“I’ve only had one conversation with this man, back in June when he burst on the scene, and he said, wouldn’t it be cool, or amazing, if he was killed at a protest and it started a revolution,” Scott added in
a second TikTok clip. “And I said, ‘John, no shade, but if you were killed, it wouldn’t start a revolution. If I was killed, it wouldn’t. Activists die every day. We don’t make the news, but we die, and it doesn’t start a revolution.’”
Scott also suggested that Sullivan had “a death wish,” and said that his provocative and incoherent approach to organizing in Utah had provoked such a strong backlash that “every white supremacist in this state hunts him. They want to kill him.”
Untroubled by such facts, Brooks, the Trump ally who led the effort to have Congress reject the electoral votes from states the president lost so that he could remain in power, jumped in to amplify a misleading report about Sullivan from the far-right website Townhall, which falsely asserted in a headline that Sullivan had a “History of Organizing Violent Antifa, BLM Protests.”
After Sullivan was briefly detained and questioned by the police in Washington on Thursday and then released, Brooks shared the conspiratorial Townhall report and further distorted the truth in an innuendo-laden tweet that concluded: “#BLM & fascist #ANTIFA supporter arrested for role in Capitol assaults, ‘standing next to’ killed Trump supporter.”
The president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, followed by highlighting Sullivan’s presence in the Capitol in a podcast that treated the baseless rumor that the pro-Trump rioters were framed by anti-fascists as fact.
But instead of looking closely at the available video evidence of what Sullivan did during the raid on the Capitol — namely, following the crowd and cheering for their success as he filmed — Giuliani focused on video of Sullivan’s comments at a small protest in August when
he had urged a handful of protesters gathered in Washington “to fucking rip Trump out of that office over there.”
Giuliani made no attempt to explain how Sullivan, by following the Trump supporters into the Capitol, was responsible for their actions.
Neither does Giuliani, nor anyone in the right-wing media, reckon with the audio on Sullivan’s recording, which reveals that he voiced almost continual support for the storming of the Capitol, expressing what sounded like genuine delight at the success of the rioters.
What’s more, although Sullivan now claims that he was just there to record the raid on video, on three separate occasions in his recording of the raid, he can be heard intervening on behalf of the rioters with the police. On each occasion, he tried to convince the officers guarding the legislators sheltering from the mob to stand down, abandon their posts, and allow the enraged Trump supporters to get into the House chamber. Those interventions would seem to undermine Sullivan’s claim that he was “just recording” the riot and not participating in it.
In each of these exchanges he initiated with the police as he stood at the front of the mob, Sullivan told the officers that he was concerned for their safety and warned that they could get hurt if they did not step aside. The final time he made that plea, he
told one of three Capitol police officers guarding the barricaded door just outside the House chamber: “We want you to go home. I’m recording, and there’s so many people; they’re going to push their way up here. Bro, I’ve seen people out there get hurt. I don’t want to see you get hurt.” Again referring to himself as part of the mob, Sullivan told the officer that the rioters would help them leave. “We will make a path,” Sullivan told the officers, unaware that a heavily armed SWAT team was about to arrive to take their place. “We’ll make a path, bro, please, just let us make a path.”
As another rioter leaned in to tell the officers, “We backed you guys this summer. When the whole country hated you, we had your backs!” the officers did, in fact, step aside. At that moment, Sullivan shouted in triumph: “I want you to go home! Go! Go!” He then immediately shouted encouragement to the rioters around him who moved to break down the barricaded door. “Let’s go, get this shit!”
Twenty seconds later, as Sullivan filmed the rioters smashing the glass of the door that was the last thing keeping them from getting at the members of the House inside, he suddenly saw an officer in a suit just beyond the door raise his pistol. He shouted, “There’s a gun!” and panned his phone over to record it. Even after other members of the crowd echoed his warning, Babbitt, an Air Force veteran from San Diego, tried to jump through an opening in the glass and was shot as Sullivan filmed the officer firing his weapon.
