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       On March 11, Tucker Carlson reflected on his long-running attempt to baselessly blame government agent provocateurs for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. And often, by implication, that blame was directed at a man named Ray Epps.

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       “A lot of this was clearly influenced by federal agents or informants. It was, okay?” Carlson said on a podcast. “But I did not want to suggest someone was a federal agent or informant unless I knew for a fact, because you really could get someone in trouble. Right?”

       By that point, though, it was too late. Carlson had spent the better part of a year and a half doing exactly what he claimed to be wary of: baselessly suggesting that Epps was a government agent, at the very least.

       And now, in part because of it, Fox News appears to be in trouble again.

       Epps on Wednesday filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox.

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       The backdrop of the case, of course, is the astronomical $787.5 million settlement amount that Fox had to fork over to Dominion Voting Systems back in April. That case, in which Dominion had sued Fox for defamation, was clearly looking to be a liability when Carlson made his comments in March, suggesting that the lawsuit might well have been on his mind. (Fox ultimately fired Carlson just a week after the Dominion settlement.)

       Troublingly for Fox, the cases involve plenty of similarities.

       Fox hosts rarely explicitly endorsed the bogus claims against Dominion. But the network clearly made a proactive decision to air them, often walking right up to the line of endorsing them, despite their baselessness and the evidence to the contrary.

       Such was also the case, despite Carlson’s March 11 comments, with Epps.

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       Carlson’s efforts to tag Epps with the “Fed” label began inauspiciously. He and a guest on his show in June 2021 chewed over a theory that the government had effectively admitted in court filings that it had agents in the crowd on Jan. 6. Except the entire segment rested on a misreading of those documents.

       Despite this, Carlson would soon launch into a cascading series of imputations that Epps was one of these government agents. (The evidence for this is not convincing.) It began in the just-asking-questions mode Carlson often exploits to plant conspiratorial ideas in his viewers’ minds. But by the end, it was indisputable what Carlson was saying.

       “We don’t know whether this Epps guy was working with the federal government,” Carlson said in October 2021, while playing video of Epps urging people toward the Capitol and noting he was never charged. Carlson added, “Just to restate, we don’t know the truth of this at all.”

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       Carlson added in December 2021: “Did Ray Epps have any contact with Federal law enforcement agencies before the Capitol was stormed on Jan. 6?”

       By Jan. 5, 2022, Carlson more explicitly began connecting the dots.

       “[The FBI is] posting photos — and not of people who actually work for them who were there that day,” he said. “They’re not only posting photos, they’re taking them off the site, including the Most Wanted list. Remember Ray Epps?”

       The next day, the first anniversary of the Capitol attack, Tucker and the aforementioned guest, Darren Beattie, spoke about Epps and purported government agents involved in Jan. 6, with Carlson ultimately remarking, “I don’t want to believe that that’s true, but if it’s not true, what’s the other answer?”

       On Jan. 12, 2022, Carlson said Epps had “stage-managed the insurrection.”

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       After Jan. 6 committee member Adam Kinzinger, the Republican former Illinois congressman, tweeted that day that Epps was “was not & is not an FBI informant,” Carlson said Kinzinger was “lying.” A week later, Carlson added, “Clearly, they’re lying about Ray Epps; there is no question about that.”

       Carlson didn’t say specifically what the alleged “lie” was, but he kept attaching Epps to his theory. He said in June 2022 that if the committee was interested in the truth, it would “be talking to Ray Epps and various FBI informants.”

       Again, that’s not saying Epps was one of those supposed informants. But the implication gradually became more direct.

       The next month, Beattie on Carlson’s show labeled Epps “the smoking gun of the entire Fed-surrection” — the “Fed-surrection” being shorthand for the idea that Jan. 6 was spurred by the government.

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       Carlson in December invoked Kinzinger and Epps and mocked critics who said it wasn’t an “op.” “Okay, then what is it?” Carlson said.

       On the second anniversary, Carlson mentioned Epps remaining a free man and said, “At this point, it’s pretty obvious why that is. But of course, they’re still lying about it.”

       When House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) later gave Carlson access to video footage of Jan. 6 — and with the Dominion lawsuit looming — Carlson set about arguing he had been careful in his handling of such matters. In addition to the March 11 comments, Carlson on his March 6 show stated, referring to allegedly suspicious Jan. 6 figures, “We’re not going to put their faces on the screen and suggest they were federal agents. That would be irresponsible.”

       It’s not clear whether this was sarcasm. Just moments before, after all, Carlson had cited “some in the crowd that day who seemed to be inciting violence” who “were never indicted for it” — a description of which Epps is by far the most famous example.

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       “We assumed these were federal agents of some sort,” Carlson added. “We still assume that.”

       There are key legal questions here which also came up during the Dominion case. At its core, proving defamation against a media entity involves showing it acted with “actual malice” — that is, not just airing false information but doing so “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”

       Fox will probably argue that Carlson didn’t explicitly say “Ray Epps was a Fed” and point to Carlson saying he had invited Epps to explain himself. In the Dominion case, there were some firmer statements by the likes of Lou Dobbs, whom Fox took off the air shortly after another voting technology company filed suit, and guests more routinely stated these things as facts.

       Fox could argue this hasn’t been disproven, despite Epps’s testimony that he hadn’t worked with the government. (As with voter fraud — and many of Carlson’s conspiracy theories — it’s difficult to affirmatively disprove, perhaps by design.) Fox could argue that it terminated Carlson over stuff like this, though it hasn’t said so publicly thus far.

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       But relatively few of Carlson’s Fox allies were saying the same or even similar things publicly about Epps. Should this get to the discovery phase, as the Dominion case did, a big question is whether we’ll learn that the Fox bosses regarded this theory as being as bonkers as they did the Dominion theories, which despite their private sentiments continued to get a platform on Fox because executives reasoned it was what the audience wanted to hear. (Fox might well be tempted to settle early to avoid those kinds of embarrassments.)

       What’s clear is that the same willingness to cater to that audience and feed baseless conspiracy theories that happened to serve Donald Trump’s political purposes was also behind the Carlson/Epps episode. Now we find out whether this shoddy version of journalism will continue costing Fox, in a parting gift from its most conspiratorial host.

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