Kash Patel Believes the FBI Planned Jan. 6th

His embrace of this wild conspiracy theory should disqualify him from leading the bureau.

Kash Patel campaigning for Donald Trump in October 2024. (Photo by Peter Zay/Anadolu via Getty Images)

“WHAT WAS THE FBI DOING PLANNING January 6th for a year?”

Kash Patel, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as FBI director, asked that question during a November 25, 2022 episode of his Kash’s Corner podcast for the Epoch Times. It was no slip of the tongue. As the title of that episode suggested—“What Did the FBI Know Before Jan. 6?”—Patel spent considerable time trying to cast the FBI as a villain responsible for January 6th. Patel noted that FBI Director Christopher Wray had “testified that the FBI never instigated or helped the January 6th protesters commit crimes.” But citing a report that the FBI had confidential human sources in the crowd, Patel asserted: “Okay, well, that was in planning for at least a year.”

Our review of Patel’s public appearances over the past four years reveals that he has repeatedly insinuated or argued that the FBI used its confidential human sources or employees to instigate the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol and entrap Trump’s supporters. Patel has claimed (as in the podcast episode above) that what he calls the “FBI’s Confidential Human Source Corruption Coverup Network” was somehow involved with January 6th. That is not only an insult to the memory of that day; it should be disqualifying for him to helm the bureau.

During the September 30, 2022 episode of Kash’s Corner, for instance, Patel said: “The question that has to be answered is, when did the FBI put those guys in, and where? And did those confidential human sources engage people who are not going to conduct criminal activity and convince them to do so?” Patel claimed that “is the definition of entrapment, which is illegal, and you can’t charge someone who’s been entrapped.” And he wondered who “was running this confidential human source network” and reporting it to FBI Director Chris Wray.

Patel added he would “venture a guess” that “once we see the documentation from January 6th, you will see the FBI’s confidential human source corruption coverup network on blast.” And he accused the FBI of inserting these human sources “into these matters.” Patel asked rhetorically: “Why? Why would you say January 6th? Because they wanted a political target, a political prosecution, not one based on law and fact.”

The man who could lead Trump’s FBI has failed to substantiate these wild accusations, which are contradicted by other evidence and by common sense. Regardless, he has frequently advanced this conspiracy theory, using his background as a former federal prosecutor and public defender—key credentials used to buttress his nomination—to provide it with a veneer of credibility.

Below, we provide additional examples showing how Patel has elaborated on this conspiracy theory in his public appearances and his book. But first, we explain how Patel’s conspiracy mongering was recently debunked by the Department of Justice’s own inspector general.

A debunked conspiracy theory

Patel is not alone in claiming that the FBI had a hidden hand in the events of January 6th. That conspiracy theory is popular on the right. In December 2024, the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released a report debunking the conspiratorial claim that the FBI corruptly used its confidential human source network to instigate January 6th.

The OIG reports that it “found no evidence . . . that the FBI had undercover employees in the various protest crowds, or at the Capitol, on January 6.” The OIG did find that the FBI tasked three confidential human sources (CHS) with traveling to D.C. “for the events of January 6 to report on domestic terrorism subjects who were possibly attending the event.” And twenty-three other FBI CHSs were in D.C. for January 6th.

However, the OIG emphasizes that “none” of these twenty-six CHSs was “authorized to enter the Capitol or a restricted area, or to otherwise break the law on January 6, nor was any CHS directed by the FBI to encourage others to commit illegal acts on January 6.”

Simply put, the FBI relied on CHSs to provide information about domestic extremist groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. The leaders of both groups have been convicted of seditious conspiracy for their actions surrounding and on January 6th. These rightwing extremists—especially the Proud Boys—were proven in a court of law to have led the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Patel claimed that he can prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” the FBI was involved in Jan. 6th

The role that the Proud Boys played instigating the January 6th attack has long been known. There is no credible evidence that suggests they were somehow duped into storming the Capitol. Yet Patel has repeatedly attempted to shift blame away from then President Donald Trump and rightwing extremists and onto the FBI.

For instance, Patel advocated for this conspiracy theory during a March 2023 interview with rightwing YouTuber Tim Pool. Brandishing his law enforcement credentials, Patel explained how he and others could “defeat the insurrection narrative” by pointing to the presence of FBI informants on January 6th.

