AUSTIN, TEXAS: Joe Rogan is once again pushing the conspiracy theory that the federal government staged the January 6 Capitol riots as a false flag operation. Rogan also claims pro-Trump rioter Ray Epps "clearly instigated" the incident.

Epps filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox News earlier this month, claiming that the network had spread the "fantastical story" that he was an undercover federal agent who instigated the violence at the Capitol in an effort to delegitimize former President Donald Trump and his followers. Rogan had a lot to say about this.

'The Jan 6 thing is bad'

Rogan, who landed a $200 million deal with Spotify in 2020, has frequently supported the notion that federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies utilized "agent provocateurs" like Epps to incite the crowd to storm the Capitol. He previously claimed that the intelligence community had a "vested interest in this going sideways," adding that "if somebody wanted to disparage a political party or to maybe have some sort of justification for getting some influential person like Donald Trump offline, that would be the way they would do it."

While hosting comedian Jim Gaffigan on his show on July 28, the podcaster argued that the FBI and CIA were involved in creating the chaos. He noted that the agencies have a history of disrupting "peaceful protests" in order to unfairly portray protesters as violent.

"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 claimed. ''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 insisted, “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.”

'Trump was very open about his disdain'

Rogan asserts that the ex-president's animosity toward the alleged "deep state" was the driving force behind the intelligence community's determination to implicate Trump during the Jan 6 riots, a demonstration intended to prevent the certification of the 2020 presidential election.​ Rogan said, “Trump was very open about his disdain for the intelligence agencies." Rogan added, “Throughout history, people of unchecked power and unchecked influence have enemies, and Trump was their enemy.” He went on to say that the intelligence services were "going to get him any way they could," and that January 6 gave them the chance to paint him as "responsible for this insurrection attempt."