort here.
So tell us that story and then tell us his status now, as far as you know.
Well, his story, again, can only be told with justice by people going to the piece revolver.newsreupspart2 and watching the video for themselves.
Because here is a guy, he's dubbed by researchers as Scaffold Commander.
And he got this moniker because he ends up at the top of this scaffold with a bullhorn, repeatedly yelling to the audience, move forward, move forward, we need your help, move forward, move forward.
Now, just as a basic matter of crowd psychology, when remember, people are all on the Capitol grounds, technically trespassing unbeknownst to them, because other members of this group had previously and methodically removed all fencing.
So now they're all congregated around the Capitol.
And all they hear is a piercing authoritative voice saying, move forward, move forward.
And people naturally are attuned to obey in a crowd situation and authoritative voice coming from a bullhorn, from a guy in a scaffold, they don't know what's going on, maybe something happened in the crowd somewhere else.
And so authorities want them to clear out some space.
Yeah, it sounds like a safety concern, right?
Move forward out of the way of something happening behind you saying we need your help, we need your help, move forward, move forward.
And so they move forward.
And then guess what the move forward changes, when the Capitol building itself is breached, and people start going in, the move forward changes to fill up the Capitol, fill up the Capitol, what are you waiting for?
We need more people in the Capitol, fill up the Capitol.
And so here's a guy who is saying move forward, move forward.
Then when the Capitol building itself was breached, he's demanding everyone go into the Capitol, fill in the Capitol, what are you waiting for?
And just as a cherry on top of that, this guy, just like the other key people covered in the Revolver news piece, was hanging out at the same place at the same time, very early on, on that same day, by the Peace Monument before the Proud Boys even arrived at that location.
And it's the official story that the Proud Boys got to the Peace Monument, and that's when the event kicked off.
That's why it's so important to note that all of these people who ended up becoming key players, including the Scaffold Commander, were all just loitering about right there before the Proud Boys even got there, which is entirely consistent with the theory that I propounded earlier, that the feds, because of their informants, knew where the Proud Boys were going to be.
And so they texted a number of people that they had working for them and say, hey, be at this place.
Here's your job.
Here's what you need to do.
And they did it.
And that's why they're not indicted.
That's why these people who played decisive roles in allowing that for this to become a riot, in getting the crowd to where the crowd needed to be, and then working up the crowd at decisive moments.
That's why these people are untouched, unindicted.
The feds are uninterested in them.
They're merely interested in Grandma for taking a selfie.
Yeah.
Man, it's really interesting and compelling, too, the part where there's a guy trying to read his goofy manifesto of grievances or something, and you can hear this guy telling him, stop that.
Just get to the point.
Move forward.
Go inside, whatever it was.
Stop with the bullshit.
We've got a mission here.
That's right.
Yeah.
So, yeah, certainly coordinated by somebody.
These guys certainly knew what they were doing.
Now, as far as going inside, I mean, the thing is we are talking about a mob here.
So you have a lot of people who don't work for anybody who are just saying, OK, this is what we're doing now.
But there does seem to be a real discrepancy from where I'm sitting between some young guy who broke a window and opened a locked door and let people in, something like that, versus some mom and dad who just kind of follow the crowd in the open door past a bunch of cops who were standing aside, letting them in.
As we saw from, I think the pictures from the front side of the building, the people coming in on that side were staying within the rope line.
Nobody dared to face a statue or a painting or anything like that.
Exactly.
And so but then in terms of who they're prosecuting, never even mind these ringleaders that we're talking about on the, you know, on the lawn who helped arrange the the entry into the building.
Are they even really differentiating the DOJ in their prosecutions between the window breakers and the other people who gained entry, which I guess, you know, a lot of those, at least according to The New York Times, a lot of those were some proud boys and others who did that.
Or are they really just going after a bunch of moms and dads and random people?
Because there were hundreds of people in there, right?
Right.
Well, it depends.
I mean, yes.
And, you know, we'd have to really approach that question systematically on a case by case basis.
But I can tell you that some of the most serious charges are being leveled against people who played no violent role whatsoever.
And in many cases, people haven't even gone into the Capitol.
I'll go back to the individual that I mentioned, Thomas Caldwell, who's really crucial because, again, he's being charged with a conspiracy charge.
The technical charge is conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding.
In this case, this proceeding being the Senate certification.
He didn't go into the Capitol.
And the conspiracy, the government's case, adducing the conspiracy, again, relies almost exclusively on the statements and actions of another person, that other person being the founder and head of the Oath Keepers Militia Group, the most prosecuted militia group of 1-6, and the militia group associated with the conspiracy charges.
