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I changed my mind on Epps during our last discussion. I'm not particularly invested in the question of whether some participants in Jan 6 were feds or not, and I was totally willing to believe Epps was. However, I think a careful examination of the relevant law makes it much less likely that his light punishment is indicative of him being treated with kid gloves.
The most notable things Epps did was loudly advocate for entering the capital. But it's difficult to actually make a case based on this. First amendment jurisprudence makes it really really hard to prove incitement, and conspiracy charges require agreement - and it's notable that he gets shouted down with accusations of being a fed when he starts yelling about going into the capitol. If he's a conspirator, who are his co-conspirators? There's a video of him whispering to another guy shortly before a barrier is breached but both Epps' and the other guy's accounts of what he said aren't incriminating.
In short, I got convinced by the fact that the charges that I thought he should be up for are just a really hard lift - as also evidenced by the fact that no one else, even Trump himself, has been charged for incitement of a riot (and as an aside, while the Colorado court found Trump to have incited Jan 6 by the standard of "clear and compelling evidence", an implication of that ruling is that he was not guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt"). And the feds hate losing cases, so they tend to drop charges that aren't rock solid.
Take out any way of charging him for things he said, and it's hard to nail him on anything other than weak "disorderly conduct" type charges. Someone who entered the Capitol later during the event and walked around a bit before leaving while damaging nothing feels morally much less culpable than Epps, but they actually have committed an action that is easier to prosecute more harshly. The law doesn't match our intuitions perfectly, some people get a raw deal and some get lucky. Such is life.
The main remaining thing that I find strange about the Epps case is that he went on repeatedly about entering the Capitol, but then didn't actually do so himself. A lot of people clearly shared his belief that they should enter the Capitol, and acted on it, but he didn't. Why? Change of heart? Just a coward? Could be, I guess. It's weird, but not so weird that him being some sort of plant is the only plausible explanation.
At the end of the day though, regardless of whether the motte of "some government officials were involved in Jan 6" is true or not, the bailey of "Jan 6 was orchestrated by the feds to make Trump and his supporters look bad" is obviously false. Maybe some Capitol police shared the goals of the rioters and deliberately let them in. Maybe some crook who was being used as an informant went and committed more crimes. But the driving force behind Jan 6 was obviously Trump and his supporters, and there is no clearer evidence of this than the fact that they continue to defend and justify Jan 6. If it was all a ploy to discredit Trump, why is he going around demanding Biden release the "J6 hostages"? Why is he promising to issue pardons? It can't simultaneously be true that it was a "fedsurrection" and that it was just a "peaceful and patriotic protest" whose participants are being unjustly prosecuted.
The "far-right anti-government militia" group (thanks wikipedia) that he was chapter president of? Prosecutors have had no trouble putting together conspiracy charges based on very little actual conspiring for other members of such groups.
I know that you think that the bar for conspiracy charges is high, and you are probably even right based on an honest reading of the law -- but that's not how the law is being used around J6, and I'm very confident that this case could have been made if someone were so inclined.
Clarification: Incitement is a high bar to reach. Conspiracy is actually a pretty low bar, and Epps is very lucky he doesn't reach it.
To convict you of a conspiracy, the prosecutor needs proof beyond a reasonable doubt of:
An agreement between you and at least one other person to commit a crime
At least one overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy (which does not itself need to be illegal).
In an alternate universe where Epps shouted "We need to go INTO the capitol!" and someone else shouted "Hell yeah!", that would be the agreement to commit a crime. Joining the rally marching toward the capitol would be an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy (even if he didn't actually go in). In other words, Epps was playing with fire and did everything necessary to be guilty of conspiracy charges, but because the people around him called him a fed instead of agreeing, he dodges a bullet.
I wouldn't be shocked if Epps indeed conspired with members of his militia to commit some crime or other, but I haven't seen any evidence of that, and evidence is necessary for a conviction.
