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Jan. 6 committee releases 19 witness transcripts including interviews with Trump Jr., Ray Epps [1]
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Date: 2022-12-29
The January 6 committee published 19 transcripts on Thursday, adding to a growing list of records it has already released to supplement its final report unwinding the attack at the U.S. Capitol and former President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Transcripts released Thursday include interviews with:
This story is developing. Updates and highlights from key transcripts to come.
Related coverage available here.
HIGHLIGHTS
Ray Epps
Epps, a former U.S. Marine and one-time leader of the Oath Keepers chapter in Arizona, met with the committee voluntarily on Jan. 21, 2022 and in November 2021. The transcript released on Thursday is from his January interview.
Epps came to Washington on Jan. 6 and was filmed at the Capitol but was never arrested. He has admitted to directing people toward the Capitol after Trump’s speech. Historically, Epps has told reporters he believes he was never arrested because he contacted the FBI promptly after his name first started circulating in FBI alerts about the siege. Phone records, according to The New York Times, have corroborated this account and Epps has maintained that video of him purportedly “urging” people to storm the Capitol is actually footage of him attempting to calm rioters. Epps entered the building briefly but spent most of his time on restricted grounds outside.
Epps became a touchstone for Jan. 6 conspiracy theorists who argued he was a deep state plant and member of the FBI who helped orchestrate the Capitol attack. Those conspiracy theories were spurred by right-wing extremists as well as mainstream talking heads on Fox News and among Republican members of Congress.
Former President Donald Trump namedropped Epps at a rally and intensified unfounded theories about Epps being part of a “false flag” mission attacking the Capitol. Epps caims to have endured multiple death threats since then.
Per the transcript, Epps addressed some of the claims against him head-on.
He told members of the committee that he has never worked for the FBI, and never spoke to law enforcement at the FBI or elsewhere when he arrived in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 4.
He did, however, have an interaction with far-right streamer, Jan. 6 defendant and reported white supremacist Anthime Gionet, also known as “Baked Alaska.” Gionet, who live-streamed himself storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, has accused Epps of being part of the “deep state.”
Epps told investigators on the night of Jan. 5, he was out “trying to protect” law enforcement from people, namely, “antifa.” When he came upon Baked Alaska, Epps said Gionet was “trying to incite violence on the police, trying to get other people involved” and he meant to stop it.
“There was a few megaphones there, people trying to you know, there was somebody screaming about — oh, what’s that guy’s name? Screaming about one guy and then somebody else screaming about antifa, ‘ef Antifa’ and all that kind of stuff. And then people wanting to fight with BLM. And just, like, I can’t believe this is going on. These aren’t—are these Trump supporters? And what it was, I don’t believe they were Trump supporters. I believe they were trying to get Trump supporters to, to back their cause. So I tried to deescalate it. I went over to the gentleman. Well, he’s not a gentleman,” Epps said. “I went over to the guy that calls himself Baked Alaska and had words with him, that this was not what we’re about. We need to stay focused. You guys are — are not right. You shouldn’t be doing this with police. He was saying the police broke their oath, you know, calling them all kind of names and stuff. And I’m sure you can go their body cams and find everything I was saying.”
On the 6th, Epps testified that he tried to convince multiple people to protest peacefully but failed when up against “the ones with megaphones and cameras” who were “trying to drive a different narrative [and] trying to suck people in.”
Epps admits he told people to go to the Capitol. It was “his vision,” he said, to get as many people as possible to “surround it, be there, let them know we’re not happy with the, with what, what has happened and that was it,” he said.
“No violence,” he added.
Epps has said that he left the area around the Capitol before any violence broke out.
“They used violence to enter our Capitol, violence and breaking windows and different things. I wasn’t aware of any of that until later on and seeing it on the news like everyone else. That’s not, that’s not law-abiding and we’re law-abiding people. Without law, it’s anarchy. It’s not good. Without government, there’s anarchy. It’s not good. Any government is better than no government,” Epps testified.
He attended Trump’s speech at the Ellipse but before it began, he had already begun telling attendees to go to the Capitol after Trump’s remarks were over. The idea to march there was organic, he said.
“It was pretty common knowledge that everybody was going to go to the Capitol. I was just trying to help out,” Epps testified.
No one told him to instruct the crowd either, he added. He and others who had “problems” with the outcome of the 2020 election simply “thought it was important that our elected officials know we had a problem with the election.”
Trump had just begun his speech around noon when Epps and others started walking toward the Capitol. He left his adult son, who had traveled with him to D.C. at the rally at the Ellipse. Epps ended up in front of the crowd and told investigators he assumed that the Capitol would be open and welcoming. And warm. He, nor his son, were dressed for the cold weather, he testified.
