Free Republic

Ray Epps wants Americans to believe he is a victim. Yet he is in the middle of the Feds’ efforts to entrap Trump protesters on Jan 6 with false crimes. Saddam Hussein claimed the victim and now so does Ray Epps. Ray Epps, a 61-year-old former Marine, called for Trump supporters to march into the U.S. Capitol building the night prior to the Capitol attack, and then joined them as they entered the restricted grounds outside the Capitol on the day of the riot. Then… he became their scapegoat, accused of being a Deep State-directed agent provocateur. As Trump allies...

President Donald Trump shredded the “Unselect Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs” in a blistering statement shared to Truth Social on Sunday. The Jan. 6 Committee, Trump said, “is yet another Radical Left Democrat Scam used to Criminalize Politics and try, against all hope, to change what will be totally disastrous results in the 2022 and 2024 Elections.” The president continued, “They should not be allowed to get away with it any longer! Are you listening Republicans, are you listening America?” The Jan. 6 Committee has been relentlessly investigating the media-labeled “insurrection” at the United States Capitol in 2021. The...

If you listened to Jan. 6 Committee witness Cassidy Hutchinson during her testimony before the Jan. 6 Committee — and granted, many people didn’t, since the Committee isn’t getting many viewers — you would have heard her tell a fantastic story about President Donald Trump supposedly lunging toward a Secret Service agent and grabbing the steering wheel of The Beast. Superhuman powers for a man in his 70s, able to leap tall Secret Service agents in a single bound, apparently.But then Hutchinson’s testimony was shot down by alleged reports from the Secret Service agents she mentioned in her tale, and...

Ray Epps has suffered enormously in the past 10 months as right-wing media figures and Republican politicians have baselessly described him as a covert government agent who helped to instigate the attack on the Capitol last year. have assailed him as a coward and a traitor and have menacingly cautioned him to sleep with one eye open. He was forced to sell his business and his home in Arizona. Fearing for his safety and uncertain of his future, he and his wife moved into a mobile home in the foothills of the Rockies, with all of their belongings crammed into...

There was no return to normal for Ray Epps, a man who became the hingepoint of a right-wing conspiracy to pin the Capitol riot on the FBI. Before the Capitol riot ended, supporters of former President Donald Trump were manufacturing stories as a way to ease the pain of the cognitive dissonance they were experiencing. The first story claimed that the Capitol police invited the protesters inside. The second was that Antifa was actually behind the riot, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. When those stories didn't stick, MAGA-world tried another. That one told the tale of an FBI informant...

The sham House January 6 Committee changed its anticipated schedule of “high-impact hearings” amid a series of maneuvers by potential witnesses and Steve Bannon’s indication he is willing to testify on his own terms. According to The Daily Mail the panel had planned to hold a Thursday hearing in prime time that would be its second televised evening event. But that all changed when Steve Bannon announced over the weekend that he would testify live and in person before the committee. The sham committee of Never Trump politicians have no interest in reporting the truth. And they know they can’t...

If January 6 was so bad, why do they have to keep lying about it? To hear Andrew McCarthy tell it, Donald Trump’s racuous speech at the Ellipse on January 6 ended with a “Braveheart” moment when the president beseeched his throng of weapon-wielding supporters to attack government leaders at the U.S. Capitol that afternoon. Last week’s testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, the junior White House aide who made a number of dubious claims under oath, has been accepted as fact by most of the corporate news media and NeverTrump pundits including McCarthy, as I explained here. In response to leading...

Mick Mulvaney, the White House chief of staff under former President Trump, appeared Wednesday on CNN Tonight and spoke about his old boss possibly making another run at the presidency in 2024. Mulvaney made headlines recently for being one of the few Republicans urging others to pay attention to the Jan. 6 Committee hearings, and has said they could mean trouble for the ex-president. “What you’re seeing, I think, is folks, especially in my party, are looking at Donald Trump as damaged,” Mulvaney said, “and something that might weigh down the party going into the midterms and into 2024.” Though...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The congressional committee investigating the deadly Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol will hold a hearing on the evening of July 14, a person familiar with the matter said on Thursday. The hearing will be the second one to take place next week and is aimed at reaching a broad television audience during prime viewing hours. Some committee members, including Republican Representative Liz Cheney, have argued that former President Donald Trump should be held criminally liable for allegedly encouraging the attack on the Capitol by his supporters, in which several people died.

