(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., turned heads during a congressional hearing Wednesday, when he claimed to have evidence of at least two busloads of FBI informants that were sent to Washington DC for the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill protest-turned-riot.
Questioning FBI Director Chris Wray, Higgins asked whether there were FBI informants were in the Jan. 6 crowd.
Wray declined to answer, but told Higgins that “if you are asking whether the violence on Jan. 6 was some sort of operation orchestrated by FBI operatives or sources, the answer is no.”
But Higgins begged to differ.
Pointing to a picture behind him, the congressman claimed that the first two buses to arrive at Union Station on Jan. 6 were filled with FBI informants. He called them “ghost buses”—preferably a reference to unmarked law enforcement vehicles.
“These two buses in the middle here, they were the first to arrive at Union Station on Jan. 6. I have all the evidence. I’m showing you the tip of this iceberg,” he said.
“These buses are nefarious in nature and were filled with FBI informants dressed as Trump supporters, deployed to our Capitol on Jan. 6.”
Higgins’s time expired before he could elaborate further. Headline USA reached out to his office for additional information, but has yet to hear back.
Higgins signaled that more info is to come.
“You’re day is coming, Mr. Wray,” he said in closing.
Rep. Glenn Ivey, D-Md., did ask Wray to respond to Higgins’s claims later on during the hearing.
Wray didn’t deny the allegation, claiming ignorance instead.
“I haven’t seen the photo before, so I can’t speak to the specifics of his photo, and what it does or doesn’t show,” he said before repeating: “But what I can say is that if somebody is asking or suggesting whether the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was part of some operation orchestrated by FBI sources or agents or both, the answer is emphatically not.”
Higgins’s so-called “ghost buses” haven’t been mentioned by the hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants.
However, there is plenty of evidence that informants participated in the Jan. 6 event.
One such informant who stormed the Capitol was recently given “time served” for a felony gun charge due to his infiltration of the Proud Boys ahead of Jan. 6.
“He has changed his thinking and actually worked as a paid FBI informant who infiltrated the Charlotte chapter of the Proud Boys and gave agents valuable information about the organization,” the Capitol-storming informant’s lawyer said in a separate case in September, pleading for a lenient sentence.
During the Proud Boys sedition trial, the DOJ disclosed at least another 10 to 12 undercover DC Metropolitan Police Department officers who participated in Jan. 6.
The defense in that case estimated that there were at least 50 law enforcement assets in the Jan. 6 crowd, adding that “there are reasons to suspect the true number [of informants] is higher.”
Not even most FBI offices involved in the Jan. 6 investigation know how many informants were in the crowd, according to FBI whistleblower George Hill, who alleged in May that officials in DC withheld such information from other offices.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