Most of the people already at the Capitol when he arrived “were not your grandmas and your grandpas,” he said.
“You know, not us fat guys,” Epps told investigators.
Most people there at that time were in their mid-20s and early 30s, he said. Some were wearing identical clothing, like khakis and orange caps. This outfit was common to Proud Boys in Washington on Jan. 6.
Many of those around him, he said, were people he recognized from the night before who had eagerly riled up rallygoers. There ended up being a lot of those people and others “in a rage” on Jan. 6, Epps said.
“It’s almost like they were in a rage the whole time, like they were losing their minds. I didn’t understand it but that’s what was going on… They definitely had an agenda,” he said.
Epps said he tried to convince a man sporting a backward cap to stop pulling at police barriers and knocking cops to their feet. Once people got beyond fencing, Epps said he kept going forward toward the west side of Capitol with them in hopes of talking them down. Those plans started to falter as the chaos around him increased.
“At that point, I wasn’t [trying to deescalate]. I was in the crowd. I was trying to figure out what I was going to do,” he told the committee.
Coming upon police, Epps said he began talking to them and protesters as they clashed. Body cam footage reviewed by the select committee shows Epps saying ‘we made our point' to other rioters.
Epps said he meant to convince those rioting to stop the “mess.” It was no longer his aim to enter the Capitol and he wanted to prevent others from doing the same since everything had spun out of control. He couldn’t recall how long he tried to deescalate at that point but once rioters got inside, he followed. A couple steps in, looking around and smelling the tear gas, he felt sick. As he began to leave, he testified, he heard calls for a medic.
Epps was once trained as an EMT, he said, and he was getting ready to do CPR on someone who had collapsed near him. A medic with experience appeared beside them and within minutes, Epps and the “medic” pulled the collapsed person through the crowd and found a spot near a tree to prop them up against.
“I looked back. I saw people crawling all over the Capitol, climbing the walls. It made me kind of ill to my stomach, I decided to go back to the — there was no point, it had gone beyond what I wanted it to be,” he said.
Epps further testified that he did not talk to anyone at the FBI, CIA or the NSA on the 7th. The panel had Epps go down a list of his phone calls from Jan. 5 to Jan. 7 and affirm the identity of each person he called or who called him. Incoming and outgoing calls were to family members and work associates.
After the insurrection, Epps learned he was on an FBI alert list from his brother-in-law. His brother-in-law found a picture of him on Twitter and shared it with his wife on Jan. 8. Epps immediately called the FBI.
“Well, I wanted to— I wanted to straighten them out and let them know what happened,” he said.
He was on the phone for an hour and when he hung up, he had no idea what would happen next. Text records obtained by the committee show Epps sought out a lawyer on Jan. 12 and he sent a letter that same day to the FBI’s field office in Phoenix. He wanted to cooperate with the FBI, he wrote. He finally met with agents in March, with his attorney in tow. There were no documents to produce, he said, but he answered all of their questions. His son was interviewed by the FBI in April and at that time, turned over a series of photographs he took from Jan. 6.
The claims that he was part of a “false flag” or party to a conspiracy to attack the Capitol are claims peddled by grifters who want to “push this garbage” to make themselves more successful, Epps said.
“Or on the other hand, to further them in a political career,” he told the select committee.
These claims against him have ruined several aspects of his life, he said. There’s been serious death threats. He was advised by his attorney not to speak out publicly about the conspiracy theories, so he didn’t, he said. Not speaking made it worse and led people to believe he must be guilty, he said.
“We had a tour bus come by our home and our business with all these whacked out people in it. There are good people out there that was in Washington. Those aren’t the people that’s coming by my house. This attracts — when they do this sort of thing — this attacks all the crazies out there. We’ve got one guy that has been in prison and shot by police once and he’s out on bail right now, and he’s trying to contact me,” Epps testified.
Though Trump namedropped him at a rally and made his life more difficult, Epps also blamed Rep. Thomas Massie and the rightwing outlet, Revolver.
“I mean it’s real crazy stuff and he brought that kind of stuff to the floor of the House. When that happened, it just blew up. It got really, really bad. Him, and gosh, [Rep. Matt] Gaetz and [Rep. Marjorie Taylor] Greene and yeah, they’re just blowing this thing up. So it got really really difficult after that. The crazies started coming out of the woodwork,” he said.
The attention wasn’t limited to Epps alone. His attorney, John Blischak—who sat by his side during the panel’s more than hour-long interview—revealed that when hysteria around Epps hit a fever pitch, he received a threatening call too.
[END]
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