Bulwark Takes - Too Crazy for Kash Patel! New FBI Conspiracy Theory Blows Up

Episode Date: September 28, 2025

Sam Stein and Will Sommer dig into the conspiracy theory that the FBI staged January 6th. What started as junk reporting has now been laundered all the way up to Speaker Mike Johnson — proof that even the dumbest conspiracy theories can get a promotion in the right fever swamp.

Hey, guys, me, Sam Stein, back with Will Summer, who is the author of The False Flag Newsletter. Will, over the weekend, there was a couple iterations of what is now sort of a fairly standard conspiracy theory on the right, which is that, in fact, the FBI was involved in January 6th. They were part of the crowd, they're egging them on, ostensibly to set up some folks and to, you know, make Trump look bad. So I bring this up because today, this is Sunday, we're recording on Sunday, Speaker Mike Johnson was asked about this with Jake Tapper, and he said this. Does the rule of law have to apply to people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th? Well, I'm glad you brought that up. There's new information over the last couple of days about that as well.

Apparently there were 274 FBI agents in the crowd on January 6th? No, no, no. I think the total number of persons involved me. Cash Patel just brought some enhancement and enhanced understanding to that. They were sent there to do crowd control because of everything that was going on. It wasn't a false flag operation, as President Trump suggested. Well, Jake, wait a minute. Hold on, Jake.

How do you know that, right? There's a lot of questions. Brand new questions about, well, and I'm telling you that there's videos, and it's always been disputed, what involvement some of those persons engaged in, what involvement they had. Did they spur on the crowd? Did they open the gates to allow them in? I don't know. These are questions, but they should be answered. Look, there you have. The Speaker of the House, who's basically embracing this idea that the FBI may have, in fact, been undercover on January 6th. Can you explain, let's start with the

origins of this idea, and then let's get into the most recent back and forth, which involves, I believe, John Solomon, Donald Trump, Cash Patel, and now Mike Johnson. But let's start with the origins of this theory that the FBI was involved somehow in January 6th? Sure. So pretty soon after January 6 happened, you know, Trump supporters tried to come up with this idea that, you know, it was a, somehow the mob there was sort of induced to do it by agent provocateurs. And so part of this was focused on people like, like Ray Epps, or they'd say like a guy who's kind of whipping it up, they would say, oh, that guy, maybe that guy's an FBI agent or something. That was, that was unfounded. And then there was just kind of this general idea that, you know, there were,

or plain-close FBI who are, you know, maybe doing the first punches or otherwise trying to basically trick Trump supporters into doing this. John Solomon gets into the act this week with an article that says there's about 270 plus FBI agents that now it's been disclosed, that Chris Ray sent them in there. And in fact, it's, you know, presented as proof that this conspiracy, in fact, was real. But it's not true. It's just a wild misrepresentation of the documents, right? John Solomon is very interesting figure. He's, he's, he's a long, he used to be kind of a mainstream reader reporter. I think he was at the post for a point.

But since then he's become, he's sort of a favorite, he's kind of like a quasi-journalist at this point. And he sort of is, he gets a lot of scoops, I would say, handed to him by the Trump administration, national security side. And he's very interesting on one hand to follow because you can really see like what direction they're going. They kind of tip their hand about the Comey charges to him. But so basically in this case, there's been this question and,

Republicans on the January 6th Committee wanted to know long ago, they would say, you know, how many FBI agents were undercover at January 6th? And so last week, he runs this story saying there were 274 FBI agents at January 6th. But he's sort of, he does this thing where he kind of like, he does a sleight of hand. And, you know, like he'll, he'll like kind of set something up. And I will say as his former coworker at the Hill, like, you know, this is something I've followed for a long time. And so there was, he'll sort of like make a claim up top and then a couple paragraphs down, he'll say something. And you say, oh, okay, so like this is about, you know, these people being, there's a suggestion that they're agent provocateurs or somehow we're up to no good. But in fact, as you said, Cash Patel then has to come out and say, well, no, actually these were FBI agents.

Well, you're jumping ahead of things. Yeah. Because he writes this piece. And then Trump posts, as one does on social media, oh my God, now it comes out. like Chris Ray, shady character, and then he, of course, has to take a dig at Chris Christie for proposing that Chris Ray be the FBI director. And there's this whole promise that maybe Chris Ray is going to be thrown into jail or under the bus or prosecuted like Comey.

So Trump was the one who really gave it life. Yeah, this was really an explosive claim on the right last week when it came out. I mean, if you think about 274 FBI agents, the idea that these guys were undercover somehow whipping up the crowd. I mean, that would be a lot. It would be crazy. And you would think that that would leak. at any point between when it happened and now.