And yet this founder and head of the entire group, whose calls are referenced throughout the charging documents, whose statements and actions are referenced throughout the charging documents as constitute of the conspiracy, is untouched when he's the big fish.
And he's not only untouched in terms of indictments, he's untouched in terms of basic routine searches.
There are many cases of people who ultimately haven't even been charged, who've been subject to the kitchen sink treatment, but where the FBI breaks down their door, they take every single electronic device in your house.
And yet for Stuart Rhodes, all they did was they waited four months after January 6th to take a single cell phone from him, not even at his house.
That's how much they don't want his electronic communications.
Now we wonder, why wouldn't the feds want Stuart Rhodes's electronic communications?
Well, one possible explanation is there are legal obligations for the government to turn over potentially exculpatory information to defense counsel.
And among that information would be information about informants that could help to support an entrapment case.
And so from the government standpoint is they don't want communications.
And in fact, communications have ended up screwing over the government before because it was leaked text messages between FBI informants agents and their handlers that helped to blow open the Michigan fiasco that we just talked about.
All right, well, I don't know if we need to go through every little bit of this, but it's so interesting.
Can you tell us about black ski mask guy?
Yeah, well, black ski mask guy is another interesting figure.
He's also covered in the revolver piece.
He's one of the people very early on methodically, you know, removing fencing and so forth.
But additionally, what's interesting about this guy is we know that the feds know who he is.
And the reason we know that is that on January 5, he was in this so called Trump hippie van that was stopped by law enforcement for having explosives and firearms.
It was stopped in front of the Department of Justice for having explosives and firearms.
And so they took everyone out, they obviously processed them.
It was a big deal.
There was a ton of, you know, cop cars everywhere.
Curiously enough, the media who is would seem to have every incentive to cover a Trump terrorist type plot that day, the media didn't cover this at all.
Basically, the media just buried it.
I got to tell you, Darren, looking at pictures of this thing, it's somebody's hoax.
Hippies for Trump in bright pink day glow spray paint like it's 1967 on this school bus.
Right.
Surprised to see further on the front.
And what are the chances?
First of all, there were repeated calls for additional security on January 6.
You would think the fact that they stopped a van of Trump supporters would stop the steal on their van that had explosives and firearms.
They stopped it in front of the Department of Justice.
You would think that the media would cover it and that that would finally cross the threshold that people would accept that there needed to be additional security on the six.
But evidently, that wasn't the case.
But coincidentally and conveniently, one of the people stopped and apprehended who was in that bus just happened to be one of the people who was there very early on the next day cutting down fencing and just happens to be that he's not arrested yet.
You know, the feds don't want him, even though we know that they know who he is because he was stopped in process the day prior.
Yeah, man.
And it does go on.
I mean, both of these things are what a good 15000 words each or something like that.
Great investigative.
And we can get into these details.
But because I have the pleasure of speaking with you and you have you're educated to the point where you you have a broader sense of the context for these kinds of things.
I'd love to discuss sort of the bigger picture here.
Because, again, this isn't this isn't the first time this doesn't happen in a vacuum.
As I alluded to Merrick Garland, his portfolio in the 90s at the Department of Justice was the domestic terrorism portfolio.
And it was just in the 90s when the government really spearheaded its sort of Pat Con operations, which were designed specifically to systematically infiltrate so called militia groups in order to neutralize the threat from those militia groups and to establish a political narrative that can be used in broader terms.
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Now, if I remember the story right, Darren, I think Roger Charles says that Merrick Garland at one point early on in the thing was the one who stood up and told the judge that there's no John Doe two and we're not pursuing any more suspects.
Oh, yes.
And and that's another thing.
And I interviewed Roger about that.
I hope I remember that anecdote correctly, but people can double check me.
It's all in the archives there.
No, I mean, look, I think part of the significance of this story and part of the reason that we've really been attacked viciously is not simply that this undermines the government and regime narrative relation to one six, but it really opens up a very dangerous Pandora's box from the public's point of view and for the government's point of view, for people to look and say, hmm, if this happened on one six, if this happened in Michigan, look, look back at Oklahoma City.
I think people people will be absolutely shocked and scandalized.
And frankly, I don't know if psychologically most people are capable of handling, you know, really a sober look at the factual case and details of Oklahoma City, because unlike January six, very tragically there, Ashley Babbitt was shot.
But Oklahoma City was a a a a a genuine tragedy.
You know, children died, all kinds of people died.
And for people to look at what actually went on there, I think is very, very difficult.
But the parallels are simply unavoidable for those who are who have the psychological constitution to to look.
Well, not to delve too far into that story, but just to back you up there a little bit that in the book, Oklahoma City by Charles, Roger Charles, I just mentioned, and Andrew Gumbel on page 328.
They quote the U.S. attorney, Larry Mackey, saying that, yeah, we all know.