“I think, as a former federal prosecutor and a public defender who defended a lot of these types of cases, what you need to show is whether or not the FBI and government agents were using undercover operatives and informants on the day of January 6th,” Patel said. Patel implied that the FBI’s conspiracy was long in the making, arguing it takes “a six-month buildup” at a minimum to place operatives or informants in extremist groups.

“It’s not like they [the FBI] just dropped them into the Proud Boys and said ‘hey, [go] disrupt, please,’” Patel said. “So once you prove that then you defeat the insurrection narrative with the FBI’s own documentation, forget what the videotape shows,” Patel argued.

“We know they [FBI] were involved [laughing] . . . Ray Epps . . .,” Pool asserted during the interview. Patel responded: “I totally agree.”

Pool hedged—but only a bit. Pool said while he could not prove it definitively, “it looks like you have a preponderance of evidence suggesting there may have been federal law enforcement involved in making that thing [January 6th] happen.” Patel eagerly went further. “I’ll get you beyond a reasonable doubt,” Patel said.

Patel claimed that “two pieces of information” supposedly established the FBI’s role. In reality, neither piece of information proved that, let alone the FBI’s culpability beyond a “reasonable doubt.” First, Patel said, “Ray Epps was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list one day and the next day he was off of the FBI’s Most Wanted list.” Patel claimed there “are only two ways that happens: you die or you’re [an] informant.”

But there is a third explanation Patel did not mention: Epps called authorities when he saw he was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. As the New York Times reported in May 2022, nearly a year before Pool’s interview with Patel, Epps “called an F.B.I. tip line” two days after the attack after he “saw himself on a list of suspects from Jan. 6.” Epps had been spotted alongside Ryan Samsel, one of the rioters who first breached the U.S. Capitol’s restricted grounds. Epps told authorities that “he had tried to calm Mr. Samsel down when they spoke.” According to the Times, Samsel said “much the same thing” about his encounter with Epps. “[Epps] came up to me and he said, ‘Dude’—his entire words were, ‘Relax, the cops are doing their job,’” Mr. Samsel said, according to a recording of Samsel’s interview with the FBI obtained by the Times.

The second piece of supposed “evidence” Patel cited in his interview with Pool was the January 2022 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing testimony of Jill Sanborn, who was the executive assistant director of the National Security Branch of the FBI at the time. Patel described Sanborn as the “the head of the FBI counterintelligence division in charge of all these investigations.” Patel said Sen. Ted Cruz asked Sanborn “flat out: were their federal agents involved with January 6th? And she said, quote, ‘Senator, I can’t answer that at this time.’” Patel drew an unsupported conspiratorial inference from Sanborn’s reticence. “Now if the answer was definitively No,’ having been a DOJ/FBI guy myself, she would have gone there and said, ‘Nope, absolutely not.’” Pool followed up: “So you’re saying that she said, ‘I can’t answer that,’ because the answer is yes and that would compromise whatever their operation was?” Patel responded: “Exactly.” (See from 08:45 to 09:40 in Pool’s interview with Patel.)

There was nothing nefarious about Sanborn’s testimony. As she explained to Sen. Cruz, she was simply unwilling to divulge “sources and methods.” But Patel led Pool’s audience to believe Sanborn’s testimony could help show “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the FBI made January 6th happen. It does not.

Patel falsely asserted that Ray Epps was “allowed to encourage and incite” the Jan. 6th riot as a “government employee”

As part of the conspiracy theory blaming the FBI for January 6th, the MAGA right has fixated on Ray Epps—baselessly asserting that he worked for the FBI and somehow instigated the attack on the Capitol. As discussed above, Patel and Pool wove Epps into their retelling of the conspiracy theory. Patel has pushed his baseless claims much further in other appearances, falsely stating that Epps was “allowed to encourage and incite a riot around some of the events of January 6th as a government employee”; was on the U.S. Capitol grounds “on behalf of the FBI”; was on the “FBI payroll”; and was part of the FBI’s “corruption coverup network,” involving “the illegal use of confidential human sources.”

