Six weeks ago, Revolver News published a blockbuster investigative report on Ray Epps — a man who, more than any other individual, appears to be the key unlocking the question of active federal involvement in the so-called “Capitol Siege” of January 6th.
Out of all of the thousands of January 6’s protesters, and the thousands of hours of publicly available footage from that fateful day, Ray Epps has turned out to be perhaps the only person nailed dead to rights confessing on camera to plotting a pre-planned attack on the Capitol. On both January 5 and January 6, Epps announced multiple times, at multiple locations, his upcoming plot to breach the US Capitol. He then spent hours attempting to recruit hundreds of others to join him. On top of it all, Epps was seen leading key people and managing key aspects of the initial breach of the Capitol grounds himself.
It would be one thing if Epps’s repeated calls on January 5 to “go into the Capitol” had simply amounted to bluster. But Epps followed through on his stated mission to shepherd others inside. In clips 4-6 of the above compilation, we see Epps actively orchestrate elements of the very first breach of the Capitol barricades at 12:50 p.m, while Trump still had 20 minutes left in his rally speech.
It is noteworthy that this Ray Epps breach occurs just one minute after Capitol Police began responding to reports of two “pipe bombs” located at DNC and GOP headquarters, respectively. Rather conveniently, the already-handicapped Capitol Police thus had still-fewer resources with which to respond to the barricade breach in question.
While the “pipe bombs” turned out to be a dud, the Ray Epps breach proved fateful. Today, the official stories told by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the US Justice Department all depict the apparent Ray Epps-orchestrated 12:50 p.m. initial breach of metal barricades as the “Big Bang” event of January 6.
In large part, this description is hardly an exaggeration. Indeed, it was the 12:50 p.m. breach of the Capitol grounds, in conjunction with a handful of suspicious individuals ripping down fencing and signage, that set in motion the conditions allowing for 1/6 to turn from a rally into a riot.
In this report, we will blow open this network of still-unindicted key operators who appear to have been at work either with or around Ray Epps during the initial Capitol grounds breach. You, dear reader, will be scandalized — though perhaps unsurprised — to learn that none of the actors covered in this report have received attention in the mainstream press, despite their active and indispensable roles in the events of 1/6.
As we explained in detail in our previous report, the FBI originally put Ray Epps’s face on its Capitol Violence “Most Wanted List” on January 8, 2021, just two days after 1/6. They offered a cash reward for information leading to his arrest. In fact, rank-and-file FBI agents initially deemed Epps’s role as an apparent riot organizer so important that they named him Suspect #16—one of the first 20 high-profile FBI targets in a database now packed with more than 500 suspects.
Then, six months later on June 30, 2021, both Revolver News and The New York Times published inconvenient stories that encouraged a more aggressive interrogation of the “Ray Epps third rail,” leading reasonable people to wonder why this publicly identified man on the Most Wanted List still had no charges filed against him.
The FBI responded to these important media stories the very next day. But their response was to quietly purge all online Ray Epps files from their website, then switch to a posture of “What? Who? Ray Epps? Never heard of him.”
Agents of the FBI Field Office in Phoenix (where Epps lives) have gone so far as to explicitly deny knowledge that Ray Epps even exists. Instead of pursuing Epps, FBI agents have instead pursued journalists who had the temerity to ask Epps in person if he was a government operative. “I understand that, but I can’t say anything,” is all Epps would tell them.
The sham Congressional January 6 Commission seems to be going along with the charade of Ray Epps denialism. For all of its recent gesticulations about Mark Meadows’s benign text messages, the Commission has yet to express even a basic interest in Ray Epps or his communications leading up to and on January 6.
But the specter of Ray Epps, and the ominous questions his immunity raises, loom too large to be memory-holed by poorly coordinated efforts of government denial. In light of the above, it is both amusing and symbolically appropriate that despite the FBI’s attempt to purge Epps’s face from its “Wanted” database (and public denials of his existence from authorized agents), the FBI DC Field Office still features Ray Epps as a “Wanted” man in its current pinned Twitter image (look closely and you’ll find it).
If Epps turns out to have been some kind of government operative, which at present is the only clean and simple explanation for his immunity, it is game over for the official “MAGA insurrection” narrative of 1/6. Epps was the day’s loudest riot recruiter, and its apparent leader of the very first breach of Capitol grounds. If Ray Epps is a Fed, the “Insurrection” becomes the “Fedsurrection” in one fell swoop.
These are the stakes at play in unraveling the Ray Epps enigma.
But it is imperative to note that if Epps was just a cog in a much larger federal operation, he would not have been deployed alone. Historically speaking, when Feds have orchestrated fake mobs of fake protesters, or contrived fake conspiratorial plots, the Feds’ own assets have commonly comprised between 16% to 25% of the plot’s participants, at least in its key respects. Indeed, the FBI once flew in 1,600 rowdy spooks to infiltrate a single convention with just 10,000 protesters.
In recent times, attacks blamed on right-wing militias have blown past the 16% mark on the Fed Saturation Index and have been clocking in at a whopping 25-50%. As Revolver has previously noted:
Students of FBI history should quickly absorb the lesson that infiltrating Feds are like roaches: whenever you spot one, it is guaranteed there are dozens of others nearby. Feds simply never, ever, operate alone. This is how you end up with at least 12 FBI informants in a tiny “right-wing” Michigan militia plot from October 2020 (that’s just informants, not even agents), 15 informants in the “right-wing” 2016 Malheur plot, dozens in the 2014 Bundy Ranch affair — including six FBI undercover agents posing as fake documentarians shooting a fake documentary — and the list goes on.
So if Ray Epps was instructed by the government to play his part in various recruiting, breaching and crowd control efforts that day, we would expect many other informants to be set up around him.
To test this hypothesis, Revolver spent the past six weeks comprehensively mapping Ray Epps’s network of interactions on January 6, and profiling the key people around him who complemented his efforts. We did a deep dive into other key figures involved in the initial breach of the Capitol grounds, as well as figures who played an instrumental role in fence removal and crowd control. In short, we investigated key players whose early actions on 1/6 turned the rally into a riot.
