At least half of all of the mentions of Epps on those three channels have been on Tucker Carlson’s prime-time Fox News program. If you are familiar with the name Epps at all, you probably know why it’s Carlson who has mentioned him the most. Ever since the right-wing website Revolver News first suggested in October 2021 that a man named Ray Epps might have been a federal agent tasked with ginning up violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 of that year, Carlson has been the central figure in propagating the theory. That the theory was debunked by early 2022 has not dissuaded Carlson. Earlier this month, in fact, Carlson overhauled his claims about Epps and presented them, once again, to his audience.
Now, the New York Times reports, Epps is responding, asking of Carlson something unfamiliar to the cable-news host: a retraction and apology.
The evidence touted by Revolver and Carlson was always circumstantial at best and often simply ridiculous. It centers on two key moments in the hours before the riot began.
In the first, Epps, a veteran and former member of the Oath Keepers, was seen speaking with an interviewer in the midst of a crowd on the evening of Jan. 5, 2021. He told the interviewer that while he was “probably going to go to jail” for saying it, “tomorrow, we need to go into the Capitol. Into the Capitol.” Then, he added: “Peacefully.”
The crowd around him began to chant, “Fed! Fed!” — suggesting that Epps was a federal agent trying to entice them into violent action.
The second key moment was on Jan. 6 itself. Epps is shown on video near a bike rack that was one of the first barriers to the Capitol to be overrun by protesters. In fact, Epps is seen speaking to a man shortly before that man seizes the rack. Epps subsequently became one of scores of people at the Capitol who were identified as people of interest by the FBI but was soon removed from the list — suspiciously, in Carlson’s telling.
All of this has been explained. The man who grabbed the bike rack, for example, was named Ryan Samsel. He told investigators that Epps hadn’t been encouraging him to remove the barrier; in fact, he said that Epps tried to de-escalate the scene, telling him, “relax, the cops are doing their job.” When Epps had seen his face on the FBI’s website, he quickly contacted the FBI and told them the same story. His face was subsequently removed from the Bureau’s website.
Epps also spoke to investigators from the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot. In January 2022, the committee released a statement answering the other part of Carlson’s allegations, that he was not a federal agent or otherwise working with federal agencies.
As the committee wound down its work, it released the full, sworn testimony Epps provided them. At one point, Epps revealed frustration with elected leaders, like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who would ask officials about Epps knowing that they couldn’t answer. Making things worse, he himself couldn’t answer questions.
“Certain Senators — or certain politicians that were questioning the FBI, knowing what the answer would be, but trying to drive their narrative, the media’s done the same thing with me,” he said. “They know anybody in my position can’t talk about it. We’re asked by our attorney, someone we pay to give us good advice, and their advice is, don’t talk about it. And [the media] take that to the next level: He must be guilty, he’s not talking about it.”
After Republicans took control of the House, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) granted Carlson exclusive access to tens of thousands of hours of footage from the Capitol. Last week, Carlson presented the results of his review: a smattering of just-asking-questions-style efforts to undercut the “official” — read: accurate — depiction of that day’s events.
Among Carlson’s purported revelations from reviewing the footage was to again focus on Epps. He’d told investigators that he believed text he’d sent a bit after 2 p.m. was after he’d left the Capitol complex but footage showed him in the vicinity for about a half-hour after that point. Carlson didn’t really have a point; there was no new footage of Epps violating the law or enticing people to enter the building. It was just that he “lied” to investigators, Carlson claimed — and therefore (viewers were meant to infer) just as suspicious as Carlson had long insisted.
“The fanciful notions that Mr. Carlson advances on his show regarding Mr. Epps’s involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection are demonstrably (and already proven to be) false,” an attorney for Epps wrote in the letter to Carlson obtained by the Times. “And yet Mr. Carlson persists with his assault on the truth.” Epps sought a retraction of Carlson’s claims and a “formal on-air apology for the lies.”
That’s unlikely. One hallmark of Carlson’s program is that his false and misleading claims are almost never corrected or even acknowledged. He was forced to retract a false claim about dead people voting in Georgia in the wake of the 2020 election, but he admitted this week that those claims came directly from Donald Trump’s campaign, making them, not him, responsible for the error. Other than that, Carlson rarely offers updates to even minor errors. The likelihood that he’ll be eager to correct a huge one, one that’s been central to his efforts to undercut the public understanding of Jan. 6, is remote.
After all, this isn’t really about Epps. It’s about Carlson convincing his audience that they cannot trust any authority figure outside of himself or other fringe-right actors. It’s about introducing doubt wherever possible for those who oppose his agenda. And, by extension, it’s about never introducing doubt about himself. Admitting a mistake is a central part of responsible news coverage. But it is also a jumping off point for bad-faith critics to do what Carlson does: suggest that this one admitted mistake proves the existence of an endless network of mistakes just under the water’s surface.
Epps certainly deserves an apology from Carlson, if for no other reason than that there’s no evidence to support Carlson’s claims in the first place. Without threatening further legal action, though, it’s very unlikely he’ll get one.