Patel’s allegations, documented more fully below, are not based in fact. During a January 2022 interview with the House January 6th Committee, Epps himself denied working for the U.S. government in any capacity, saying that “the only time I’ve been involved with the government was when I was a Marine in the United States Marine Corps.” In September 2023, Epps pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct on restricted grounds and was subsequently sentenced to one year of probation. During his plea hearing, a government prosecutor confirmed on the record that Epps “was not before, during, or after” January 6th “a confidential source or undercover agent working on behalf of the government, the FBI, or any law enforcement agency.” Outgoing FBI Director Christopher Wray has directly rebutted the conspiracy theory centered on Epps in congressional testimony as well.

Nevertheless, Patel has alleged on multiple occasions—without citing adequate supporting evidence or documentation—that Epps was working for the FBI. And again, Patel used his credentials as a former federal prosecutor to lend the conspiracy theory the appearance of legitimacy.

“Look, as a former federal prosecutor who ran sources and informants, if the answer is, ‘This guy is not on our payroll and we don’t know him, and he did absolutely nothing for the United States government,’ you come out hard and fast in your press op and say those things,” Patel said during the January 6, 2023 episode of his Kash’s Corner podcast. “But those things have never been said by this DOJ or FBI about Ray Epps.”

During that same episode, Patel called on the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to investigate Epps and the FBI’s confidential human sources. Patel said “the actions of the FBI’s confidential human sources” on January 6th “needs to be the perennial investigation.” Patel went on to compare Epps to Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence official who produced a dossier filled with dubious allegations connecting Donald Trump to Russia in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. Patel said:

Maybe I’m biased because of my law enforcement and national security background, but questions like, ‘Why did we have the equivalent of a Christopher Steele running around the compound of the United States Capitol on January 6th on behalf of the FBI?’ Ray Epps literally said, ‘I orchestrated it,’ when he was talking about the activities surrounding the Capitol building on January 6th. What do you mean he orchestrated it? Where is he? This guy was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list one day and gone the next? When FBI leadership was asked under oath in the United States Senate about Ray Epps, they refused to answer. We need to know not just where our tax dollars went, but why was a domestic law enforcement agency allowed to implement multiple informants throughout the area on January 6th? How long ago did they start? Because they couldn’t just drop them in that day. We covered that extensively on a prior episode. Who authorized that? Who gave that order? How much were they paid? All of these documents are at the FBI. All of this material, all of this information needs to be subpoenaed immediately by this Congress. [Emphasis added.]

As the above quote shows, Patel asserted that Epps was acting “on behalf of the FBI” and he wondered why the bureau was “allowed to implement multiple informants” on January 6th. In that same episode, Patel criticized Adam Kinzinger, who served on the House January 6th Committee. Patel paraphrased the former congressman as saying, “I see no evidence that Ray Epps was responsible for anything or that the FBI had anything to do with it.” Patel then asserted that Kinzinger and the January 6th Committee “didn’t care to get the documentation” supposedly tying Epps to the FBI because “it didn’t advance the political narrative that he wanted to advance.”

In fact, Patel had no reasonable basis for claiming there was such “documentation” to be had. Nevertheless, Patel argued that House Republicans should make the issue part of “wider investigation of DOJ and FBI activity overall.”

In another interview, uploaded to the Fight With Kash channel on BitChute in early 2023, Patel again called for the Republican-led House of Representatives to investigate Epps. Patel said the House should “put out every piece of information the FBI has on Ray Epps, the amount of money he’s been paid as an informant, and why was he allowed to encourage and incite a riot around some of the events of January 6th as a government employee?” (emphasis added).

Patel alleged that Epps was part of an illegal FBI effort. “This guy Ray Epps is the Christopher Steele of January 6th,” Patel said. “[We] are going to find out he’s on the FBI payroll, he’s a part of their corruption coverup network, and the illegal use of confidential human sources for political gain and he’s not going to be the only one that’s there,” Patel speculated.

Patel has even claimed that the January 6th defendants have been denied “exculpatory evidence” tying Epps to the FBI. In that interview posted on the Fight With Kash channel, Patel said “what’s happening” to the “Jan. 6th defendants and detainees” is “the most unconstitutional thing I’ve ever seen in terms of denial of due process.” He continued:

By not giving them the information on Ray Epps and other corrupt actors at the FBI, they are denying these people due process and exculpatory evidence just like they did to the likes of [former Trump National Security Advisor] Gen. [Mike] Flynn and company, and we saw what happened to those cases and mark my word, I think once we get a Congress with some guts we’re going to get the exposure of this information and you’re going to see a lot of January 6th cases get tossed because the FBI and DOJ once again acted illegally and based on political partisan gain.

