As anyone who pays attention knows, people who take orders from Donald Trump eventually get burned. But one faithful MAGA minion — Ray Epps — wasn't paying attention, marching to the Capitol on Jan. 6 just like Donald Trump instructed him to do.
Repercussions for his loyalty came just months later, when Tucker Carlson decided the GQP needed a scapegoat and vilified the foolish Trumper as the culprit behind the insurrection, falsely claiming he was a covert FBI operative who helped instigate the riots. (Carlson's faux reports were then echoed by Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, among other authoritarian bullies.)
"All of this, it's just been hell," a regretful Epps said in July.
Many months after receiving death threats that forced him to flee his Arizona business and home, the 61-year-old gentleman is demanding that the noxious Fox host apologize for "false and defamatory statements."
From The New York Times:
A lawyer for Ray Epps, the man at the center of a prominent conspiracy theory about the Capitol riot, sent a letter on Thursday to the Fox News host Tucker Carlson demanding that he publicly retract his "false and defamatory statements" that Mr. Epps had worked as a government provocateur on Jan. 6, 2021, and helped to instigate the mob attack.
The letter to Mr. Carlson from the lawyer, Michael Teter, also demanded a "formal on-air apology for the lies" that have been "spread about Mr. Epps" by others at Fox. …
Letters seeking retractions and apologies are often sent when lawyers are preparing to file a defamation lawsuit. …
Mr. Epps, a former Marine, traveled to Washington from his home in Arizona to support Mr. Trump and was videotaped on the night before the attack urging people to go inside the Capitol. He was also in the crowd on Jan. 6 moving past barricades outside the building, although he never went inside and ultimately sought to de-escalate tensions in the mob.
Still, he became the face of the conspiracy theory that the federal government had instigated the Capitol attack for a single reason: He was never charged for what he did on Jan. 6. In reality, prosecutors declined to file charges against thousands of people who had breached the barricades outside the Capitol but never entered the building.
