As if we needed yet another reason to hate and distrust the mainstream media.

Last weekend, CBS’s “60 Minutes” went to great lengths to try to clear the name of one of the most mysterious and controversial characters of the January 6 riot: Ray Epps.

You remember Ray Epps: The tall guy with the MAGA hat and the loud voice who essentially yelled “Fire!” in a crowded theater when he exhorted the crowd, “We need to go into the Capitol!”

Back in October 2021, we reported this news as Kentucky Republican Congressman Thomas Massie questioned Attorney General Merrick Garland about Epps, who appeared to be a government-protected agent provocateur. After all, Epps was not only seen on video having encouraged the breach of the Capitol, but he was also seen having encouraged the first wave of protesters into the Capitol building. As we noted at the time, a comprehensive collection of videos from that day shows Epps in different locations, and his oft-repeated message was the same: “We need to go into the Capitol.”

I questioned Attorney General Garland about whether there were Federal Agents present on 1/6 and whether they agitated to go into the Capitol. Attorney General Garland refused to answer. pic.twitter.com/RHq3Yd2pbu

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) October 21, 2021

As Massie said: “There’s a concern that there were agents of the government, who were assets of the government, who were present on January 5th and 6th during the protests. As far as we can determine, the individual who was saying he’ll probably go to jail, he’ll probably be arrested, but they need to go into the Capitol the next day, is then the next day directing people to the Capitol. And as far as we can find, this individual has not been charged with anything. You said this is one of the most sweeping in history.”

Indeed, adding to the mystery and suspicion, the FBI stealthily removed Epps from its Capitol Violence Most Wanted List on July 1, 2021, just one day after one of Epps’s primary January 6 associates had been exposed. Why on earth would the FBI do that?

Then there was the Senate hearing on January 11, 2022, when Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton and their Republican colleagues grilled a couple of hapless FBI pencil-pushers about the agency’s role in the violence of January 6. As we reported at the time, perhaps the most telling moment was this exchange between Cruz and Jill Sanborn, executive assistant director of the FBI’s National Security branch: “On January 6, Mr. Epps is seen whispering to a person, and five seconds later … that same person begins to forcibly tear down the barricades. Did Mr. Epps urge them to tear down the barricades?”

Sanborn replied, “Sir, similar to the other answers, I cannot answer that.”

The feds’ behavior surrounding Epps certainly seemed suspicious, especially as other J6 participants were being rounded up from all around the country via armed raids and summarily thrown in jail, many of them into solitary confinement. Two-tiered justice, anyone?

And yet here was The New York Times’s headline from July 13 of last year: “A Trump Backer’s Downfall as the Target of a Jan. 6 Conspiracy Theory.” And its subhead: “Ray Epps became the unwitting face of an attempt by pro-Trump forces to promote the baseless idea that the F.B.I. was behind the attack on the Capitol.”

A baseless idea?

Perhaps the Times should reacquaint itself with Matt Rosenberg, its very own Pulitzer Prize-winning national security correspondent who, as we reported on March 16 of last year, had been caught on video telling some supremely inconvenient truths to an undercover journalist from Project Veritas. The most inconvenient of them all was this admission from Rosenberg: “There were a ton of FBI informants among the people who attacked the Capitol.”

Even Nancy Pelosi’s select committee defended Epps as it was vilifying others who’d engaged in similar behavior. As The Federalist’s Tristan Justice asks: “Why would the Jan. 6 Committee, which was ostensibly established to prosecute exactly the kind of behavior Epps displayed, come to his defense? Why would CBS News and The New York Times, both accomplices to the panel’s narrative of a ‘violent insurrection,’ do the same?”

Finally, then, there’s the “60 Minutes” piece that aired this past weekend in a full-throated and highly sympathetic attempt to rehabilitate Epps.

To be clear, we have no problem whatsoever with the mainstream media’s efforts to debunk the prevailing narrative about one of the key characters in the January 6 riot. What really galls us, though, is that neither the Times nor CBS News has done any serious reporting on Rosenberg’s devastating admission that there were federal agents embedded all over the place at the Capitol that day.

Let’s forget the mainstream media’s Ray Epps smokescreen for a moment. What about all the other agents that Matt Rosenberg mentions? Why is the mainstream media so incurious, so disinterested in getting to the bottom of the FBI’s involvement in January 6? Don’t the American people deserve the whole truth of that day, or are we expected to be satisfied with Nancy Pelosi’s pathetically one-sided show trial and final report?

What we wrote some 18 months ago still stands: The extent to which federal agents provoked the protesters to enter the Capitol building demands an accounting.

And while we may never know the answer to that question, the fact that we need to ask should trouble every American who respects law and order, who is troubled by our two-tiered system of justice, and who believes the government should be enforcing our laws rather than inciting others to break them.

UPDATE: Disgraced former Fox News star Bill O'Reilly, whose primetime slot was actually taken by Tucker Carlson when the network fired him, suggests that Ray Epps may actually sue Carlson — which we happen to think would be a great way for him to prove his innocence. After all, if Epps really is innocent, he doesn’t have anything to fear from Carlson’s legal team and what they might find during discovery.

But for the life of us, we just don’t see how a guy who encouraged an act as unlawful as storming the Capitol during a legislative session was protected by both the Feds and Nancy Pelosi’s hyper-partisan committee. The video evidence against him was open-and-shut, tantamount to Michael Brown’s stepfather climbing atop that car in Ferguson and exhorting the crowd that had assembled around him to “Burn this btch down!” Given how the Feds treated every other J6 suspect, how on earth could they *not have arrested and charged Ray Epps?