Raheem Kassam, a former War Room cohost, is one of my favorite people.

He’s an excellent, in-depth reporter, but he’s also quite witty. It’s a fantastic and lethal combination. He did an excellent piece on Ray Epps’ testimony a while back. He read it all and then broke it down; if you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend it.

The entire piece can be found here. But one thing that stood out to me, and I thought it was worth discussing, was the missing “two hours” in Ray Epps’ DC movements on January 5th, the day before the big “insurgency.”

According to the testimony and text message record, Ray drops off the radar for a couple of hours, and the clowns on the J6 Committee did absolutely no digging to find out what was going on, or who Ray Epps could’ve been with.

Here’s what Raheem Kassam said in his tweet: There’s a strange two-hour gap in Epps’s movements that the committee never dig into, the night of Jan 5th. He loses his son and takes hours to return to his hotel, which is only a 10-minute walk away.

Here’s a more detailed look from Raheem’s Substack:

On page 33, we learn that Epps’s son Jim had text his dad, asking if he was still out at BLM Plaza.

Q: “It looks like you had a lengthy — or 140 seconds, so what’s that? That’s not even 3 minutes — conversation with your son just after midnight. Is that possible that you guys were separated still at that point, or were you back to the hotel room?”

Epps: “Yes, it is possible. I had to walk back.”
Okay, he had to walk back. Does that account for the near TWO HOUR difference between when Epps’s son text him, and when he appears to reach the hotel? Not really. Something else strange happens at this point in the conversation: the questioner asks for a break, and when they return, Epps has additional counsel.

We know that Epps says he stayed at the “Washington Marriott”. Well, there are indeed a few Marriotts in D.C., but not a lot of “Washington Marriotts”. There are Courtyards by Marriott, AC Hotels by Marriott, etc. But in so far as hotels named “Marriott” – there are three biggies: the Washington Marriott, the Washington Marriott Georgetown, and the JW Marriott, as indicated below. There’s also the new Marriott Marquis attached to the D.C. Convention Center, where you see the ‘Unconventional Diner’ on the map:

The walk from BLM Plaza to the Washington Marriott takes 10 minutes. The walk from BLM Plaza to the JW Marriott takes 12 minutes. The walk between the JW Marriott and the Washington Marriott is 8 minutes. So unless Epps really got turned around and walked 10 blocks in the wrong direction to the Georgetown Marriott, or 20 minutes to the Marriott Marquis – several times over – the idea that the two hours is accounted for by trying to find his hotel 10 minutes away makes little sense. He might’ve ambled around, but remember, this is an old dude in a strange city, who was just in a fracas with randos at BLM Plaza, at midnight.

His son even text him at 10:30pm, asking his whereabouts but on page 38 we learn that Epps was still making calls at 12:17am and 12:19am, to his son and his brother “Scott or Darrell” (he oddly can’t remember) respectively. This time period, broadly unaccounted for, is never further explored by the committee. But within 6 hours or so, the trio – Epps, his son, and his son’s friend Zack – were outside the White House ready for the rally at the Ellipse.

Interesting, right?