We’ll give a hat tip to Chad Rogers at The Dead Pelican for finding this – it’s a clip of Rep. Clay Higgins on Benny Johnson’s podcast from a little while back talking about that somewhat-famous confrontation he had with FBI director Christopher Wray about the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot.

If you’ll remember that fiery exchange, which is included in the clip, Higgins asked Wray point blank whether the FBI had confidential informants or employees seeded into the crowd. Wray’s answer was evasive to the point of comedy – it was obvious he knew the FBI had covered the board on January 6, but had no desire to talk about it.

And Higgins’ response was that the answer should have been “no.” Which made for a great sound bite.

We’re not completely sure that we agree with Higgins on that point, though we do lean in his direction. The thing is, if there was an honest and trustworthy FBI it probably wouldn’t be all that sinister if they had a few people watching in the event things got out of hand.

But that’s not the concern. The concern is that the FBI, having meddled in the 2020 election in ways which impeded the public’s ability to make an informed choice for president – which is the only reasonable way to describe what it did in suppressing the reporting about the Hunter Biden laptop and the Chinese and Ukrainian bribes the Democrat nominee can be quite credibly accused of taking – then seeded the crowd with not so much informants as actual agents provocateur who turned what would have been a raucous but peaceful protest into a riot.

The further problem is that if the FBI – or other federal law enforcement agencies acting in concert with the FBI – had done what Higgins is implying they did (and let’s remember that Higgins’ position is held by a majority of Americans now; it might not be welcomed at ABC News but polls show more than 60 percent of the country believes there were salts in that crowd bent on agitating people into the Capitol for purposes of mayhem), it wouldn’t be outside of an already-established pattern of behavior for that agency.

The FBI has a long train of abuses in which it has entrapped people into “terrorist” activity. The supposed plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer was a perfect example. There were several other examples in the space of cooked-up jihadist plots which ensnared unsuspecting Muslims who might well have had evil on the brain but wouldn’t have attempted to act on those thoughts but for FBI goading.

This matters, because again and again we’re told that it’s “white supremacists” who are the nation’s top terror threat, and yet we sure don’t seem to see much in the way of hard evidence that the country is awash in neo-Nazi Klansmen with an eye toward bloody revolution. In fact, since Charlottesville in 2017, which is one of the most lied-about affairs in American history (the vast bulk of what happened in Charlottesville was a protest by ordinary folks over the removal of a historic landmark statue of Robert E. Lee; everything else was a conflict between fringe groups that resulted in one young woman being run over by a car driven by a deranged alt-right zealot), there has hardly been any evidence of a “white supremacist” threat.

And now we see a clearly cooked-up group calling itself the Patriot Front marching around in masks with massive police protection and it’s obvious the folks in the group are feds of some stripe or other.

Wray’s answer to Higgins could either have been “no,” which would have been a lie but at least it would have been definitive, or he could have said “yes,” matter-of-factly, and then given a flat explanation of why, and most people could have seen some sense in that answer even if they disagreed. Instead he responded with weasel words, and Higgins and the rest of us are more than entitled to see them under the worst possible light.

Especially since, as Higgins says, he has evidence that the FBI was everywhere at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.