Hop aboard the latest kooky right-wing conspiracy theory about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot: The nefarious “Ghost Bus.”
The image of a spectral public transportation system emerged like a phantom during a bizarre moment in the Congressional testimony of FBI Director Christopher Wray before the Homeland Security Committee. Republican Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana peppered Wray with questions about whether secretive buses arrived near the Capitol building on the morning of the riot in January 2021.
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Higgins berated Wray for not knowing what a “ghost bus” is, and claimed the term is common parlance among people who know about cop stuff.
“Do you know what a ghost vehicle is?” Higgins asked. “Director of the FBI certainly should. You know what a ghost bus is?”
Wray seemed nonplussed.
“I’m not sure I’ve used that term before,” he said.
“Okay,” said Higgins, skeptically. “Pretty common in law enforcement. It’s a vehicle that’s used for secret purposes. It’s painted over.”
Higgins then pointed at a billboard showing a nondescript picture of a parking garage with several buses in it.
“These two buses in the middle here, they were the first to arrive at Union Station on January 6th,” Higgins said. “These buses are nefarious in nature and were filled with FBI informants dressed as Trump supporters, deployed onto our Capitol on January 6th.”
Higgins characterized this otherwise very boring photograph of buses as just the “tip of the iceberg” of evidence he’s accumulated. Finally, he concluded, with the air of a man about to place his opponent in checkmate: “Your day is coming, Mr. Wray.”
Moments before this strange interaction, Wray affirmed that, contrary to right-wing myth-making, FBI sources did not instigate the Jan. 6 riot.
“If you are asking whether the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was part of some operation orchestrated by FBI sources and, or, agents, the answer is emphatically no,” Wray said.
Of course, Trump’s fans have spun their wheels for months over attempts to find evidence that the deadly Capitol riot wasn’t really the fault of a Trump rally that ran amok. The “Ghost Bus” theory is the latest installment in a series of unsubstantiated rumors.
But, in fairness, at least this one has a cool name.