You think someone might have been like, actually, yeah, like, here was a directive or, you know, they were trying to, like, make Trump look by it. But obviously, that's not the case. They're there for crowd control. So then we get into, and I don't feel bad for cash. I just want to be clear. I don't feel bad for cash. But he did have to put out a statement being like, actually, no, these people were there

for crowd control. And his statement notably did not mention Donald Trump, obviously, because he cash cares. about his career. But like, imagine being the, imagine being in Cash's position. It must have been really difficult to figure out what the hell to do. Yeah. I mean, he clearly had to say, you know, there's this misconception. People are going after the FBI. I'm not going to name those people or, you know, if it's the president. And so I think he had to then give a story to Fox News to kind of like correct the record here. And they put on a tweet and it was the same thing. But what do you think the internal conversations were among FBI leadership around this? Like, Yo, Cash. You got to do

I think we've seen Cash have to do this once or twice before on kind of a smaller scale when like someone in the right wing media will target like an FBI agent or something. And then he, Cash realizes, he really has like no actual reason to go after this person. So then he has to come out and say, you know, in fact, this person, you know, is in good standing at the FBI. And so obviously with Trump, this is on a much bigger scale. But I think there is this sense of like, you know, it's I've got a, I can't risk just totally alienating all the agents.

Yeah, and I know, but he's, I guess the bigger scale he did it was on Epstein, where he went out there and was like, actually, no, there's nothing here. And then, of course, that didn't go very well for him. So this brings us, I guess, back to Mike Johnson, which really kind of like ticked me off a little bit. Although I guess I should have done a little bit more homework. He's like, Mike Johnson, as far as you know, is he like a January 6th truther? Is he like, has he said stuff like this before?

You know, as far as I know, I haven't seen him like really be out there. in terms of saying, like, you know, it was a false flag operation or something like that. Okay. Yeah. So here you have the guy who is the Speaker of the House, whose members. I mean, we know that Mike Johnson was pushing. He was on the amicus brief pushing for Trump to overturn the election, you know, the election and things like that. But I'm not really familiar with him ever saying the actual riot that day was a false flag operation. But here you have him, basically telling Jake Tapper, after the FBI head, Cash Rattel says, no, these people are there for crack control. Tells Jake Tapper, we don't know. You just don't know.

And it's just so irresponsible to say something like that. Like the guy who would know, and Cash Patel is not Chris Ray or James Comey. He is Trump's guy for, for sure, like has just said 12 hours ago, this is not, these were not plants, right? Like these people weren't there, riling people up. And Mike Johnson couldn't bring himself to just trust Cash Patel. I mean, I don't know what the incentives are for him to do this shit, but it strikes me as really irresponsible. Well, maybe he hadn't seen Cash's statement, but I have to imagine he had. Well, you know, Mike Johnson, historically, I think he's developing this thing where he kind of like gets his own talking points or kind of comes up with them.

I mean, you know, we think about when he said Trump was an FBI informant against Epstein. Oh, right. I forgot about that. I don't know if he's just like missing some emails or what's going on, but he's kind of getting out over his skis repeatedly here. I totally forgot about that. Yeah, maybe that's it. But, you know, it's like your members, your colleagues were there that day. Like, it was, you know, it wasn't a minor thing.

And to, like, dabble with this shit, to flirt with these conspiracists is really bad. We expect that from Trump, but not from Mike Johnson, I guess. I don't know. Any other thoughts, well? Well, if I could just share, like, kind of something that's amused me about this whole John Solomon aspect of it. But as I said, there's always, like, little Easter eggs buried in his stories that basically often undermine them. And so in this case, he had in this story, he also had a report from it. It was like the FBI feedback report.

How did we do on January 6th? And so he made it out to be like that everyone was like, oh, we're too woke. You know, this is why we missed it. And so then he published all the complaints. And so I was going through them. And there was one he said, because of our political bias, he said agents complained about wokeness and the specific phrase was political bias. We weren't prepared for January 6.

And I thought, hmm, I wonder. And I looked that up. And as you might expect, it's actually an agent saying we were too, we're too, we're conservative. We were too trusting of Trump supporters. We didn't think they would do this. So he's completely twisted it. Totally twisted it around. And then I will say another one he jumped on that said, you know, the FBI is too anti-conservative. This is why January 6th happened. I read the full complaint and it was an agent saying like, you know, we didn't go after the stolen election of 2020, which he left out. You know, it might have exposed the agent as a bit of a

crackpot. The idea the FBI is just too woke. It's hilarious to me. All right, man. Well, there's so many good John Solomon stories. I feel like maybe that should be a false flag newsletter one day. I'd be more than happy to. Okay, cool. Well, we'll wait for that one. Everyone subscribe to Will's false flag newsletter. Everyone subscribe to our YouTube feed so you can get elevated content like this. Thanks for watching. We'll talk to you soon.