A Smokescreen of Crazy

Discovery requests by Trump indicate how much further off the deep end all this may go.

Ray Epps, center at U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Photo: Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

On Monday, The Washington Post reported on some bizarre discovery requests by Trump in the federal criminal case in D.C. 

Broadly put, discovery is the process where the parties exchange information about the case, often in the form of documents. It’s meant to reduce surprise and afford the parties a fair opportunity to test the strength of the other side’s case.

But that’s not what Trump is up to. Included among his requests is straight up conspiracy level garbage, including that January 6 was a set-up by the federal government, which of course Trump was still in charge of, or some kind of Antifa plot.

Trump has asked for all government documents regarding people like “Ray Epps,” a January 6 protester falsely accused by right-wing media of being an FBI agent. Epps has had to go into hiding because of threats to him and his family.

He’s also asked for documents about the so-called “Scaffold Commander”—a crowd coordinator at the insurrection. Right-wing media falsely identified him as John Nichols, a liberal reporter who was actually in Madison, Wisconsin that day. There’s also a request about the “Fence Cutter Bulwark,” another conspiracy about a protester who cut and removed snow fencing around the Capitol, allowing the protestors to freely approach. 

Trump has further generally demanded all documents about the presence of Antifa at the Capitol or among law enforcement who “encouraged or participated in any illegal activities on January 6th.”

What’s going on with these requests? Are they a product of Trump’s warped mind, poisoned as it is by right-wing misinformation and conspiracy theories? Or is it part of a larger scheme to distract, confuse and delay? 

These requests indicate that Trump intends to rewrite January 6th to downplay his role and falsely suggest others in the “deep state” or on the far-left were to blame for it. Alongside his intent to relitigate debunked claims about a stolen election, his defense, both in court and in public, will be a fount of lies and disinformation. 

We had better buckle up and work to stay ahead of this flood, armed with actual information and fully aware of the smokescreen Trump and his legal team plan to push out at us. Hold your nose, because we’re diving into some weird crap today.

Ray Epps

Every conspiracy needs a face, and poor Ray Epps never figured he’d be the one. Like many MAGA faithful, Epps had traveled to D.C. at Trump’s invitation to participate in the January 6 protest. He was part of the violent mob outside the Capitol, and in September of this year he pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct on restricted grounds.

Trump and his allies had desperately wanted to shift blame for the insurrection to other parties, from Antifa (who weren’t there) to the FBI, whom conspiracy theorists claimed had planned the attack in order to target conservatives. According to The New York Times, which did a big story on Epps,

Obscure right-wing media outlets, like Revolver News, used selectively edited videos and unfounded leaps of logic to paint him as a secret federal asset in charge of a “breach team” responsible for setting off the riot at the Capitol.

This is because, according to Epps’s lawyer, when other protesters began to get violent and attack law enforcement at the Capitol, Epps “sought to deescalate and restore peace and order.”

No matter. Fox’s Tucker Carlson amplified the false theories about Epps on his program, as did elected GOP officials such as Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). Then Trump got into the mix as well, talking about Epps at political rallies. #WhoIsRayEpps trended on Twitter.

After that, Epps was regularly attacked by total strangers as a traitor to America. Some threatened his life. Ray Epps and his wife had to sell their business and home and go into hiding in an RV.

There is no evidence Epps had any association with the FBI or was any kind of plant. Instead, he was a convenient target, a villain for extremists to tarnish and condemn, much the way they did election worker Ruby Freeman just for doing her job. Like Freeman, Epps is suing news networks like Fox who intentionally defamed him.

The “Scaffold Commander” and the “Fence Cutter Bulwark.”

Two other figures in the crowd that day earned spooky, conspiratorial names from far-right media: “Scaffold Commander” and “Fence Cutter Bulwark.” 

Before we lift the rock to look at this mess, a note about the names. Right wing conspiracy sites selected these monikers for the alleged FBI agents in order to suggest shadowy, hidden characters working for the government, when in fact they were simply run of the mill MAGA protestors. The “Scaffold Commander” was some guy who climbed a scaffold and urged protestors to go into the Capitol, shouting from a platform set up for the Biden inaugural. The “Fence Cutter Bulwark” earned his name because he cut snow fencing away and wore a “Bulwark” brand fire-retardant jacket. Neither was “commander” or a true “bulwark.”