That's just it -- these 'militias' are riddled with for-sure feds, if they wanted to go after basically anyone involved for conspiracy there's plenty of evidence to be had -- given that Jan6 itself is being treated as a criminal act.
Have you read the Revolver articles on Epps? It's been a while, but as I recall while they are focussed on the idea that Epps is a fed, they've gathered enough publically available information to make a pretty good conspiracy case -- never mind all of the evidence that the actual feds have from all the other prosecutions.
I've read them, I don't see the evidence. In particular, I don't see evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that anyone made an agreement with him to commit a crime.
OK, I looked at it again -- check the part towards the end of Pt 1, in which Epps is on video conspiring with 'MaroonPB' and Ryan Samsel just before they push the barricades down and rush the Capitol.
He tells the 'MaroonPB' guy to 'leave your pepper spray here when we go in there, we don't want to get shot' -- the guy then leaves the pepper spray and goes in there. That alone seems like enough for current-day definitions of conspiracy -- but Revolver News is not the FBI; if the FBI were inclined to go over these dudes' phone records (as they did with the other Oath Keepers et al) I'd be extremely surprised if they couldn't find some more fodder.
As I understand it both Epps and Samsel say that Epps just told him not to attack police. They might both be lying but we don't have audio of what was actually said, so it seems hard to make the case that statement constitutes an agreement to commit a crime.
This is getting closer, but I don't think it reaches "beyond reasonable doubt". "MaroonPB" doesn't seem to acknowledge Epps in the video. He's talking on the bullhorn, and he keeps talking even as Epps is telling him to leave the pepper spray. I think a reasonable person could have some doubt as to whether there really was an agreement between the two men.
I'm unimpressed by assertions that further evidence must surely exist if only the FBI would look for it. Maybe so, maybe not. But the fact that someone has not been charged on the basis of evidence that we haven't seen seems like an awfully long stretch to conclude that he must be an undercover agent.
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What's your explanation for why the FBI removed him from its Most Wanted list?
My understanding is that he called them and identified himself.
I'm not actually sure what the purpose of a Most Wanted list is, but if I had to guess I would say it's for finding wanted individuals when you don't know who and/or where they are. If I'm correct in assuming that, then once you've located and identified a target, there's no reason to keep them on the list generating tips you no longer need.
The archives of those pages are linked in the first Revolver article, which shows the FBI had been updating the /wanted/capitol-violence page as each person's status changed (leaving each person's 'photograph number' the same). They were putting big red "ARRESTED" labels on everyone and leaving their picture up. The day before that July 1st update of quietly removing Epps, the top 50 people on the page had over 60% marked 'ARRESTED', while only two numbered suspects had been removed (Suspects #36 and #37, and then Epps #16 was removed the next day).
So the removal was clearly not just triggered by a successful identification. Moreover, based on looking at those red Arrest labels, it seems like their priority was roughly similar to the order of 'photograph number', where being Suspect #16 was close to the top (not many marked arrested in the 250-400 range at that time).
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What are you talking about? DOJ Attorney Matthew Graves has even announced this week that they are looking into prosecuting J6 Protesters who did not enter the Capitol building but might have entered other restricted areas -- the entire J6 campaign by the DOJ is inventing new applications of existing laws. If they can't find anything to prosecute Ray Epps for, it's because they don't want to. Why else would motivate the judge not to reprimand Epps at all, but to instead say he was a good boy who got caught up in unfortunate conspiracy theories?
I don't understand why these are two irreconcilable positions: "The feds entrapped MAGA in a sting." Not only does that reconcile your two positions, but it is in fact the argument being made by just about every J6 truther.
What do you expect those lesser offenders to be charged with? I expect they will cop charges very similar to the ones Epps got - "disorderly conduct" and suchlike.