I'm paraphrasing.
Yeah, we all know that we didn't get everybody involved.
And they say it was because they have their excuses.
We don't want to jeopardize the Capitol case against McVeigh.
But that's just nonsense.
They could have prosecuted the whole lot of them.
And the reason they didn't is because so many of them were undercover informants or flip states, witnesses compromised by the feds, but also compromising the feds right back.
And so it's the same.
It's the same thing.
And this gets to the really complicated relationship and dynamic with various types of informants.
And so, again, I might not want to get too far into these details, but I'm sure you're familiar with the case of Carol Howe, who is an important informant in the Oklahoma City case who ended up getting burned by the government because she kind of stepped out of boundaries.
And there's a well, they didn't want her to be available to testify for the defense.
Exactly.
And you see you see precisely this kind of thing in the Michigan case.
So Steve Robeson, a longtime informant who was one of the active instigators of the plot and entrapment agents in the plot.
Once he was outed, the government slapped him with criminal charges conveniently so he wouldn't be in a position to testify on behalf of the defense so that so there are all kinds of ways that you can game out the situation with informants.
There's also, of course, the famous case of Andreas Strassmeier.
I was just about to say, do we have any German army intelligence officers who were, you know, secreted out of the country to Mexico and all this in this case?
It's it's very interesting, because if you look at the case of Strassmeier in detail, and you look at subsequent interviews, it's clear that he's tortured and conflicted because things didn't quite go the way that he expected or wanted.
And it's important to take note that informants themselves, even in many cases, agents themselves, can be misled, there can be a difference between their expectations of what they're doing and what actually happened.
And this can lead to regret, this can lead to crisis in conscience.
And for that reason, I think it's very possible that someone like Ray Epps is, is conflicted now, because he saw how it plays out.
And maybe that's not how he wanted it to play out.
And one of my hopes is that over time, we can create enough pressure in the right environment for just one of these people, whether Ray Epps, Stuart Rhodes, or one of the others, to come out and do the right thing and expose their handlers and expose the largest story that only they're in a position to do.
Yeah.
And by the way, the footnote there, everybody, for Strassmeyer virtually confessing to Ambrose Evans Pritchard, it's in the book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, which is a tabloid sort of a title, but the book is not.
And that's in there.
And it's actually amazing, because in the Oklahoma City case, you had this quote, unquote, Elohim City white supremacist compound with all of these sort of PatCon networks throughout the country that McVeigh met with.
And in fact, you had the same group called the Wolverine Watchmen, this Michigan militia associated with the McVeigh networks that you now have associated with the Michigan kidnapping plot.
So it's like they run the same books, you have the same issue target of federal building, you have the same issue, the same extrapolation to extend guilt to innocent nonviolent citizens to facilitate a political narrative.
You have the same type of foreknowledge Carol Howe, when I just mentioned the informant in Oklahoma City, she is warning the FBI six months in advance of the Murability bombing that it was a target.
You have, you know, Rhodes calling and not Rhodes, Epps calling the day before saying, oh, we need to go into the Capitol.
You have the Michigan plot involving storming a state Capitol.
You have the same individuals we mentioned Merrick Garland, not as not as first rodeo, the same guy who closed the door into the Oklahoma City investigation.
As you mentioned, same informant saturation, the Elohim City compound in Oklahoma City, this was effectively 50% feds.
And you see the same ratio in the Michigan case where 12 out of the 26 plotters were either informants or agents.
And of course, you have the same expansion of the National Security State imprimatur in response to these false narratives, the same deal.
It's the same playbook.
And that's why people really need to understand, even if these militia groups, if some of their messaging resonates and some of their messaging does make sense.
But I think it's like, I really think effectively all these major militia groups in the United States are functionally honeypots for these infiltration operations.
And the public needs to understand that.
Yeah.
And just as back then, this can be the basis for not just the crackdown on regular Joe's out on the lawn here, caught up in the thing, but also for future plots against American right wingers.
And the thing is, and this is really important, I think that there are a lot of militias, maybe more now and in terms of like overall population, even than there were after Waco.
But they really are essentially defensive in nature, training for the takeover of the new world order that ain't coming anyway.
But they're not about to go to war sometime soon with their local sheriff departments and all this stuff.
It's ridiculous.
They're just that's not what they're about.
And so there are on the fringe, you know, pretty dangerous Nazis, but not very many of them.
And to lump in the whole militia movement with them is just not accurate.
I mean, that's certainly my experience from the 90s.
And I think that that holds true today, that there are, you know, you got to be pretty damn far to the right to be outright national socialists in this country and and and then are not accepted by the rest of even the far right.
You know, once you go that crazy.