The bad news for Fedsurrection Deniers is the results are in, and they look even worse for the FBI than Revolver’s already low expectations. For brevity, we profile five of the most egregious cases in this report, and tell the story of how they crossed paths and interacted with, and in some cases coordinated with Ray Epps to make 1/6 possible. Some of these cases are so wild as to constitute Epps-sized scandals unto themselves.
But first, it important to note that Feds at the mere informant level are seldom told by their handlers of the presence of other government informants around them. From each individual informant’s perspective, the agitators around them would look as lawless to them as they did to the crowd.
This exact strange situation played out in the climax of the Whitmer Kidnapping Plot. The car that prosecutors say “cased” the Governor’s house had five passengers—two homeless patsies, and three secret Feds. But only the agent-level Fed in the car had total operational awareness. Each of the two informants in the car probably thought the other was a legitimate insurrectionist.
So it is not necessary for all or any of the individuals covered in this report to know each other or to have affirmatively “worked together” to have formed a “team” through collective effort. A simple text message from a federal handler to “Be at the Peace Monument at 12:45 p.m. and flush out the crazies” would be all that’s needed for a large ring of provocateurs to simultaneously be in the same place, at the same time, contributing to the same breach.
So now, without further ado, we will tell the true, documented story of 1/6 that the Regime doesn’t want you to hear, involving key unindicted figures the Regime would prefer that you never heard of.
If there were such a thing as an unbiased January 6 Commission that sought to piece together the accurate timeline and narrative of events on 1/6, the following study would be the sort of thing it would publish.
Revolver makes no facial allegation about any of the individuals below. However, some very serious, shocking and time-sensitive questions are raised by this report. To that extent, our accusations and demands are aimed squarely at the US Justice Department.
FBI Director Chris Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland have an awful lot of explaining to do.
The Booby Trap that Turned a Rally into a Riot
Before we get acquainted with the key unindicted players operating around Ray Epps, let’s quickly touch upon the basic facts of the initial breach of the Capitol grounds.
The “Big Bang” moment that kicked off the riot was when a small “breach team” of just a few dozen people violently knocked over the first set of metal barricades between 12:50-12:53 p.m. They forced back the police, and therefore opened a clean walkway entrance to the crowd behind them.
We will hereafter refer to this location of barriers as the “Ray Epps breach site,” and the collection of individuals responsible for this critical initial breach as the “Ray Epps breach team.” Clips from that breach scene, with Ray Epps standing front and center giving out directions, are republished below for convenience.
This same breach team then proceeded to haul the metal police barricades off to the side, tear down “Restricted Area” signage, and systematically remove protective fencing from the Capitol lawn. Ordinarily, with no barriers in place, this entire area is open to the public.
To get a geographical sense of the Ray Epps crime scene, the below image shows where the Capitol’s rear barricades and fencing were first attacked. This area is also known as the Peace Monument.
The tactical importance of this breached location is that it was the very first walkway entrance into the Capitol grounds that every Trump supporter would arrive at first as they walked from the Trump rally to the Capitol.
The Ray Epps Breach Team had the amazing foresight to pry open the one walkway entrance that no one could avoid.
As you can see from the above, both the Pennsylvania Ave and the Constitution Ave exits from the Trump speech intersect at the exact Peace Monument barricade targeted in advance by the Ray Epps Breach Team. If any of the eight other walkway entrances into the Capitol grounds had been toppled instead, tens of thousands of marchers would have been met by police and metal barricades, instead of an open gate.
The Ray Epps breach team thus set up a booby trap by pushing back the police, then hauling away the “restricted area” signage, the chain fencing, and the metal barricades—all while tens of thousands were still at the Trump rally. Without police present or “do not enter” signs prominently visible, people leaving Trump’s speech and arriving at the Capitol entrance would have no idea it was illegal to walk through the gate, or onto the lawn, or up to the Capitol steps. After all, this entire area is ordinarily open to the public.
Instead, they heard friendly music and saw the main walkway to the Capitol grounds wide open. These unwitting Trump supporters had no idea they had just crossed an invisible tripwire that would later subject them to federal prosecution for trespassing.
Moreover, the giant main component of Trump protesters would not arrive at this Capitol entrance until 50 minutes after the Ray Epps Breach Team opened up the walkway—Trump had 20 minutes left in his speech, and it took 30 minutes to walk to the Peace Monument. This giant component arrived at the entrance and saw hundreds of people already inside the Capitol grounds. They would no longer stage their protest back behind the fencing, because the Breach Team booby-trappers had already hauled most of it away before they got there. The giant component therefore walked all the way up to the Capitol building itself.
As we described in more detail in our October 10 report, the Ray Epps Breach Team thus set up what may amount to the largest legal booby-trap in American history.
Indeed, when the DOJ indicted Oath Keeper Jeremy Brown in September for “trespassing on restricted grounds” (18 US Code § 1752), the Justice Department explained that any January 6 protester who stepped foot within the red line below had committed a federal crime and could be kept in prison without bail until a criminal trial 12+ months away.
But how did this happen? Who exactly pulled it off? And how does it all trace back to Ray Epps?
Setting Up The Booby Trap
In our October 10 Revolver report, we showed January 6 footage of one dark-complected man coolly and methodically cutting down and then rolling up “restricted area” fencing around the Capitol lawn. He had no Trump gear on, and made sure to wear dark sunglasses on a cloudy day. He was not angry. He was dispassionate, calm, and professional, like he was just there to do a job.
This man remains unindicted. In fact, the FBI does not even appear to even be looking for him. He is wholly absent from the FBI Capitol “Most Wanted List.” There is no reward for information leading to his arrest.
For perspective, the FBI’s “Most Wanted List” features plenty of MAGA grandmas and teens who committed no property crimes or physical damage at all. For instance, you can still win a cash reward for information leading to the arrest of FBI “Most Wanted” Suspect # 34.
