Popular podcaster Joe Rogan on Monday spread the same Jan. 6 conspiracy theory that's already caused a defamation lawsuit to be filed against Fox News.
Rogan has repeatedly told listeners that federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies manipulated the Jan. 6 insurrection with "agent provocateurs" such as Donald Trump supporter Ray Epps, who the hugely popular podcaster claimed had "clearly instigated" the U.S. Capitol riot, reported The Daily Beast.
“The Jan. 6 thing is bad, but also, the intelligence agencies were involved in provoking people into the Capitol Building -- that's a fact," Rogan said.
The podcaster hedged a bit and claimed that he's not certain Epps was working with the FBI, saying he was only asking questions and pointing out that others seemed to believe he was an undercover agent, but he made some of the same assertions the Arizona man cited in his lawsuit against Fox News and former host Tucker Carlson.
“I don’t know, but I do know that every other, I think that every other person who was involved in Jan. 6, who was involved in coordinating a break-in into the Capitol and then instigating people, they were all arrested,” Rogan said. “This guy wasn’t. Not only that, but they were defending him in the New York Times, the Washington Post, all these different things saying Fox News has unjustly accused him of instigating when he clearly instigated, he did it on camera. I don’t know if he was a fed. I know a lot of people think he was a fed.”
Rogan, who signed a $200 million contract in 2020 with Spotify, claimed the intelligence committee wanted to frame Trump for the riots due to his disdain for the so-called "deep state," and they supposedly instigated the violence to make the former president look responsible for any crimes committed by his supporters who had answered his call to protest his election loss.
“Throughout history, people of unchecked power and unchecked influence have enemies," Rogan told his listeners, "and Trump was their enemy.”
Epps has filed a defamation suit against Fox and Carlson seeking punitive and compensatory damages to be determined at trial for smearing him as an "agent provocateur," which resulted in death threats that forced him and his wife to leave their home in Arizona.
“Just as Fox had focused on voting machine companies when falsely claiming a rigged election, Fox knew it needed a scapegoat for January 6th,” states Epps' complaint against the network. “It settled on Ray Epps and began promoting the lie that Epps was a federal agent who incited the attack on the Capitol.”