In his book Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy, Patel again insinuated that Epps instigated the attack, and that the FBI had not arrested the real “agitators” of the January 6th attack. Writing before Epps’s arrest and plea deal, Patel claimed:

Even more shady, there are all sorts of strange agitators who were at the Capitol on January 6th and stirred up the crowd to breach the Capitol beforehand but who have faced no consequences. The most famous of these is a man named Ray Epps. Epps and others like him were caught on video pushing people to do illegal activities and to storm the Capitol building. Yet they have not been detained or prosecuted by the DoJ. Federal law enforcement has used cell phone data, video evidence, bank records, and more to track down just about everyone who was at the Capitol that day. Yet we’re supposed to believe they can’t find these guys? It’s not that they can’t. It’s that they don’t want to. Epps literally went from being on the FBI’s most wanted list to being removed from it overnight.

Again, Patel’s assertions about Ray Epps had no adequate basis in fact. It is just a wild conspiracy theory—a collection of the types of claims that were once confined to the fringes of the internet.

Patel has accused the FBI of a “cover up” and “lying” about its involvement in January 6th

In Government Gangsters, Patel again chastises former FBI official Jill Sanborn for refusing to answer questions about Ray Epps’s alleged involvement with the bureau during her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “If the answer was no, she would have said so,” Patel claims. “Sanborn’s answers were corrupt FBI government speak for, ‘We don’t have to answer you with the truth, because if we did we would yet again reveal our own corruption.’” Patel then asserts that Sanborn’s testimony was evidence of a “cover-up,” writing:

All the signs of a cover-up are on full display—as is the two-tiered justice system we have become so familiar with. What’s most terrifying is that the persecution of the establishment’s political opponents didn’t stop with the protestors who were at the Capitol that fateful day. Soon, they expanded their reach to target any American who has ever dared to wear a MAGA cap.

Patel has also alleged that the FBI lied to Congress about its involvement in January 6th. During the November 25, 2022 episode of his Kash’s Corner podcast, Patel asked, “why is the FBI lying to the world about their involvement in January 6th?” He allowed that there “could be” a “completely innocent” explanation for the presence of the FBI’s human sources in D.C. on January 6. “As a former federal prosecutor,” Patel said, “you have to always keep that in mind.”

But Patel then argued against such an innocent explanation, saying the FBI’s “track record strongly suggests the opposite on the individuals we’ve outlined, and how they’ve used their confidential human source corruption coverup network to do just that, cover up the FBI and DOJ’s own corruption.”

For Patel, the mere presence of confidential human sources was enough to prove that FBI Director Wray had lied to Congress when he said the FBI did not have specific advance warning of the January 6th attack. “Either you knew through your confidential human source network, which you placed months in advance that January 6th was going on, or you didn’t,” Patel said. “But now we know they existed, and now we know you lied.” Patel claimed that the FBI had been “working for a year and placing them [confidential human sources] in specific groups and locations for January 6th.” For Patel, this meant that Wray was lying to Congress:

Now, we have caught Christopher Wray in yet another lie to Congress, because these confidential human sources would have been reporting, by mandate and the law, to the FBI the entire time they were working in these groups, and working with these people, and working with individuals that were there on January 6th. You can’t just airdrop them in. So, when Christopher Wray told the world that the FBI had no quality or verifiable or credible evidence that January 6th was going to happen, that’s a complete and total lie, because the FBI had placed confidential human sources there.

Patel added that there “needs to be some serious change” at the FBI.

Conclusion

PATEL PUSHING CONSPIRACY THEORIES about what happened on January 6th should disqualify him from leading the FBI. These allegations deface the truth: the responsibility of Donald Trump, his supporters, and his enablers for what happened that day. That dishonors the memory of the members of law enforcement who were injured or died as a result of what really happened that day and in its long runup.

But groundlessly focusing blame on the very agency Patel is supposed to lead is more shocking still. It undermines his ability to win the trust of those who make up the FBI. Given the bureau’s central role in protecting us all, the risk of dysfunction is unacceptable.

And what other conspiracy theories will he subscribe to, and who will be targeted as a result? Because of the power of the FBI, that question should concern us all. Patel should be thoroughly examined on all of this at his confirmation hearing. It should be disqualifying.