Despite the FBI’s lack of interest in this brazen booby-trapper seen rolling up restricted area fencing, online researchers have stayed on the case. They have dubbed this individual “#FenceCutterBulwark”, with “Bulwark” being the brand name of his fire-retardant jacket, designed for professional use in the oil and gas industry. You’ll see more fire-retardant jackets among the unindicted below.
Moreover, 12:31 p.m. is 17 minutes before the large group of 220+ marching Proud Boys arrived at the Peace Monument from their lunch break. Here’s why that matters:
The official January 6 story, as parroted by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and HBO, is that the Proud Boys’ arrival at the Peace Monument at 12:48 p.m. is what sparked a sudden breach. But the fact that FenceCutterBulwark and other key operators (until now ignored by mainstream media) were already waiting in place while the Proud Boys’ were still a mile away eating lunch suggests a more sinister possibility: foreknowledge of an imminent breach at this exact location.
If it were just FenceCutterBulwark hanging out near the breach site before the Proud Boys’ arrival, we might chalk it up to coincidence. But the presence of multiple key breach figures waiting here seems too much to be coincidental. In the below video, continuously recorded between 12:40-12:50 p.m., you will see Ray Epps already in position at the exact walkway entrance the breach team will pry open, at least six minutes before they arrive (in fact, we know he was there 45 minutes before they arrived too).
NWScaffoldCommander (we’ll call him just “ScaffoldCommander” for short) gets his name from being the ostensible “commander” of the prominent “media tower” that overlooked the Capitol’s back terrace on January 6. You’ve probably seen this tower in pictures—it’s the tall temporary structure built in November 2020 so that media crews could properly film the January 2021 inauguration ceremony. Here’s what it looks like without people around.
As you can see, this tower is the most perfect “command post” that anyone seeking to monitor and direct the Capitol crowd could possibly hope for. It stands front and center, everyone can see it, and the man high atop it can see and scream down to all.
One can only imagine the damage a highly aggressive and monomaniacally focused breach leader could do from this perch if he had zero scruples, a plan to attack the Capitol, and an extremely loud megaphone.
From high atop the tower between 1 p.m. – 2:30 p.m, ScaffoldCommander issued the iconic bellows and non-stop commands that are loud and clear on almost every video clip from January 6 filmed in that time interval. For nearly 90 minutes straight, he bombards the otherwise leaderless crowd below him with endless variations on a single instruction: “Don’t just stand there. Keep moving forward!”
But once the crowd had continuously “moved forward” for over an hour, and the very first handful of rioters entered the building, ScaffoldCommander suddenly threw the switch: “Okay we’re in! We’re in! Come on! We gotta fill up the Capitol! Come on! Come now! We need help We gotta fill up the Capitol! They got in.”
This clip below is checkmate. It should make ScaffoldCommander one of the top criminal suspects on the entire FBI Capitol Most Wanted List (spoiler alert: he isn’t even on the list, and no charges have been filed, and the FBI to date has still never acknowledged his existence).
For perspective, it’s important to step into the shoes of January 6 rallygoers to see just how dominant and pervasive ScaffoldCommander’s influence was over the crowd’s psychology the entire time.
Rallygoers could hear his confident and constant commands with total clarity all the way back at the entrance to the Capitol lawn. For new entrants arriving at the Capitol grounds, ScaffoldCommander’s voice would be the first and loudest voice they heard. ScaffoldCommander even mixed in damsel-in-distress type appeals so new arrivals would perceive that “moving forward” would be doing their part to rescue innocent Trump supporters who “need your help”.
His high-pressure megaphone instructions were a constant mental and social pressure on a captive audience who was there for an entirely different reason: to peacefully participate in what they were told was a lawful Trump rally. But a loud, authoritative voice literally coming from “on high,” pleading that people “need your help,” and asking you to simply and lawfully “move forward,” creates a strong suction effect to comply with authority.
One attendee described this unnatural pressure in a vividly detailed Twitter thread a few days after January 6. She fingered ScaffoldCommander as “the ringleader” of the operation.
Another attendee who was later arrested said he was just following the instructions of the man with the bullhorn yelling “Patriots move forward.” That would be ScaffoldCommander. But the FBI affidavit refuses to mention the tower commander with a giant bullhorn shouting at tens of thousands of people to “Fill up the Capitol” for 90 minutes straight because, according to the FBI, he doesn’t exist.
But the clip below is, perhaps, the dead giveaway into what was truly going on. Here, a second man in the tower — the similarly unindicted “#TowerManMale19” — begins to read a prepared, hand-printed speech out loud to the crowd. The speech was sappy and idealistic, waxing philosophical about how cancel culture is bad and election processes need reform. But ScaffoldCommander had no interest in letting the bullhorn be used to communicate Trump-aligned concerns or election-related solutions.
He quickly grew angry and chastised his tower associate for losing focus: “Tell them to move forward! That’s all they need to know right now! Tell ’em to move forward!”
The statement “that’s all they need to know right now“ seems to all but confirm that ScaffoldCommander had a two-stage breach plan, which he stuck to with monomaniacal focus. For the first 70 minutes, the only objective was to move the pawns “forward” up the board, until as much pressure as possible had been placed on the building itself. Then, once a single breacher had made it inside, he immediately hit the Bullhorn Bait-And-Switch: “Move forward” gave way to his real imperative—“Fill up the Capitol.”
And yet the whole time, he never gave a reason. He was simply a man on a mission.
We have seen this type of singular dedication before in Ray Epps—a man who was loud and insistent, aggressive but lacked conviction, had a lust for action but wanted others to do it.
Here’s a fun supercut we put together of Epps telling other protesters “We need to go inside the Capitol”—and that everything besides that singular objective was “losing focus,” “a distraction”, “doesn’t matter,” and “not what we’re here for.” This is effectively a mirror of what ScaffoldCommander was doing on the bullhorn above him.
At one point, after being rhetorically blown out by kids two generations his junior, who took turns brutally mocking his Capitol attack plan, Epps tried at last to come up with a good reason. But it didn’t go well. When forced to think on his feet, he mindlessly babbled that “We need to go inside the Capitol” because “The Capitol is our enemy.”