The positions are irreconcilable because they disagree on the fundamental question of whether or not J6 was actually a bad thing. There's an incoherence to saying "the Jan 6rs did nothing wrong, and also, the feds made them do it". If they did nothing wrong, how were they "instigated" into doing it? Conversely, if the feds instigated an insurrection, that means that Jan 6 was an insurrection.
If MAGA was entrapped in a sting, it was a "sting" where they were "entrapped" into conducting what the majority of Republicans now consider a legitimate protest.
I've been with you all the way up to here, upvoting and even reporting one of your comments in this thread as a QC, but this is clearly wrong: the feds can be guilty of luring the protesters/rioters into taking risks that would make them look bad and expose them to prosecution.
Eh, fine, I'll back down a bit. Yes, it's possible to thread the needle, I guess.
But I still think that the widespread support for both the goals and actions of Jan 6 among Trump supporters offers a much more likely and harmonious explanation for why Jan 6 happened than some fed entrapment theory. If they caught Snoop Dogg with weed and he claimed they planted it, I'd be similarly sceptical.
After all, does anyone seriously think that if Trump loses to Biden again he's going to slink off sullenly into the night? No, he's going to do the exact same crap - angrily insist the democrats cheated, file lots of garbage lawsuits, pressure officials to change results, tell his supporters they need to fight or lose their country, etc, etc. And are all these people who say Jan 6 was a "legitimate protest" just going to sit back meekly and wave signs a bit and then go home? I hope so - the prosecutorial response at least provides some deterrent - but I'm not convinced it will be enough.
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No there isn't. The feds don't need to make them do something that's actually insurrection in order to make them do something that can be easily called insurrection by a partisan judge and the media.
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it was just a protest that got out of hand. a similar thing happened in Australia except it was the left protesting against a right wing government, i'm sure the right tried to make it out like it was the end of the world but i don't think anyone ended up serving 20 year prison sentences because of what happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Parliament_House_riot
Yeah, say what you like about Howard but he was a savvy politician. He chose not to demonise the actual rioters or to really ascribe them agency for their own actions. Instead he made it all about the union leadership that organised the rally and blamed them for riling up their members and letting it get out of hand. He used the event to tar and discredit the unions and justify his aggressive anti-union moves - the most dramatic of which was supporting Patrick Stevedores to fire their entire union workforce.
The unions today have a fraction of the membership they did then, many of their formerly routine activities have been criminalised, and their officials have been hit with criminal convictions and massive fines. The long term damage done to the organisational left as a result was very substantial.
I do think there's a meaningful difference between the events, in that neither the union leadership nor any organised group involved in the '96 riot was trying to prevent an elected government from taking power. But it was still a disgusting event, and the actual participants should have been treated much more harshly.
Is this some form of nominative determinism? The Wire Season 3 (?) revolved around the Stevedores Union, dockside in Bawlmer.
No? Patrick Stevedores is a stevedore company, presumably named after some bloke called Patrick. "Stevedore" is just another word for a dockworker, so the connection is just that the political event and the TV season were both about dockworkers' unions.
Ah, I see now.
I was confused as hell the first time I saw the word too. I was a teen and there was a dock strike, and there was all this talk of "corralling the stevedores", so I figured they were some kind of livestock running around the docks getting into mischief. I did a great job embarrassing myself the next day bitching about how third world we must look with all these animals wreaking havoc on our docks.
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The normie Republican position is that J6 was justified because it was not an insurrection. The government's position is that J6 was an attempt to overthrow the government. The "sting" theory is that the Feds took justified protest and tried to make it look like an attempt to overthrow the government, so they could persecute it.
Who decided that Ray Epps was a "lesser offender"? The feds are charging lots of people with more for less. Ray Epps was egging people on into entering the Capitol, and the media and government are all talking about how this poor guy has been targeted by a smear!
How did the feds make J6 look like an attempt to overthrow the government without getting anyone to do anything wrong?
The Supreme Court of the United States, in 1969, when it decided in Brandenburg v Ohio that the First Amendment protected speech so strongly that it became nearly impossible to convict a person of inciting a riot. Alternatively, the framers of the First Amendment itself.