Imagine being John Nichols, a liberal reporter for The Nation, and seeing your name appear online as the “Scaffold Commander” from the January 6 riot. On that day, you were actually home in Madison, watching the riot unfurl on television. You updated the Nation website and an article entitled “Impeach Trump Immediately.” Now, suddenly, you were instrumental in inciting the insurrection?

The photos of the “Scaffold Commander” did “look like a younger me,” Nichols told The Washington Post, but “for better or worse we do age a bit.”

Image courtesy of Reddit

Nichols was surprised to learn that the conspiracy had recently resurfaced in an unlikely place: the discovery requests by Trump made to the government. Why had Trump or his attorneys picked up on this story?

The “Fence Cutter Bulwark” is a similar SMDH / facepalm moment. This protester was caught on film removing fencing, anticipating the crowd’s movement from the Ellipse to the Capitol. Right-wingers claim that this is “evidence” that there was an FBI agent who lured Trump supporters into trespassing. (Yes, it’s quite the leap.)

Said Revolver News editor Darren Beattie on Glenn Beck’s radio program,

I am very convinced that if ... Fence Cutter Bulwark [was] simply identified, it would be the biggest scandal in the country. And definitively confirm that January 6 was a “Fedsurrection,” in the darkest sense of the imagination.

And yet, the guy identified as the fence cutter has given podcast interviews insisting he is no federal agent. He claims he cut down and rolled up plastic “snow fences” because they were a safety hazard. An undercover D.C. metro police officer named Ryan Roe has a recording showing the man removing the fencing while Roe thanks him, saying “Appreciate it, brother,” seeming to corroborate this story.

There isn’t any evidence to discover

It’s important to recognize that the question of FBI and Antifa plants has been fully investigated and litigated in the context of other January 6 defendants’ cases. All of the government’s records, recordings, documents and files have been made available to hundred of attorneys and their clients, many of whom wanted also to argue that this was some kind of inside job and that they were somehow duped or less culpable.

Nothing has come of it. 

That’s why it’s doubly suspicious that Trump and his attorneys want to plow the same ground. If there were anything to these wild claims, that evidence would have surfaced by now. And Jack Smith has made it clear that the government has turned over everything it has, and there’s no more to be produced in response.

Trump knows, however, that he can make a whole meal out of a nothingburger. Enough of his loyal followers believe the lie about the FBI and Antifa, for example, that merely mentioning these shadowy characters is enough to further confuse and mislead them. After all, with all these stories out there, there has to be a bit of truth to them, right? With that much smoke, there has just got to be fire, right?

The playbook is the same as Trump used for the Big Lie, connecting obscure anecdotes and misleading claims of election fraud together into a fantastical network of untruth and misdirection. Never mind that it actually doesn’t matter whether his followers attacked on their own or were led into attacking; Trump still stood by and watched the assault and did nothing to quell it for hours.

The government will file what’s called “motions in limine” to prevent false conspiracies and tangential claims from polluting the trial. If Smith succeeds and Judge Chutkan excludes most or all of such evidence, Trump likely will then argue on appeal, that he was unfairly kept from presenting “his” side of the case. It’s all part of his deep state, witch-hunt narrative.

The battle will also play out in public. Trump will emerge from the courthouse and tell America that the election was stolen, that the feds were behind January 6, but that he’s not being allowed to show that inside the courtroom. The media needs to be prepared to not simply just repeat his false claims, but rather to label them as false and explain precisely why that each is.

In the meantime, we can all stand to be more informed. We regrettably must now know about Ray Epps, the “Scaffold Commander” and “Fence Cutter Bulwark.” We have to understand how these names bubbled up from the fetid corners of the internet and found their way into the former president’s requests for production in a federal criminal case. As absurd as all of this is, we must deal with it head on and speak the truth in response.