The January 6 committee recently ended with a whimper after a year of pomp and circumstance. Despite much manipulation of information by its members, the committee’s report garnered all of about eight hours of headline news before quickly burning out.
Why? Because there was almost nothing revealed that we didn’t already know in it, and no matter how much Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, and the rest insisted otherwise, they themselves never produced an ounce of evidence that Donald Trump orchestrated and was responsible for the Capitol breach.
Still, there was something interesting shown in the testimony of now-infamous Ray Epps, the man who was caught on video multiple times telling people to enter the Capitol Building on January 6th. While the committee’s final report never mentions him, he apparently stated “I also orchestrated it” in relation to the events of that day.
Yet, for some reason, Adam Kinzinger rushed to social media on Sunday morning to defend Epps.
It’s worth noting that this is the second time that Kinzinger has gone to bat for Epps. He did so in January 2022, actually painting the man who helped incite the riot at the Capitol as a sympathetic figure. It was one of the weirder moments of the entire January 6th saga. More importantly, though, Kinzinger is lying, and he’s lying in a way that is very easily exposed.
Look at the language the ousted Illinois congressman uses. In response to someone saying “Ray Epps is on video encouraging the riot and admitted such in a sworn statement,” Kinzinger claims it is “literally completely untrue.” Now, I’m no linguist, but I’m pretty sure I know what the words “literally” and “completely” mean, and they would indicate that nothing in Eric Matheny’s statement is true.
But as I noted above, Epps is on video multiple times telling people to attack the Capitol Building. He was also present on January 6th and appears to have ordered the first attack (that’s also on video, as shown below). Further, he does indeed say in his sworn testimony that he “also orchestrated it.”
Why is a congressman who served on the January 6 committee outright lying about something that is so obviously true? The videos of Epps are not new and have been circulating since 2021. He clearly and unambiguously incited the riot and the entry into the Capitol Building. In fact, when you watch the different clips of him, he seems to be very well rehearsed in what he’s saying and doing.
That he was never arrested while grandmas who took selfies were thrown into solitary confinement has always been a major red flag. Given that, perhaps we should figure out why Kinzinger keeps defending the one man with the most evidence of incitement against him in relation to January 6th. Wasn’t the committee’s entire justification for existing to find out why the attack happened? Yet, they completely ignore the man who instigated it?
None of that makes any sense unless you begin to think the worst, which is that the government was involved. But hey, I’m sitting here typing this, willing to hear a reasonable explanation for why Epps was ignored by the committee and has never been arrested. If Kinzinger has one, he’s welcome to share it because lying about what happened isn’t convincing anyone.