Rep. Liz Cheney publicly nudged the Justice Department on Sunday to move against Donald Trump, warning that not holding the former president accountable for January 6 is a 'graver Constitutional threat' to American democracy than letting him off the hook. Cheney - one of two Republicans on the Democrat-led Capitol riot committee - also shared a warning for her own party, which has largely ostracized her for her role on the panel. 'I think that that he can't be the party nominee' in the 2024 presidential race, the Wyoming lawmaker told ABC News of Trump. 'I don't think the party...

FOX News reported: Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., claimed Thursday that a Secret Service agent who may testify before the Jan. 6 committee about the timeline of events that unfolded around former President Donald Trump during the riot “likes to lie.” Two Secret Service agents, Tony Ornato and Robert Engel, are prepared to testify before Congress that then-President Donald Trump did not lunge at a steering wheel or assault them in an attempt to go to the Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot, a source close to the Secret Service told Fox News’ David Spunt this week. The explosive new allegations...

Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s Tuesday testimony ought to ring the death knell for former President Donald Trump’s political career. Trump is unfit to be anywhere near power ever again. Hutchinson’s resume alone should establish her credibility. The 25-year-old had already worked at the highest levels of conservative Republican politics, including in the offices of Sen. Ted Cruz (TX) and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (LA), before becoming a top aide for former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows. In short, Hutchinson was a conservative Trumpist true believer and a tremendously credible one at that. She did not overstate...

Then-President Donald Trump angrily demanded to go to the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and berated his protective detail when he didn't get his way, according to two Secret Service sources who say they heard about the incident from multiple agents, including the driver of the presidential SUV where it occurred. The sources tell CNN that stories circulated about the incident -- including details that are similar to how former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson described it to the House select committee investigating January 6 -- in the months immediately afterward the US Capitol attack and before she testified...

Kevin McCarthy went on Fox News’ hit show, Jesse Watters Primetime, and issued a warning to Dems Reps Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell. Kevin told them when he is Speaker, after the red wave in 2022, he will send them packing from their prized positions on the Intel Committee. It was reported that McCarthy told Jesse that a crew from the Late Show with Stephen Colbert that had been arrested for unlawful entry at the Capitol complex had been let in by a former Schiff aide. Home Political Kevin McCarthy Just Made A Bold Warning To Members Of The Jan...

U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, one of two so-called Republicans on the House’s January 6th Committee, has claimed the investigation is balanced and fair but many of the panel’s actions and some optics tell a different story. “If questioner (Cheney) wants to appear fair to jury (American people), it probably is not a good idea to get caught on camera hugging the witness,” tweeted Greta Van Susteren, citing Politico and sharing an image of Cheney hugging Cassidy Hutchinson after a special hearing on Tuesday. The telling photo of Cheney’s exchange with the former aide to ex-White House Chief of Staff Mark...

In the public testimony that’s come so far, the House Select Committee has carefully laid out the evidence showing that the assault on the Capitol was not a spontaneous event, but the result of a widespread conspiracy that went on over a period of months. That conspiracy put the Proud Boys in place to break through police lines and lead the way into the Capitol. It fabricated claims of election fraud that ensured thousand of the most gullible would be on hand, ready to be shaped into a weapon. It pressured local and state officials in an effort to create...

NeverTrump is up to its old tricks: bashing Trump, berating his supporters, and cheering his latest nemeses who almost always end up as farcical as NeverTrumpers themselves. At least their taste in Trump antagonists is getting better. After more than six years of bandwagoning with every haggard nemesis of Donald Trump—Stormy Daniels, Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Alexander Vindman, and Marie Yovanovitch to name a few—NeverTrump reunited this week to swoon over a telegenic 25-year-old former aide in Trump’s White House: Cassidy Hutchinson. The latest actor to offer a cameo appearance in the January 6 select committee’s show trial caught the...

The explosive testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to then-Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, that President Donald Trump tried to grab the steering wheel of his presidential limousine on January 6, 2021 and assaulted a Secret Service agent when agents refused to take him to the Capitol building during the riot is being disputed by some of those very agents. First of all, Hutchinson was not in the vehicle when the alleged incident took place, and she testified to the hand-picked (by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) committee only as to what she claims she was told. In...