Related: Federal Involvement in the Infamous Riot

With the understanding that the journalist involved here has a vested interest in shocking stories, and the Congressman he's interviewing certainly must also have an angle, these claims are official given that they are being raised as a result of a Congressional investigation.

Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), who has been investigating the Capitol riot, says that there were at least 200 undercover FBI assets embedded in the crowd, inside and outside of the Capitol Building..... 

FBI Director Wray has long refused to answer whether the FBI had assets dressed as Trump supporters at the Capitol that day.

One point that Higgins made was that it is highly improbable that civilians would know how to get around the Capitol without help from people who knew where they were going.

“There’s no way they can come in some random door that gets opened and then get their way directly to Statuary [Hall] or the House chamber or the Senate chamber. It’s just not possible,” Higgins told Carlson....

Higgins says the evidence points to FBI undercover agents who planted the seeds of a "radical occupation" of the Capitol online before Jan. 6.... the evidence suggests that the Capitol riot, which has been used as a pretext to incarcerate Trump supporters without trial and to even prevent Trump from being allowed on the ballot in various states, was a set-up.

“I’m following the evidence, and to my horror, it implicates our FBI at the highest level,” Higgins said.

The usual defense of entrapment as a tactic is that you couldn't entrap people who weren't at least somewhat open to committing the crime. If the crowd had been made up of people who would never consider rioting, committed to peaceful and lawful obedience at all times, even 200 instigators salted through the crowd would not be enough. To my mind police entrapment is always wrong, but that's their usual defense so it's fair to raise the point.

Likewise, Trump himself bears responsibility (link is to my post from that day) for having staged a rally so close to the counting action that was taking place. It doesn't require a brilliant mind to know that a riot was likely given that you concentrated so many of the aggrieved in one place, not that far away from where the votes were being counted. His poor judgment on that day is inexcusable even if the Feds were acting like complete scoundrels. 

That said, the most inexplicable thing about the whole event was the cascade failure of the security systems in place to prevent such things. From about a week after: 

One of the things I've been trying to piece together is how all the various security forces we have in place at the Capitol failed on 6 January. It's quite embarrassing, really: the Capitol Police alone have 2,000 men, the DC National Guard another thousand-plus battalion, and then there's the FBI, the Park Police, the Metro Police Department, the National Guard units from VA and MD that could be called with short notice, even the 3rd Infantry Regiment in Arlington (and the Marines not too far down the road in Quantico). 

We had plenty of guys who could have been there, and plenty of advance notice of a demonstration likely to spin out of control. Yet somehow, dudes with bison hats were wandering the halls of Congress. 

The simplicity of the explanation that the cascade failure was intended, and thus directed, is attractive compared to the nest of coincidences that would otherwise be required as explanators. It also explains why the FBI never found any suspects for the "pipe bombs" that were allegedly planted near party headquarters that day. I remember Jim Hanson -- former Green Beret -- and I looked over the photos and decided the 'bombs' pictured were probably mock-ups instead of real bombs anyway.

Now, the old saying that 'the simplest explanation is always best' -- which is itself a bastardization of Occam's Razor -- is not accurate. The true explanation is always best. Occam's Razor is a heuristic for gamblers, not a truth-identifying tool. The tangled-nest explanation of the cascade failure could be the true explanation: after all, we saw an even more complex cascade failure of our systems during the Afghanistan withdrawl the next year.

Still, a tool for gamblers does tend to identify high-probability bets. This one is worth looking into further, and keeping an open mind about, even if it is currently the fodder of hard right wing Congressmen and journalists.