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Is there any legal basis for this at all? Would I be able to escape a criminal conviction by having a bunch of people on twitter talk about how I was a federal agent? If this is actually a criteria that's being used to adjust sentencing and shift legal outcomes, I've just come up with an incredibly profitable new business idea that will help get people out of sticky prosecutions even when there's direct video evidence of them committing the crime! Of course I don't actually believe that's the case - he's not being let off due to an actual legal principle. There are hundreds of conspiracy theories circulating about Donald Trump, and I highly doubt that he's going to be able to dodge the charges by using a similar precedent.
But Eps didn't escape a federal criminal conviction. He pleaded guilty to federal charges. My understanding is judges have a pretty wide latitude to consider a defendant's circumstances at sentencing, so nothing explicitly prevents a judge considering these factors.
My apologies for being unclear - please replace "criminal conviction" with "prison sentence".
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Not explicitly so and not unique to conspiracy theories, but judges and prosecutors do indeed factor into their decisions whether someone has "suffered enough already". The prime example I can think of are deciding whether to charge negligent parents whose child is killed as a result of being forgotten inside a hot car. I also had a client who avoided jail time on her third DUI, most likely because the collision she caused severely mangled her foot and left her in a wheelchair.
I can see the tenuous basis/linkage here, and I appreciate you providing an answer to my question. But, unfortunately, it isn't enough to change my mind on this matter - I can't understand how Ray Epps gets away with what he did on the basis of people saying mean things about him online when this same principle is not applied to anywhere near the same degree when it comes to others. Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were the target of far more online conspiracy theories than Ray Epps was, but that hasn't impacted their sentencing or prosecution in the slightest.
Well there's two questions here and it's important not to confuse them:
I've laid out my reasons for why Ray Epps does not appear to have been treated unusually when comparing his charges/sentences to other comparable J6 defendants. In terms of how much him being the victim of a conspiracy theory affected the outcome, it's hard to say because his ultimate sentence was well within the ballpark compared to other defendants. I do think it's plausible just based on the fact that this is indeed a factor in other cases, but his sentence was expected to be low anyways. You can read Epps' sentencing memo filed by his attorney for further details on how his life had been affected.
This is why a comparison to Epstein/Maxwell wouldn't make sense. The "suffered enough already" factor might sway judges/prosecutors at the margins, particularly for petty or questionable offenses, but I can't imagine a scenario where it would justify leniency for someone accused of running an underage sex trafficking ring.
Could you please show me where you actually did this? I gave the post I was responding to the and the links a few looks, but I couldn't find any where you went through the claims made in the Revolver piece in great detail.
Also, I'd just like to add as an aside that I don't think "being the victim of a conspiracy theory" is actually what is responsible for his lenient sentencing - rather, it was due to him being a federal informant or otherwise working for the government. I think that the conspiracy theory claim is being used as a figleaf for those other reasons. And finally...
Petty or questionable offences? Epstein was just running an underage sex trafficking ring, and the government didn't even think that was a big enough deal for him to go to prison the first time he did it. They haven't even gone after many of the confirmed customers of the sex ring - Ehud Barak is still a free man, as is Prince Andrew. In contrast, I've been repeatedly informed by "reliable sources" that what took place on January 6 was a violent insurrection that attempted to end our democracy, and is actually legally comparable to raising an army and literally waging war on the US government. The idea that people being mean on twitter could make up for that beggars belief.
I was addressing whether or not Epps was treated unusually as a defendant, and I examined that by comparing him to all other J6 defendants: "Ray Epps pleading guilty to misdemeanors (505 out of all 1,265 J6 defendants also did), avoiding jail time (282 out of 749 convicted J6 defendants also did), or avoiding pretrial detention (70% of J6 defendants also did) seemed unusual." What claim within the Revolver piece addresses whether or not Epps was treated unusually that I did not address?
Do you believe that the 37% of other convicted J6 defendants who also avoided jail time were also federal informants or otherwise working for the government?
Sure, that would beggar belief if it happened. I've seen no indication that's the case because plenty of other convicted J6 defendants avoided jail time despite not being the subject of a conspiracy theory. This is evidently not a material factor for sentencing purposes.
The actual acts undertaken by Epps as outlined that article are the exact reason why people believe he was being treated unusually. Remember that he said that people needed to go into the capitol the night before the speech, and he even quit the speech early to go make sure people could go into the capitol! There is a much more direct line from his actions to the breach of the capitol building than anything Trump did or said, and they actually are going after Trump for actions that were unequivocally less relevant to the breach of the capitol building than what Epps did. He was also high up in the ranks of the Oathkeepers, one of the groups involved - he's directly comparable to Enrique Tarrio, and the difference in sentencing is extremely stark.
