Christopher Wray The Insurrectionist
It is very rare for Tucker Carlson and Revolver News to stumble ass-backwards into the truth, but that is what happened on 6/15/2021. During his monologue that night on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Tucker Carlson talked about something that had been obvious to many (or at least to myself) this entire time, the fact that the FBI had involvement with the storming of the capitol on 1/6/2021.
Here’s just one piece of evidence Tucker gives:
For example, one of those “unindicted co-conspirators” is someone the government identifies only as “Person Two.” According to those documents, “Person Two” stayed in the same hotel room as an “insurrectionist” named Thomas Caldwell, who’s alleged to be a member of the group called the Oath Keepers. “Person Two” also “stormed the barricades” at the Capitol on January 6, alongside Thomas Caldwell.
The government’s indictments further indicate that Caldwell — who by the way is a 65-year-old man — was led to believe there would be a “quick reaction force” also participating in January 6. That quick reaction force, Caldwell was told, would be led by someone called “Person Three” — who had a hotel room and an accomplice.
But wait. Here’s the interesting thing. “Person Two” and “Person Three” were organizers of the riot. The government knows who they are, but the government has not charged them. Why is that? You know why. They were almost certainly working for the FBI. So FBI operatives were organizing the attack on the Capitol on January 6, according to government documents. And those two are not alone.
When Tucker Carlson trended on Twitter because of the statements above, Twitter gave this information about the trending topic:
Federal law does not permit cooperating witnesses or informants to be charged with conspiracy, despite a baseless suggestion by Tucker Carlson that some co-conspirators of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol were not charged because they were undercover FBI agents.
Mind you, those two facts have nothing to do with each other. The people Carlson accused of being undercover FBI agents were not just witnesses or informants, but were instead organizers of the event. From Tucker Carlson’s monologue:
But wait. Here’s the interesting thing. “Person Two” and “Person Three” were organizers of the riot. The government knows who they are, but the government has not charged them. Why is that? You know why. They were almost certainly working for the FBI. So FBI operatives were organizing the attack on the Capitol on January 6, according to government documents. And those two are not alone.
For that matter, even if these people are not being charged with a crime, that still doesn’t answer why we don’t know who they are. Does the federal government not know who these people are? Did these people strike a deal with the federal government in order to stop their involvement with the insurrection from becoming public? If the answer is yes, what did that deal entail and why was the FBI willing to make it with them and not with others? These are all things that are in the public interest to know, and yet, we still don’t know them.
Oh, and there’s the small fact that even if informants cannot be charged with conspiracy — conspiracy here simply meaning “a plot by two or more people to do something illegal” —that doesn’t mean that they still can’t be charged with the crime they conspired to commit. For example, during a gang rape it is not uncommon for one rapist to get a plea bargain where they get a reduced sentence on the condition they testify against their fellow criminals. That person is still charged with rape, but they are given a lesser sentence because they were involved with the prosecution of other rapists. Basically, even if you cannot charge these specific people with conspiracy, that doesn’t mean that they are immune from being prosecuted of any crime whatsoever.
Of course, Carlson is pulling this new narrative out of his ass. Before, his argument was not that the events of 1/6/2021 were a plot by the FBI, but that they were a completely understandable backlash to the 2020 Presidential Election. Here’s what he said on those events just a few months beforehand (I could not find the date of these quotes, but they’re in John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight segment on Carlson):
On January 6th, we had a riot at the U.S. Capitol. Why did that happen? It happened because millions of American voters were convinced that the last election was not fair. Where did they get that idea? Well, it wasn’t simply because the last president told them so, you’re hearing that now as if they are animals who take commands and do what they’re told, but they’re not animals. They are people. They are American citizens who can see what’s happening and come to their own conclusions about it. They saw the radical increase in mail-in voting, millions did, and it corroded their faith and the public’s faith in our systems of election.
However, that does not mean that we should shoot the messager when it comes to information like this. The fact is, there is growing evidence that the FBI was involved in the events of 1/6/2021 and that does not become untrue just because Tucker Carlson says it. In fact, my main issue with Tucker’s segment is that it doesn’t go far enough, because it’s very possible the main reason why the FBI allowed the events of 1/6/2021 to happen was because they are still loyal to Trump and wanted to keep him in office.
It should be noted that nobody can deny the idea that the FBI has agents inside right-wing groups who have since been listed as nothing more than antonymous co-conspirators. Here’s a CNN article which claims to “fact check” the original claims made by Carlson:
It’s true that some indictments against members of extremist groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys mention anonymous co-conspirators who haven’t been charged yet. And the FBI routinely uses undercover agents, and government operatives may have been embedded in right-wing groups like January 6.
Did FBI agents encourage members of those groups to storm the capitol, as the did? For that matter, did FBI agents actually engage in the storming of the capitol, and if so, to what degree did they participate? Was the anonymous organizer of the event one of these FBI agents or was their another reason as to why the FBI kept his name anonymous?
So was the FBI involved with the storming of the capitol on 1/6/2021? As I write this, although it has been six months since the storming of the capitol, we are still lacking much information about exactly what happened on that day. However, here are some facts we know.
On 1/5/2021, a fellow by the name of Ray Epps told a group of Trump supporters “I don’t even like to say it because I’ll be arrested. I’ll say it. We need to go into the Capitol.” The crowd was actually against the idea, which is rather ironic considering what we saw happen the next day.