I agree that the feds are charging people with more for less, but the rules they have to play by say they probably can't convict Epps for inciting a riot. Personally I think the First Amendment should be abolished which would make it much more possible to prosecute the kind of egregious behaviour Epps engaged in. But a lot of Americans disagree with me and it's their country.
I'm going to repost the original Revolver News article here, since I posted it in another comment. Ray Epps did a lot more than exercise his First Amendment rights:
https://revolver.news/2021/10/meet-ray-epps-the-fed-protected-provocateur-who-appears-to-have-led-the-very-first-1-6-attack-on-the-u-s-capitol/
Epps orchestrated the breach of the capitol, announced before J6 his intention to breach the Capitol, incited protesters during J6 to join him in breaching the Capitol, and then was put on the FBI's "Capitol Violence Most Wanted List," from which he was quietly dropped as soon as investigative reporters started asking questions. And there's more.
They are not playing by any rules, a claim I have repeated several times now to which you seem not to have said anything.
You're posting on a website that was created to escape censorship. Are you trying to look silly?
This is your reminder that AshLael is literally a paid political operative in meatspace. Any conversations you have with them should be viewed through that light.
In Australia.... He has his biases, which color his responses to this issue, but we all do.
Sure, we all have biases. But I don't literally get paid to further a specific political agenda, and I have a hard time imagining a world where that doesn't drastically affect your biased far beyond normal.
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I'm pretty sure that if he went on public record as saying that the January 6 protestors did nothing wrong, he'd lose his job as a political operative, even though it is in Australia.
It is logically possible to hold opinions favoring the Republicans in the US while still holding leftist opinions with respect to Australian political issues. Unfortunately, politics doesn't run on logical possibility.
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Which crime do you think he could be convicted of, what are the elements of that crime, and what evidence exists to prove all elements beyond a reasonable doubt?
I think the best way to contest that claim is to talk in detail about the actual rules that are observably being applied, which I am doing.
I have a longstanding view that the US bill of rights was a big mistake, which I have articulated multiple times. It has put judges in the position of having to effectively make policy decisions about what constitutes due process or equal protection or free speech that are always going to be somewhat arbitrary and politically controversial, and that in turn has made it very important to staff the judiciary with judges that interpret these very vague provisions the way your side wants, which has created a highly politicised judiciary.
I think a much better system is to allow democratically elected governments much more latitude in making the laws they want, for policy choices to be explicitly legislated, and for judges to have a much more restrained and uncontroversial role in applying the law. Sometimes governments will pass bad laws, but there is a much more direct and workable system for the public to rectify those cases than when judges make bad constitutional rulings.
If the same standard was being applied to everyone (which is different question from what I think he should be convicted of), I see no reason to not at least try to pin "seditious conspiracy" on him, like the guy that got 20 years without ever being present in Washington.
This is not a valid criterion to prove or disprove the point being debated here. The attempt to prove something beyond reasonable doubt happens after the charges are made, in court, not before. Rittenhouse was charged with murder despite exonerating evidence being public before the charges were made, for example.
It's not accurate to suggest that the existence of evidence is irrelevant to the charges that get laid. Yes, sometimes bad charges get laid despite the evidence not supporting a conviction. Rittenhouse was a dramatic example (and rightfully acquitted). But it's not the norm.
The normal process is investigate, then charge. It doesn't always happen that way, but it's the normal process. And particularly for US federal prosecutors (who tend to be both good lawyers and fiercely protective of their reputations as good lawyers), they will very much want to win the cases they bring.
Epps spent a long time without being charged. I don't know why, but it's at least possible that was because there was a lot of time being spent investigating him to see if they could find evidence to make harsher charges stick, and they couldn't. While it's certainly possible that mining a person's history and communications will turn up evidence of lawbreaking, it's also possible that it doesn't.
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