Epps was reduced to claiming that the building itself was the enemy. That’s what motivated the whole shebang. Everyone else was in town for a Trump rally, and Epps flew 2,300 miles from Arizona because of a vendetta against neoclassical architecture.
But even more important than the cognitive and attitudinal similarities between Epps and ScaffoldCommander are the operational ones.
Whether wittingly or unwittingly, Epps and ScaffoldCommander formed a two-man team the entire afternoon. By miraculous coincidence, Ray Epps stationed himself immediately below ScaffoldCommander at the media tower for the whole 90 minutes it took to move the crowd forward, then into the building.
In the below video, you will see Ray Epps cordially interject himself into another man’s selfie video filmed from this spot. In the footage, Epps points back at the Washington Monument, where President Trump still had 7 minutes to go in his speech, and says: “It’s good to be on the right side of history.” You can see here that Epps chose the exact spot where the base of the command tower met the front of the Capitol police line. From there, Epps would have ultimate vision into both the rowdy vanguard front-line of the crowd, and a sense from the command tower crew of what was happening with the vast thongs of people behind him.
At the 0:35 mark, Epps is practically underneath the command tower, just arms-length away. You can see from Ray Epps’s point of view just how close he is to the front of the Capitol building itself, where he has staked out a key position.
At this point the clock read 1:03 p.m., so there were still 7 minutes left in Trump’s rally speech. Yet already, an enormous and growing crowd filled the horizon. That crowd was headed toward the very spot where Ray Epps is standing. Epps pointed back proudly to where Trump was speaking and beamed with a broad smile.
Additional footage discovered by Revolver reveals just how extensive Epps’ directorial efforts were from this key spot where the media tower met the police line.
In the clip compilation below, you will see Epps variously coordinating with a man in an orange ski mask, looking and pointing up at the media tower, retaking his spot by the tower, getting maced by police, then bellowing “Ahhh, I love it!” as he temporarily retreats from the officers’ gas attack.
The beaten down crowd looked as if it would back off the police, but Epps would simply not be denied. He stepped straight up to the police officers who had just showered the crowd in pepper spray. Epps appeared to negotiate with the officers and struck a deal, whereby Trump supporters could come back up to the front step if they simply remained there peacefully. Epps then turned back to the crowd and told them “Guys: Listen Up. Up to the steps and stay there. We’re gonna stay there for a while.”
Just like ScaffoldCommander above him, Epps was successfully getting the crowd to “move forward” below. In fact, at the end of this clip, you can even hear ScaffoldCommander scream “move forward” as Epps instructs the crowd to return to the top of the steps.
This all happened just 30 minutes before the Capitol building itself was breached. There were by then tens of thousands of people behind Epps. The following screenshot, from when the crowd broke out in The Star-Spangled Banner behind Epps, provides a sense of the dizzying volume of human flesh impacted by how Ray Epps and ScaffoldCommander were coordinating the front line.
So we have ScaffoldCommander directing the body of the crowd from the tower above, and Ray Epps directing the vanguard front-liners at the police line below. Yet neither one of them has been prosecuted, nor is either presently “Wanted” by the FBI.
But what makes the ScaffoldCommander-Ray Epps affair complete is that they appeared to work in tandem from start to finish the entire day on 1/6. Both set up positions at the initial 12:50 p.m. “Big Bang” breach site, and they did so before the Proud Boys arrived. The official story, you will recall, says that the Proud Boys group caused the riot. Again, we must point out how bizarre it is that so many individuals (so far Epps, ScaffoldCommander, and FenceCutterBulwark) who turn out to be key players in the Capitol breach show up in the same area so early on in the day.
Indeed, while Ray Epps was with others antagonizing police at the front of the barricades, ScaffoldCommander was antagonizing police on the lawn just meters away. This coincided almost exactly with the arrival of the Proud Boys marchers to the Peace Monument at 12:45 p.m., as if they knew the time for action was drawing near.
It is unsettling enough that law enforcement seems to be protecting key operators like ScaffoldCommander and FenceCutterBulwark. But the story gets stranger still.
ScaffoldCommander and FenceCutterBulwark were actually not the first to start removing barricades and fencing. In fact, they did not “activate” until Ray Epps’s Breach Team set off the initial attack at the Epps breach site at 12:50 p.m.
About 30 feet south of Ray Epps, right around the time the breach occurred at 12:50 p.m., a smaller squad of men were beginning the process of fence and barricade removal, out of sight of the walkway police.
Below is a video of one of the very first booby-trappers, dubbed “#BlackSkiMask.” Cell phone metadata confirms a timestamp of 12:53 p.m., meaning BlackSkiMask’s efforts to open up the lawn overlapped with the precise minute that Epps took on the police.
You’ll note a familiar pattern: the crowd is begging BlackSkiMask to stop breaking the law, just like they rejected Ray Epps the night before.
As the above video ends, BlackSkiMask sees Ray Epps and his team have successfully breached the police line. He then runs over to the walkway Epps has just cleared. From there, BlackSkiMask begins methodically dumping the police barricades over the side of the walkway wall. This clean removal process will create the impression to the 15,000 people already walking from the Trump speech that no police barricades were ever there in the first place.
BlackSkiMask is the individual you will see at 0:24 say: “We’re taking that s**t today.”
Six weeks ago, Revolver News published a blockbuster investigative report on Ray Epps — a man who, more than any other individual, appears to be the key unlocking the question of active federal involvement in the so-called “Capitol Siege” of January 6th.
Out of all of the thousands of January 6’s protesters, and the thousands of hours of publicly available footage from that fateful day, Ray Epps has turned out to be perhaps the only person nailed dead to rights confessing on camera to plotting a pre-planned attack on the Capitol. On both January 5 and January 6, Epps announced multiple times, at multiple locations, his upcoming plot to breach the US Capitol. He then spent hours attempting to recruit hundreds of others to join him. On top of it all, Epps was seen leading key people and managing key aspects of the initial breach of the Capitol grounds himself.
