Ray Epps, a former Marine who became the target of a January 6, 2021, “conspiracy theory,” has been charged with a misdemeanor offense in connection with the US Capitol riot and is expected to plead guilty, according to court papers filed Tuesday. You may remember Epps from the many videos of him organizing and exhorting crowds to enter the Capitol building on that day. “We have to go into the Capitol!” he famously yelled to the throng. The night before his rhetoric was so over the top that those assembled started chanting, “Fed! Fed!” Obviously.
Epps didn’t go into the Capitol building, authorities tell us. That’s why he is only charged with a misdemeanor. Enrique Tarrio wasn’t even in Washington DC that day and he received 22 years in a federal penitentiary—and prosecutors sought a 33-year prison sentence. But Tarrio was encouraging his fellow Proud Boys to riot through encrypted messages. That’s the difference? Epps texted his nephew at 2:12 pm on January 6 to tell him, “I was in the front with a few others,” adding, “I also orchestrated it.” Epps won’t spend a day in federal prison. Nor was he held for years in a federal jail cell without bail.
We are told that the disruption in the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was an attempt by right wing forces to overthrow democracy. It was branded an “insurrection” with the goal of Trump supporters to take over government to keep Trump in power. The public was supposed to believe that a large and unorganized crowd of Trump supporters—farmers and proletarians—armed not even with pitchforks, but only with flags and posters and pro-USA merch, entering one government building, represented a threat to democracy.
What Trump supporters did accomplish—if they intended to accomplish anything other than venting their frustration with obvious election rigging and if we can give them the credit for disrupting anything—was undermining a process that was in fact favorable to Trump. In other words, the disturbance was used to derail a democratic process that threatened the finalization of a four-year slow-moving coup. Trump did not want them interrupting the process. He told them them to “peacefully and patriotically” march to the Capitol and let the Republican lawmakers know that the public supported the challenging of the certification of several states with obvious election irregularities—challenges that were entirely legal under federal law.
(Note: The FBI had so many paid informants at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, that the Bureau lost track of the number and had to perform a audit to determine exactly how many “confidential human sources” run by different FBI field offices were present that day, a former assistant director of the bureau has told lawmakers.)
As occurs every four years in America, a joint session of Congress was convened on January 6, 2021, to certify the electoral college results of the 2020 United States presidential election. The law guiding this process is the Electoral Count Act of 1887 (ECA), which outlines the procedures for Congress to follow when counting and certifying electoral votes and resolving any objections raised by members of Congress. According to the ECA, a member of the House of Representatives can object to the certification of electoral votes from their state during the joint session of Congress. If both a member of the House and a member of the Senate object to a state’s electoral votes, it triggers a process where both chambers of Congress must separately debate and vote on the objection before proceeding with the certification.
There have been objections under the ECA in past elections. During the joint session of Congress to certify the electoral votes of the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, there were objections raised by some members of the Congressional Black Caucus regarding the electoral votes from Florida. Unfortunately, these objections did not result in a sustained debate and vote because they lacked the necessary support from both a House member and a Senator, as required by the Electoral Count Act. Likewise, during the certification of the electoral votes of the 2004 presidential election between George W. Bush and John Kerry, there were no sustained objections that resulted in debates and votes. And in the certification of the electoral votes of the 2016 presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, objections raised by House members did not result in debates and votes because they lacked the necessary support from the corresponding Senator. All these challenges were led by Democrats.
During the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021, objections were raised by members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate to the certification of electoral votes from certain states. This triggered the process outlined in the ECA for debating and voting on those objections separately in both chambers of Congress. Objections were raised to the certification of electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania. But before more objections could be raised, the so-called insurrection interrupted the process.
The timing of the riot played a significant role in derailing the process. The joint session of Congress was halted, and lawmakers evacuated. When proceedings resumed later in the evening, once the Capitol was secured (it was only a brief and mostly peaceful “occupation,” during which Trump told the protestors to peacefully leave the building and grounds and go home), Congress continued with the certification of the electoral votes and the debates on objections. The mood of the body had decisively changed, however.
There were objections planned before the riot to the certification of electoral votes from several states, including Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin. The disruption and its characterization as an insurrection caused lawmakers to reconsider their objections, and they chose not to pursue them for these states. Objections to the electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania were the only ones that proceeded to debate and vote and, predictably, they lost. Mission accomplished.
Epps’ misdemeanor charge? Cover for deep state orchestration of January 6? The string pullers had to do something. If you fall for this trick you don’t understand the way the world works at a fundamental level. The effect of the disturbance was to derail the process of challenging of problematic certifications, to stop a process that could have returned certificates to states with significant electoral irregularities, the sum of which was 62 electoral votes, more than enough to change the outcome of the election. Instead of looking into the problems with the certifications, which would have been the democratic course of action, Congress rubber-stamped the results to avoid appearing to stand with an insurrection that never happened.
It was the culmination of a four-year soft coup to remove a popular President and thwart the will of the People.
freedom and reason 