We have known who Ray Epps was since at least 1/11/2021, because the Arizona Republic had an article about him with the headline “Arizona man went to Washington for day of Capitol riot, appears to talk about plans in video.” In the article, Epps even says he will not answer any questions related to the events of 1/6/2021 without an attorney present — I mean, how much more suspicious can you get?
However, as I write this, Ray Epps has not been charged with anything related to the events of 1/6/2021. This is in spite of the fact we have video of him encouraging others to commit a federal crime — which, by itself, is a federal crime — and we know for a fact that he was at the storming of the capitol the following day. If anyone would be arrested for involvement with the storming of the capitol, it would be Ray Epps.
Of course, it is possible that their is a perfectly logical and reasonable answer to every question I’ve asked in this article. However, if that really is the case, why is the FBI hiding the answers to these simple questions? If the FBI hasn’t done anything wrong, why is the FBI hiding their actions from the public?
Now, I’m not saying to sure that Ray Epps was an undercover FBI agent, we simply do not have enough evidence to conclude that at the moment. However, we also have no alternative reason as to why this man has not yet been arrested. In fact, the FBI seems to be doing everything possible to sweep people like Epps under the rug, instead telling us it’s our fault because we don’t let the FBI do enough.
At the time of the insurrection, the FBI was directed by noted Trump-loyalist Christopher Wray — who Biden has decided to keep as FBI Director. Throughout 2020, Wray had already backed Trump on Micheal Flynn (even opening an investigation into possible misconduct in the Flynn investigation), China (which he called the biggest national security threat to the United States during a testimony to Congress), and Antifa (calling it a domestic terrorist threat, although he refused to call it a specific organization) along with much more. Wray was appointed FBI Director after Trump’s controversial firing of James Comey on 5/9/2017 for not being loyal enough to Trump and his administration.
Despite multiple testimonies to Congress, Wray has also been rather dodgy about what the FBI is doing in response to the storming of the capitol. During one testimony, Wray said that he was “not aware” of any investigation into Donald Trump’s role in the storming of the Capitol. Considering Trump was impeached for his role in that same event, you’d think opening an investigation would have been the first thing the FBI would do. Oh, and there’s also this information from a New York Times article published on 1/9/2021:
“Our president wants us here,” a man can be heard saying during a livestream video that showed him standing within the Capitol building. “We wait and take orders from our president.”
And there’s also this:
Still, the crowd seemed a bit giddy at the prospect of helping President Trump reverse the result of the election — though at times the language evoked a call to arms. “It is time for war,” one speaker declared.
And this:
“Patriots, if you need financial help getting to DC to support President Trump on January 6th, please go to my website,” a QAnon adherent who identified himself as Thad Williams, of Tampa, Fla., posted on Twitter three days before the event. He said he had raised more than $27,000.
And much more. The fact is, both the United States House of Representatives and those who actually storm the capitol are in very clear agreement, this happened because of Donald Trump. Yet, in spite of that, Trump’s hand-picked FBI Director Christopher Wray has not opened an investigation into if this happened because of Donald Trump.
During his most recent testimony, Wray blamed the limits of social media tracking as the reason for the insurrection. Tia Sewell and Benjamin Wittes debunked this point on Lawfare back in March:
Can it really be that not one of the thousands of open investigations allowed the bureau to examine public social media postings that made the plan to storm the Capitol a matter of public knowledge and conversation? Can it really be that the restrictions on monitoring of public social media activity are so severe that plotting that took place in public and was the subject of open discussion on television and in newspapers was off-limits to the FBI? These contentions are too extravagant to warrant serious contemplation. Particularly given how many of the subsequent charges brought against rioters have involved alleged conspiracies and how quickly the FBI was able to uncover those conspiracies, it is quite clear that forewarning was available.
On 1/5/2021, the FBI’s Norfolk memo warned of “war” at the capitol on the following day. (I was unable to find the full-text of the Norfolk memo, so I’m just going off of what has been reported.) While it’s understandable that Wray would not have been able to do an entire investigation in one day, the standard procedure for getting such a memo is to alert the local police so they can prepare accordingly. Was Wray even aware of the Norfolk memo? If he was, why did he not forward such important information to the D.C. Police? If he wasn’t, then who decided not to tell the FBI Director about something so important and why did they decide to do such a thing?
Let’s not forget that 9/17/2020 saw Wray telling Congress that white supremacists are the biggest domestic terrorism threat in the United States at the moment. We also know that Wray’s FBI had done investigations into groups like the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and the Three Percenters (all of whom were at the storming of the Capitol) because all three of those groups were found in the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database, and all three were listed as suspected white supremacists.
The Economist famously said Reagan’s role in Iran-Contra was “guilty but asleep.” I see no situation where Wray could be better than “guilty but asleep,” but the fact that Wray ignored so many red-flags seems like something else could have easily been going on.
During one of his infinite testimonies, Wray compared the storming of the Capitol to the attacks on 9/11/2001. In former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham’s book Intelligence Matters, Graham found twelve instances where the terrorist attacks of that day could have been uncovered and thwarted. Why Bush did not thwart 9/11 is heavily debated, with everything from malice to stupidity being possible motives.
For the same reason, we should ask why Wray did not thwart the insurrection, and everything should be seen as a possible motive.
