Lawyer demands Fox apologize for Jan. 6 conspiracy theory
NEW YORK (AP) — The attorney for a just one-time supporter of former President Donald Trump who has been caught up in a Jan. 6 conspiracy concept demanded Thursday that Fox News and host Tucker Carlson retract and apologize for recurring “falsehoods” about the man’s supposed intentions.
The action taken on behalf of Raymond Epps specifically mentions a voting equipment company’s pending $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit in opposition to Fox, an sign that persons caught up in political conspiracy theories are battling back again.
The law firm, Michael Teter, claimed he gave Fox official detect of opportunity litigation. Fox Information experienced no fast comment.
Epps, a former Maritime from Arizona, traveled to Washington, D.C., for Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, rally and was caught there on video two times, at the time urging demonstrators to go to the Capitol.
He was under no circumstances arrested, main some to theorize that he was a governing administration agent conducting a “false flag” procedure to whip up difficulties that would be blamed on Trump supporters. There has been no evidence to suggest that was correct, and Epps instructed the congressional committee investigating the attack that he has hardly ever labored at or been an informant for a government agency.
Yet the principle, first posed on a fringe conservative website, distribute to the additional influential Fox Information and to Congress and was even pointed out by Trump himself.
Epps explained to The New York Moments final summer time that he and his spouse had to market their enterprise and dwelling and go away for an undisclosed location simply because of threats.
“The crazies started out coming out of the woodwork,” Epps testified to the congressional panel.
He has acknowledged remaining caught on movie on Jan. 5, 2021, telling demonstrators to go to the Capitol the following day. He reported he was hoping to defuse a tense situation and intended that the demonstration should really be peaceful. He testified that it was “something stupid” that he reported and he regretted it.
Epps also was caught on video clip at the Capitol on Jan. 6, but said he did not enter the creating. He has been pointed out on Carlson’s key-time Fox News Channel display five periods in 2023 by itself, in accordance to a search of transcripts identified in Nexis.
On March 6, Carlson said: “What was Epps executing there? We simply cannot say, but we do know that he lied to investigators.”
Previous July 13, on the day the Periods story about Epps and his spouse likely into hiding was posted, Carlson explained he was “on camera repeatedly telling people today to storm the Capitol. A whole lot of people who did that are however in jail, but Epps is not. But it’s a conspiracy principle?”
In his letter to Fox on Thursday, Teter demanded “that Mr. Carlson and Fox Information retract the claim that Mr. Epps was operating for the FBI or any other federal government entity when he attended the Jan. 6 events and the declare that Mr. Epps acted as an instigator or provocateur of the incident.”
He termed on Carlson and Fox to situation a official on-air apology “for the lies.”
Teter explained revelations that have emerged via court papers in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit might make clear why Fox acted the way it has with his shopper.
Dominion has stated Fox knowingly and maliciously spread lies that it was associated in voting irregularities that damage Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Documents have unveiled the suspicion that a lot of at Fox had about those theories, but also inside worry about how the community may well be dropping professional-Trump viewers who considered the wrong promises that the election was stolen.
Fox has explained that it was carrying out its job in reporting on newsworthy claims created by the then-president and his allies.
In Epps’ situation, Teter wrote that “fear of getting rid of viewers by telling them the fact is not a defense to defamation and bogus light, nor will it absolve you of liability relevant to statements for infliction of emotional distress.”
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Associated Push researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report.