So but just like after Oklahoma City, they essentially said Rush Limbaugh, who is, of course, the center right Republican, him and everybody to the right of him.
In fact, all white males who own guns, they all blew up that building that day.
So we're letting the actual perpetrators get away with it.
But we're blaming the entire right half of America for it.
And, you know, militarizing the police more than ever in response to it and all of these kinds of things.
And so we're looking at another wave of all of that.
But I guess I'm sorry.
One of the things I'm trying to say here is, though, that it should be pretty hard to entrap people into these kinds of things because it's just not on the agenda of even your dumbest gun nut friend to fall for a plot to go and actually set off a bomb and hurt some innocent person or some kind of thing like that.
There's just you know, it's just and it's just not as plausible because people are from our communities.
It's easier to scapegoat a Muslim kid from Brooklyn and say, oh, he was going to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge and everybody buys that.
But when it's somebody that's that available to the rest of their community, it's just I don't know.
I think the feds have essentially a lot of hard work to do if they're going to scare up a bunch more Michigan, you know, plots and January 6th insurrections.
They have nothing but time and money and incentive.
And this is clearly their new imprimatur.
And you see that in the kind of stated official public statements by many bureaucracies of the national security apparatus, including the Department of Homeland Security, which now is in desperate need of a new grift and a new self-justification.
War on Terror grift is over.
Certain security organizations, their new grift is going to be this new Cold War with China.
But beyond that, it's the domestic war on terror.
And that's why you see the top officials in the Department of Homeland Security saying, oh, the number one threat to American national security is is, you know, white supremacist terror and these kinds of things.
That's the new that's the new narrative.
And if there aren't enough white supremacists to go around, you have to create it just like they created it in PatCon.
And in fact, there are multiple different categories of of of targets.
There's the kind of so-called racist Nazi targets.
But now there's target that's called patriot extremism that kind of exploits the resonance of the vocabulary of constitutional patriotism.
And that's that's relevant to the Oath Keepers, which is not a racist organization in terms of its own self-understanding and its message.
It's a constitutional patriot organization.
And that's another national security threat as judged by the National Security Bureaucracy.
And in fact, the Oath Keepers is listed as a domestic security threat by DARPA and other DOD organizations.
And so I think just the reality of it, as I was saying, like irrespective of whether the messaging of the militia groups make sense to people or what, they're all different types.
But people need to be very careful because the government has a long history of infiltrating and you can go in with the best of intentions.
But when the government wants to screw over people, they put them in these positions and, you know, you're you're you're leaving a lot to chance there.
And when you look at the way that these unsuspecting people like Thomas Caldwell end up getting screwed in events like January 6th, it really gives one pause and people really need to be privy to the government's aggressive history of infiltrating these types of militia groups for political purposes.
Yeah, I was really happy to see in Tucker Carlson's special on this that he highlighted the work of Trevor Aronson, who wrote the book The Terror Factory about the FBI in the Bush and Obama years.
And I'm almost certain by his count, it's 300 and something cases that you could call entrapments where essentially they pick the dumbest Muslim kid in the neighborhood to, you know, trick him.
Here's some money.
Just tell us you love Osama and, you know, hit this button.
And then they cart him off to prison as a publicity stunt.
And they've really refined the practice.
I mean, they've gotten very good at it just in the last 20 years here.
And so, yeah, never mind PatCon, right?
I mean, that's old news compared to how good they are at this now.
And then, yeah, to switch from one target to the other is easy.
Right.
And by the way, it's the people who cheered and all those poor Muslim entrapees were paraded across their TV screens for the last 20 years who are the subjects of it now.
Not that I'm saying they deserve it, but it is ironic.
It is.
And, you know, part of the reason they cheered was that there was a robust media infrastructure that was in place to engineer a narrative and shove a certain interpretation of reality down people's throats as to what kind of threat those Muslims constituted.
So the media is always ready to help facilitate these narratives that buttress the agenda of, you know, the national security apparatus.
It was true then and it's true now.
All right, man.
Well, great first interview on the show.
I hope of many to come in the future here.
Absolutely.
No, it's really it's a great honor.
I've been a follower of your show and I know you've you've interviewed a lot of very important people.
And so I'm honored to be amongst them.
I think you and you interviewed Jesse Trinidad at one point.
Oh, many times.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I'm a big fan of his.
So there are a lot of really, really, really brave, very important people who have really charted the path here and who've gone into this in far greater detail than I ever have.
So I'm happy to do a little part here to to uncover the truth on January 6th.
And as you say, I hope it's the first of many rich and lively and informative discussions.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I'll certainly be looking forward to part three of this thing.
Meet Ray Epps at Revolver Dot News.
Darren J. Beattie.
Thank you again.
Thank you.
