Not sure why they'd need a fake Maoist group for this when the real ones are pretty good at fomenting factional disputes. (I attended a couple of young socialist (I forget the name of the sponsoring organization) on-campus meetings in the late 60's, mostly out of curiosity. It's pretty clear why college student revolutionaries never took over the world. The meetings consisted mostly of pointless theory-based arguments between Maoists, Marxist-Leninists, and Trotskyites--no one admitted to being a Trotskyite; that was just a pejorative term for anyone considered not revolutionary enough.)

If your hypothesis pans out, I wonder if there will be evidence that the FBI (or whoever) withheld evidence in order to allow the rioters to breach the Capitol, so as to maximize the importance of the FBI's intelligence. Kind of a conspiracy theory about conspiracy theories.

Interesting, well-researched journalism as always. Many thanks.