Jan. 6 Rioter At The Center Of Conspiracy Theories Faces Prison Time

High-profile TV commentators and elected Republicans said Ray Epps was a federal agent who manipulated Donald Trump supporters into storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

There was no evidence for the claim to begin with, and federal prosecutors said this week in a sentencing filing that Epps, a 62-year-old former Marine from Arizona, is just a rioter who should go to prison. A more thorough debunking of the Epps theory would probably not be possible.

Three years since the riot, the Epps case serves as both a reminder of the lies surrounding the attack on the Capitol as well as the truth of what happened.

Epps is one of more than 1,200 Trump supporters who have been charged with crimes for their actions on Jan. 6. The attack interrupted the congressional certification of Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, injured more than 100 police officers and left five people dead in its immediate aftermath.

Epps attended Trump’s speech that day near the White House, where the president insisted the election had been stolen from him and encouraged his supporters to “fight like hell” and go to the Capitol. Epps himself then encouraged people to go to the Capitol, where he joined a group that fought police officers on the Capitol grounds as they made their way toward the building. Video from the previous evening shows Epps saying he thought people should go all the way in.

“He is on video several times encouraging crimes, riots, breaches of the Capitol on Jan. 6,” Tucker Carlson said on his Fox News show on Jan. 5, 2022. “He hasn’t been charged with anything, apparently. Why is that? That’s a real question.”

Several Republicans in Congress accused the Justice Department of protecting Epps, as though he had been helping the