It would be one thing if Epps’s repeated calls on January 5 to “go into the Capitol” had simply amounted to bluster. But Epps followed through on his stated mission to shepherd others inside. In clips 4-6 of the above compilation, we see Epps actively orchestrate elements of the very first breach of the Capitol barricades at 12:50 p.m, while Trump still had 20 minutes left in his rally speech.
It is noteworthy that this Ray Epps breach occurs just one minute after Capitol Police began responding to reports of two “pipe bombs” located at DNC and GOP headquarters, respectively. Rather conveniently, the already-handicapped Capitol Police thus had still-fewer resources with which to respond to the barricade breach in question.
While the “pipe bombs” turned out to be a dud, the Ray Epps breach proved fateful. Today, the official stories told by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the US Justice Department all depict the apparent Ray Epps-orchestrated 12:50 p.m. initial breach of metal barricades as the “Big Bang” event of January 6.
In large part, this description is hardly an exaggeration. Indeed, it was the 12:50 p.m. breach of the Capitol grounds, in conjunction with a handful of suspicious individuals ripping down fencing and signage, that set in motion the conditions allowing for 1/6 to turn from a rally into a riot.
In this report, we will blow open this network of still-unindicted key operators who appear to have been at work either with or around Ray Epps during the initial Capitol grounds breach. You, dear reader, will be scandalized — though perhaps unsurprised — to learn that none of the actors covered in this report have received attention in the mainstream press, despite their active and indispensable roles in the events of 1/6.
As we explained in detail in our previous report, the FBI originally put Ray Epps’s face on its Capitol Violence “Most Wanted List” on January 8, 2021, just two days after 1/6. They offered a cash reward for information leading to his arrest. In fact, rank-and-file FBI agents initially deemed Epps’s role as an apparent riot organizer so important that they named him Suspect #16—one of the first 20 high-profile FBI targets in a database now packed with more than 500 suspects.
Then, six months later on June 30, 2021, both Revolver News and The New York Times published inconvenient stories that encouraged a more aggressive interrogation of the “Ray Epps third rail,” leading reasonable people to wonder why this publicly identified man on the Most Wanted List still had no charges filed against him.
The FBI responded to these important media stories the very next day. But their response was to quietly purge all online Ray Epps files from their website, then switch to a posture of “What? Who? Ray Epps? Never heard of him.”
Agents of the FBI Field Office in Phoenix (where Epps lives) have gone so far as to explicitly deny knowledge that Ray Epps even exists. Instead of pursuing Epps, FBI agents have instead pursued journalists who had the temerity to ask Epps in person if he was a government operative. “I understand that, but I can’t say anything,” is all Epps would tell them.
Here’s a quick visual synopsis of this timeline.
The sham Congressional January 6 Commission seems to be going along with the charade of Ray Epps denialism. For all of its recent gesticulations about Mark Meadows’s benign text messages, the Commission has yet to express even a basic interest in Ray Epps or his communications leading up to and on January 6.
But the specter of Ray Epps, and the ominous questions his immunity raises, loom too large to be memory-holed by poorly coordinated efforts of government denial. In light of the above, it is both amusing and symbolically appropriate that despite the FBI’s attempt to purge Epps’s face from its “Wanted” database (and public denials of his existence from authorized agents), the FBI DC Field Office still features Ray Epps as a “Wanted” man in its current pinned Twitter image (look closely and you’ll find it).
If Epps turns out to have been some kind of government operative, which at present is the only clean and simple explanation for his immunity, it is game over for the official “MAGA insurrection” narrative of 1/6. Epps was the day’s loudest riot recruiter, and its apparent leader of the very first breach of Capitol grounds. If Ray Epps is a Fed, the “Insurrection” becomes the “Fedsurrection” in one fell swoop.
These are the stakes at play in unraveling the Ray Epps enigma.
But it is imperative to note that if Epps was just a cog in a much larger federal operation, he would not have been deployed alone. Historically speaking, when Feds have orchestrated fake mobs of fake protesters, or contrived fake conspiratorial plots, the Feds’ own assets have commonly comprised between 16% to 25% of the plot’s participants, at least in its key respects. Indeed, the FBI once flew in 1,600 rowdy spooks to infiltrate a single convention with just 10,000 protesters.
In recent times, attacks blamed on right-wing militias have blown past the 16% mark on the Fed Saturation Index and have been clocking in at a whopping 25-50%. As Revolver has previously noted:
So if Ray Epps was instructed by the government to play his part in various recruiting, breaching and crowd control efforts that day, we would expect many other informants to be set up around him.
To test this hypothesis, Revolver spent the past six weeks comprehensively mapping Ray Epps’s network of interactions on January 6, and profiling the key people around him who complemented his efforts. We did a deep dive into other key figures involved in the initial breach of the Capitol grounds, as well as figures who played an instrumental role in fence removal and crowd control. In short, we investigated key players whose early actions on 1/6 turned the rally into a riot.
The bad news for Fedsurrection Deniers is the results are in, and they look even worse for the FBI than Revolver’s already low expectations. For brevity, we profile five of the most egregious cases in this report, and tell the story of how they crossed paths and interacted with, and in some cases coordinated with Ray Epps to make 1/6 possible. Some of these cases are so wild as to constitute Epps-sized scandals unto themselves.
But first, it important to note that Feds at the mere informant level are seldom told by their handlers of the presence of other government informants around them. From each individual informant’s perspective, the agitators around them would look as lawless to them as they did to the crowd.
This exact strange situation played out in the climax of the Whitmer Kidnapping Plot. The car that prosecutors say “cased” the Governor’s house had five passengers—two homeless patsies, and three secret Feds. But only the agent-level Fed in the car had total operational awareness. Each of the two informants in the car probably thought the other was a legitimate insurrectionist.