I believe that a substantial amount were. This isn't a bizarre conspiracy theory or fact pulled out of my ass to justify my opinion, but based on the admission of several officials that there were a large number of informants and government workers in the crowd. I'm sure that some of these individuals were just lucky (or unlucky given they were involved in the process at all), but I would bet a significant amount of money that there are federal informants or government workers inside that 37%.
Did you read the opinion? Judge Boasberg (coincidentally the same judge who approved the faulty warrant that allowed surveillance of the Trump campaign) explicitly said that this was a material factor for sentencing purposes. I think he was lying, but that is his actual official position.
This is very interesting to hear and maybe explains our disagreements you outline in your first paragraph. What officials? What admissions? How many informants? And assuming all that is correct, how do you know that the groups 'informant' and 'J6 defendant who avoided jail time' overlap with each other? The practice in federal court that I'm familiar with for defendants is that their informant status is disclosed in order to get leniency at sentencing, and no J6 defendant has ever been outed as having done that. Maybe they're ongoing confidential human sources (CHS) but then I'm failing to understand why the government would bother charging them with a crime only to result in no jail time. Is this all meant to be a charade to aver a suspicious public? If so, doesn't the lack of jail time allow scrutinizing observers like yourself to see through that facade?
Mea culpa, I was not aware the judge said that. But like I said before plenty of other convicted J6 defendants avoided jail time despite not being the subject of a conspiracy theory. I understand you believe that many of those were also informants so that loops back to that point.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12541115/Merrick-Garland-says-dont-know-asked-FBI-informants-January-6-former-assistant-directors-bombshell-claim-bureau-MULTIPLE-confidential-sources-involved-Capitol-Riot.html
There've been multiple news stories about this, and multiple confrontations in official government panels. Even disreputable media sources like the NY Times have reported on this - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/25/us/politics/capitol-riot-fbi-informant.html
I don't even necessarily think that they do. Some of them would receive light or perfunctory sentences in order to keep their cover (most groups recognise what it means when someone keeps joining political groups, commits crimes, encourages lawbreaking and then doesn't go to prison). Some of them were, supposedly, simply government informants for other reasons who went to the protests as individuals. Some of the people who received a vanishingly small sentence may have simply had good lawyers, taken advantage of a legal mistake made by the government or have extenuating circumstances. But I stand by my claim that some of those defendants received leniency because they were actively working with the government. Ray Epps especially given that he's on camera talking about the need to break into the capitol building the night before (to a rousing chorus of FED!).
Publicly admitting that they were there on government orders is exactly the sort of thing that the FBI would prevent these informants/CHSes from doing, because that gives the game away.
Not at all. Notice how we're actually having a debate over this rather than simply pointing at the evidence and going "lol fed". Additionally, the FBI actually lost track of all their informants and confidential sources due to the sheer quantity of them involved in the protest. If there are so many of them that the FBI can't even keep track of people who they have on file, I don't think it's impossible that the government could end up charging some of them by mistake.
But to bring things right back to Ray Epps and the FBI, they have a documented track record of instigating crimes for the purpose of making arrests - see the Gretchen Whitmer plot, or the Khalil Abu Rayyan case. "Right wing extremism" is currently their biggest investigation target, and I think it is abundantly plausible that government informants or people otherwise working for the FBI were involved in making sure that otherwise innocent people ended up committing crimes.
If you look at things under that assumption, everything about Epps' conduct makes sense. He spends time telling people they need to break into the capitol building (again, with such insistence that people there in person surround him and start chanting FED), and then he goes and skips the actual speech he supposedly came to Washington to see, in order to make sure that the barricades preventing people from going into restricted areas are removed!
Then, he later says in a phonecall that he "facilitated the entrance of people into the capitol" - which is exactly what he would be doing if this theory is correct.(I can't find my source for this quote - google seems to just ignore it and give me articles about how he was let off, so feel free to just ignore this point). I may be making a fallacious argument from incredulity here, but I really can't see an alternative explanation for his behaviour on the day that makes any sense.More options
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So what? For this to be a valid argument, the same rules would have to be applied to all defendants, which is precisely the thing in dispute.
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I have no opinion whatever about whether Epps is or isn't a federal agent, nor do I care.
With that said, though, I think some of what you are encountering is based not on any of the individual factors you discussed, but rather the combination of all of them together all seeming to roll on the "lenient" side, along with the perception that Epps is a (relatively) prominent defendant. I think to some degree you have mistakenly focused on individual probabilities rather than the compound probability that a "prominent defendant" would have all of those individual elements all come up in a way favorable to him.
Not saying that's right or wrong, but I think that is at least some of what is going on here, and if you wanted to be more convincing, I think that's where you'd want to focus.
I appreciate the feedback but I'm not sure how to apply it. How would someone conduct a compound probability without examining individual elements? Not all of the elements were favorable to Epps either because he was charged with a crime while other prominent figures with comparable conduct (Nick Fuentes & Ali Alexander for example) were not. I'm open to suggestions for how to do a comparison differently.
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