So it is not necessary for all or any of the individuals covered in this report to know each other or to have affirmatively “worked together” to have formed a “team” through collective effort. A simple text message from a federal handler to “Be at the Peace Monument at 12:45 p.m. and flush out the crazies” would be all that’s needed for a large ring of provocateurs to simultaneously be in the same place, at the same time, contributing to the same breach.
So now, without further ado, we will tell the true, documented story of 1/6 that the Regime doesn’t want you to hear, involving key unindicted figures the Regime would prefer that you never heard of.
If there were such a thing as an unbiased January 6 Commission that sought to piece together the accurate timeline and narrative of events on 1/6, the following study would be the sort of thing it would publish.
Revolver makes no facial allegation about any of the individuals below. However, some very serious, shocking and time-sensitive questions are raised by this report. To that extent, our accusations and demands are aimed squarely at the US Justice Department.
FBI Director Chris Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland have an awful lot of explaining to do.
The Booby Trap that Turned a Rally into a Riot
Before we get acquainted with the key unindicted players operating around Ray Epps, let’s quickly touch upon the basic facts of the initial breach of the Capitol grounds.
The “Big Bang” moment that kicked off the riot was when a small “breach team” of just a few dozen people violently knocked over the first set of metal barricades between 12:50-12:53 p.m. They forced back the police, and therefore opened a clean walkway entrance to the crowd behind them.
We will hereafter refer to this location of barriers as the “Ray Epps breach site,” and the collection of individuals responsible for this critical initial breach as the “Ray Epps breach team.” Clips from that breach scene, with Ray Epps standing front and center giving out directions, are republished below for convenience.
This same breach team then proceeded to haul the metal police barricades off to the side, tear down “Restricted Area” signage, and systematically remove protective fencing from the Capitol lawn. Ordinarily, with no barriers in place, this entire area is open to the public.
To get a geographical sense of the Ray Epps crime scene, the below image shows where the Capitol’s rear barricades and fencing were first attacked. This area is also known as the Peace Monument.
The tactical importance of this breached location is that it was the very first walkway entrance into the Capitol grounds that every Trump supporter would arrive at first as they walked from the Trump rally to the Capitol.
The Ray Epps Breach Team had the amazing foresight to pry open the one walkway entrance that no one could avoid.
As you can see from the above, both the Pennsylvania Ave and the Constitution Ave exits from the Trump speech intersect at the exact Peace Monument barricade targeted in advance by the Ray Epps Breach Team. If any of the eight other walkway entrances into the Capitol grounds had been toppled instead, tens of thousands of marchers would have been met by police and metal barricades, instead of an open gate.
The Ray Epps breach team thus set up a booby trap by pushing back the police, then hauling away the “restricted area” signage, the chain fencing, and the metal barricades—all while tens of thousands were still at the Trump rally. Without police present or “do not enter” signs prominently visible, people leaving Trump’s speech and arriving at the Capitol entrance would have no idea it was illegal to walk through the gate, or onto the lawn, or up to the Capitol steps. After all, this entire area is ordinarily open to the public.
Instead, they heard friendly music and saw the main walkway to the Capitol grounds wide open. These unwitting Trump supporters had no idea they had just crossed an invisible tripwire that would later subject them to federal prosecution for trespassing.
Moreover, the giant main component of Trump protesters would not arrive at this Capitol entrance until 50 minutes after the Ray Epps Breach Team opened up the walkway—Trump had 20 minutes left in his speech, and it took 30 minutes to walk to the Peace Monument. This giant component arrived at the entrance and saw hundreds of people already inside the Capitol grounds. They would no longer stage their protest back behind the fencing, because the Breach Team booby-trappers had already hauled most of it away before they got there. The giant component therefore walked all the way up to the Capitol building itself.
As we described in more detail in our October 10 report, the Ray Epps Breach Team thus set up what may amount to the largest legal booby-trap in American history.
Indeed, when the DOJ indicted Oath Keeper Jeremy Brown in September for “trespassing on restricted grounds” (18 US Code § 1752), the Justice Department explained that any January 6 protester who stepped foot within the red line below had committed a federal crime and could be kept in prison without bail until a criminal trial 12+ months away.
But how did this happen? Who exactly pulled it off? And how does it all trace back to Ray Epps?
Setting Up The Booby Trap
In our October 10 Revolver report, we showed January 6 footage of one dark-complected man coolly and methodically cutting down and then rolling up “restricted area” fencing around the Capitol lawn. He had no Trump gear on, and made sure to wear dark sunglasses on a cloudy day. He was not angry. He was dispassionate, calm, and professional, like he was just there to do a job.
Here’s another picture to make perfectly clear what he was doing, and how strange and methodical it was.
This man remains unindicted. In fact, the FBI does not even appear to even be looking for him. He is wholly absent from the FBI Capitol “Most Wanted List.” There is no reward for information leading to his arrest.
For perspective, the FBI’s “Most Wanted List” features plenty of MAGA grandmas and teens who committed no property crimes or physical damage at all. For instance, you can still win a cash reward for information leading to the arrest of FBI “Most Wanted” Suspect # 34.
Despite the FBI’s lack of interest in this brazen booby-trapper seen rolling up restricted area fencing, online researchers have stayed on the case. They have dubbed this individual “#FenceCutterBulwark”, with “Bulwark” being the brand name of his fire-retardant jacket, designed for professional use in the oil and gas industry. You’ll see more fire-retardant jackets among the unindicted below.
FenceCutterBulwark was waiting right next to the Ray Epps Breach Site at 12:31 p.m. That’s a full 20 minutes before the breach kicked off. There, he was doing nothing except looking out past the fencing he would later take down.
Moreover, 12:31 p.m. is 17 minutes before the large group of 220+ marching Proud Boys arrived at the Peace Monument from their lunch break. Here’s why that matters:
The official January 6 story, as parroted by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and HBO, is that the Proud Boys’ arrival at the Peace Monument at 12:48 p.m. is what sparked a sudden breach. But the fact that FenceCutterBulwark and other key operators (until now ignored by mainstream media) were already waiting in place while the Proud Boys’ were still a mile away eating lunch suggests a more sinister possibility: foreknowledge of an imminent breach at this exact location.
If it were just FenceCutterBulwark hanging out near the breach site before the Proud Boys’ arrival, we might chalk it up to coincidence. But the presence of multiple key breach figures waiting here seems too much to be coincidental. In the below video, continuously recorded between 12:40-12:50 p.m., you will see Ray Epps already in position at the exact walkway entrance the breach team will pry open, at least six minutes before they arrive (in fact, we know he was there 45 minutes before they arrived too).
But it’s not just Ray Epps and FenceCutterBulwark who appear to have been waiting for the Proud Boys.
Perched right across from FenceCutterBulwark at 12:31 p.m. is the man widely regarded by online researchers as the most infamous of all unindicted January 6 riot leaders—a man unmentioned in the mainstream press but elevated to legendary status online as “#NWScaffoldCommander.”
Don’t let looks deceive you: This extremely peculiar middle-aged man with glasses, a nerdy mask and a blue ballcap has been assigned more notoriety by deep researchers than arguably any other person of the thousands they have indexed. NWScaffoldCommander’s frenetic whirlwind of activities, and apparent role as “the ringleader” of the breach, have made him the subject of Russiagate-level rumor and speculation that he was privy to a January 6 “master plan.”
NWScaffoldCommander (we’ll call him just “ScaffoldCommander” for short) gets his name from being the ostensible “commander” of the prominent “media tower” that overlooked the Capitol’s back terrace on January 6. You’ve probably seen this tower in pictures—it’s the tall temporary structure built in November 2020 so that media crews could properly film the January 2021 inauguration ceremony. Here’s what it looks like without people around.
And here’s what it looked like on January 6, with ScaffoldCommander and his crew controlling it.
As you can see, this tower is the most perfect “command post” that anyone seeking to monitor and direct the Capitol crowd could possibly hope for. It stands front and center, everyone can see it, and the man high atop it can see and scream down to all.
One can only imagine the damage a highly aggressive and monomaniacally focused breach leader could do from this perch if he had zero scruples, a plan to attack the Capitol, and an extremely loud megaphone.
If you’ve seen any mid-day January 6 footage, you have probably seen ScaffoldCommander in action without knowing it.
From high atop the tower between 1 p.m. – 2:30 p.m, ScaffoldCommander issued the iconic bellows and non-stop commands that are loud and clear on almost every video clip from January 6 filmed in that time interval. For nearly 90 minutes straight, he bombards the otherwise leaderless crowd below him with endless variations on a single instruction: “Don’t just stand there. Keep moving forward!”
But once the crowd had continuously “moved forward” for over an hour, and the very first handful of rioters entered the building, ScaffoldCommander suddenly threw the switch: “Okay we’re in! We’re in! Come on! We gotta fill up the Capitol! Come on! Come now! We need help We gotta fill up the Capitol! They got in.”
This clip below is checkmate. It should make ScaffoldCommander one of the top criminal suspects on the entire FBI Capitol Most Wanted List (spoiler alert: he isn’t even on the list, and no charges have been filed, and the FBI to date has still never acknowledged his existence).
For perspective, it’s important to step into the shoes of January 6 rallygoers to see just how dominant and pervasive ScaffoldCommander’s influence was over the crowd’s psychology the entire time.
Rallygoers could hear his confident and constant commands with total clarity all the way back at the entrance to the Capitol lawn. For new entrants arriving at the Capitol grounds, ScaffoldCommander’s voice would be the first and loudest voice they heard. ScaffoldCommander even mixed in damsel-in-distress type appeals so new arrivals would perceive that “moving forward” would be doing their part to rescue innocent Trump supporters who “need your help”.
His high-pressure megaphone instructions were a constant mental and social pressure on a captive audience who was there for an entirely different reason: to peacefully participate in what they were told was a lawful Trump rally. But a loud, authoritative voice literally coming from “on high,” pleading that people “need your help,” and asking you to simply and lawfully “move forward,” creates a strong suction effect to comply with authority.
One attendee described this unnatural pressure in a vividly detailed Twitter thread a few days after January 6. She fingered ScaffoldCommander as “the ringleader” of the operation.
Another attendee who was later arrested said he was just following the instructions of the man with the bullhorn yelling “Patriots move forward.” That would be ScaffoldCommander. But the FBI affidavit refuses to mention the tower commander with a giant bullhorn shouting at tens of thousands of people to “Fill up the Capitol” for 90 minutes straight because, according to the FBI, he doesn’t exist.
But the clip below is, perhaps, the dead giveaway into what was truly going on. Here, a second man in the tower — the similarly unindicted “#TowerManMale19” — begins to read a prepared, hand-printed speech out loud to the crowd. The speech was sappy and idealistic, waxing philosophical about how cancel culture is bad and election processes need reform. But ScaffoldCommander had no interest in letting the bullhorn be used to communicate Trump-aligned concerns or election-related solutions.
He quickly grew angry and chastised his tower associate for losing focus: “Tell them to move forward! That’s all they need to know right now! Tell ’em to move forward!”
The statement “that’s all they need to know right now“ seems to all but confirm that ScaffoldCommander had a two-stage breach plan, which he stuck to with monomaniacal focus. For the first 70 minutes, the only objective was to move the pawns “forward” up the board, until as much pressure as possible had been placed on the building itself. Then, once a single breacher had made it inside, he immediately hit the Bullhorn Bait-And-Switch: “Move forward” gave way to his real imperative—“Fill up the Capitol.”
And yet the whole time, he never gave a reason. He was simply a man on a mission.
We have seen this type of singular dedication before in Ray Epps—a man who was loud and insistent, aggressive but lacked conviction, had a lust for action but wanted others to do it.
Here’s a fun supercut we put together of Epps telling other protesters “We need to go inside the Capitol”—and that everything besides that singular objective was “losing focus,” “a distraction”, “doesn’t matter,” and “not what we’re here for.” This is effectively a mirror of what ScaffoldCommander was doing on the bullhorn above him.
At one point, after being rhetorically blown out by kids two generations his junior, who took turns brutally mocking his Capitol attack plan, Epps tried at last to come up with a good reason. But it didn’t go well. When forced to think on his feet, he mindlessly babbled that “We need to go inside the Capitol” because “The Capitol is our enemy.”
Epps was reduced to claiming that the building itself was the enemy. That’s what motivated the whole shebang. Everyone else was in town for a Trump rally, and Epps flew 2,300 miles from Arizona because of a vendetta against neoclassical architecture.
But even more important than the cognitive and attitudinal similarities between Epps and ScaffoldCommander are the operational ones.
Whether wittingly or unwittingly, Epps and ScaffoldCommander formed a two-man team the entire afternoon. By miraculous coincidence, Ray Epps stationed himself immediately below ScaffoldCommander at the media tower for the whole 90 minutes it took to move the crowd forward, then into the building.
In the below video, you will see Ray Epps cordially interject himself into another man’s selfie video filmed from this spot. In the footage, Epps points back at the Washington Monument, where President Trump still had 7 minutes to go in his speech, and says: “It’s good to be on the right side of history.” You can see here that Epps chose the exact spot where the base of the command tower met the front of the Capitol police line. From there, Epps would have ultimate vision into both the rowdy vanguard front-line of the crowd, and a sense from the command tower crew of what was happening with the vast thongs of people behind him.
At the 0:35 mark, Epps is practically underneath the command tower, just arms-length away. You can see from Ray Epps’s point of view just how close he is to the front of the Capitol building itself, where he has staked out a key position.
At this point the clock read 1:03 p.m., so there were still 7 minutes left in Trump’s rally speech. Yet already, an enormous and growing crowd filled the horizon. That crowd was headed toward the very spot where Ray Epps is standing. Epps pointed back proudly to where Trump was speaking and beamed with a broad smile.
Additional footage discovered by Revolver reveals just how extensive Epps’ directorial efforts were from this key spot where the media tower met the police line.
In the clip compilation below, you will see Epps variously coordinating with a man in an orange ski mask, looking and pointing up at the media tower, retaking his spot by the tower, getting maced by police, then bellowing “Ahhh, I love it!” as he temporarily retreats from the officers’ gas attack.
The beaten down crowd looked as if it would back off the police, but Epps would simply not be denied. He stepped straight up to the police officers who had just showered the crowd in pepper spray. Epps appeared to negotiate with the officers and struck a deal, whereby Trump supporters could come back up to the front step if they simply remained there peacefully. Epps then turned back to the crowd and told them “Guys: Listen Up. Up to the steps and stay there. We’re gonna stay there for a while.”
Just like ScaffoldCommander above him, Epps was successfully getting the crowd to “move forward” below. In fact, at the end of this clip, you can even hear ScaffoldCommander scream “move forward” as Epps instructs the crowd to return to the top of the steps.
The sequence is so remarkable it’s worth highlighting its beginning, middle and end again. First, the cops spray the crowd off the step.
Then, Epps steps up to negotiate with police.
Then, like Moses returning from the mountaintop, Epps pronounces to the crowd that their Promised Land is forward at the front step of the police line.
This all happened just 30 minutes before the Capitol building itself was breached. There were by then tens of thousands of people behind Epps. The following screenshot, from when the crowd broke out in The Star-Spangled Banner behind Epps, provides a sense of the dizzying volume of human flesh impacted by how Ray Epps and ScaffoldCommander were coordinating the front line.
So we have ScaffoldCommander directing the body of the crowd from the tower above, and Ray Epps directing the vanguard front-liners at the police line below. Yet neither one of them has been prosecuted, nor is either presently “Wanted” by the FBI.
But what makes the ScaffoldCommander-Ray Epps affair complete is that they appeared to work in tandem from start to finish the entire day on 1/6. Both set up positions at the initial 12:50 p.m. “Big Bang” breach site, and they did so before the Proud Boys arrived. The official story, you will recall, says that the Proud Boys group caused the riot. Again, we must point out how bizarre it is that so many individuals (so far Epps, ScaffoldCommander, and FenceCutterBulwark) who turn out to be key players in the Capitol breach show up in the same area so early on in the day.
Indeed, while Ray Epps was with others antagonizing police at the front of the barricades, ScaffoldCommander was antagonizing police on the lawn just meters away. This coincided almost exactly with the arrival of the Proud Boys marchers to the Peace Monument at 12:45 p.m., as if they knew the time for action was drawing near.
ScaffoldCommander then immediately leapt into action to help with fence removal as the Ray Epps Breach Team toppled the first barricades at 12:53 p.m.
There are clear face shots of ScaffoldCommander, and he is in view for hours.
It is unsettling enough that law enforcement seems to be protecting key operators like ScaffoldCommander and FenceCutterBulwark. But the story gets stranger still.
ScaffoldCommander and FenceCutterBulwark were actually not the first to start removing barricades and fencing. In fact, they did not “activate” until Ray Epps’s Breach Team set off the initial attack at the Epps breach site at 12:50 p.m.
About 30 feet south of Ray Epps, right around the time the breach occurred at 12:50 p.m., a smaller squad of men were beginning the process of fence and barricade removal, out of sight of the walkway police.
Below is a video of one of the very first booby-trappers, dubbed “#BlackSkiMask.” Cell phone metadata confirms a timestamp of 12:53 p.m., meaning BlackSkiMask’s efforts to open up the lawn overlapped with the precise minute that Epps took on the police.
You’ll note a familiar pattern: the crowd is begging BlackSkiMask to stop breaking the law, just like they rejected Ray Epps the night before.
As the above video ends, BlackSkiMask sees Ray Epps and his team have successfully breached the police line. He then runs over to the walkway Epps has just cleared. From there, BlackSkiMask begins methodically dumping the police barricades over the side of the walkway wall. This clean removal process will create the impression to the 15,000 people already walking from the Trump speech that no police barricades were ever there in the first place.
BlackSkiMask is the individual you will see at 0:24 say: “We’re taking that s**t today.”