In the chaotic aftermath of the fatal shooting, Sullivan
described what he had seen to a videographer for the far-right conspiracy theory site Infowars, saying that he was sure Babbitt had been killed. “She’s dead. I saw the light go out in her eyes,” Sullivan told Infowars. “I’ll post the video. I have the video of the guy with the gun and him shooting,” he added. “I have it all, I was right at the doors.” When the Infowars cameraman asked for the footage, Sullivan told him, “Dude, this shit’s gonna go viral, bro.”
Sullivan then berated the police for shooting Babbitt. “That’s really fucked up! That got me moved, that got me heated!”
he screamed at the officers. Babbitt, he said, was “just going through the window. No weapon, none, no violence towards that guy, and she just gets shot! It’s on your hands, your guys’ hands!”
When he posted his video of the shooting on Twitter, it did go viral, along with Sullivan’s caption, which described the killing of the Trump supporter as a murder.
Despite what sounded like sympathy for the rioters in his comments as the storming of the Capitol unfolded, the focus of right-wing media on Sullivan since then has prompted a wave of threats against him online.
From the left, activists and journalists who cover the movements for racial justice and against fascism are enraged at Sullivan for giving the right-wing media material for their conspiracy theory about anti-fascist provocateurs.
Talia Jane, a journalist who filmed the right-wing attack on the police outside the Capitol, told me in a message that Sullivan “shows up for attention” and is now “not welcome in leftist activist spaces.” She said that he had tried to join a protest at Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington on December 12, when local anti-fascists confronted a contingent of Proud Boys after a pro-Trump rally, and was not allowed to take part.
Despite the skepticism about him on the left, the far-right hysteria over Sullivan reached such a fever pitch that when I called him to talk about it on Friday night, our interview was interrupted by a woman who came up to him on the street in Washington and asked him, again and again, “Are you BLM? Are you Black Lives Matter? John, will you just answer, are you with Black Lives Matter?”
As he walked away from the woman, I asked how he answers that question. Sullivan confirmed Lex Scott’s statement that he is not a member or a supporter of Black Lives Matter and told me he had formed his own group, Insurgence USA, to work for similar goals, like an end to police brutality and racial discrimination. Asked about his politics, he said, “It’s neither right nor left; it’s completely neutral, in the middle. I’ve never voted in my life nor will I probably ever.”
That echoed comments Sullivan made in October, two weeks before the election, when he told a handful of viewers following his
hourlong YouTube monologue on the possibility of an imminent civil war that he was not interested in “picking sides on right or left,” and even believed that “voting for Trump does not make you racist.”
When I asked him to address left-wing critics who accuse him of either harboring secret right-wing sympathies or just exploiting their movement for profit — by selling “bloc gear”
on his Insurgence USA website, including gas masks, bulletproof vests, and knives — he dismissed them. “These are all fallacies,” he said, as the woman continued to harass him.
I only discovered after we hung up that the woman who was stalking Sullivan as he spoke to me was Millie Weaver, an Infowars contributor who filmed her harassment of him and posted a clip on Twitter, where the video went viral and has now been viewed more than 1.2 million times — including by Giuliani, who shared it with a comment blaming Sullivan for the attack on the Capitol.
I also asked Sullivan about his brother’s recent claim, in
an interview with a right-wing YouTuber, that John was, until recently, a conservative too. Jade Sacker, a filmmaker who is making
a documentary about the two brothers — and was
filming John as he filmed the riot in the Capitol — told me that the two men, who were both adopted, were raised in a deeply conservative military family. Their parents, Sacker said, are so right-wing that they refuse to watch Fox News, considering it too liberal.
John Sullivan flatly denied that he had ever been a conservative. “I’ve never, even to this day, had a political ideology,” he said. He also maintained that his activist organization, Insurgence USA, which promotes protests and sells gear to people who want to attend, was not political. “No, it’s not, not in the least,” he said.
When I asked Sullivan how his group hopes to end racial discrimination and police brutality without engaging in politics, his response was vague and contradictory. “We have to pass laws,” he said, “legislation that, effectively, hopefully, bring about change to hopefully end things like that from happening.” Moments later, he added: “You could say we do have laws in place that, you know, hopefully provide equality for all people, but you could say it’s far from the truth from a lot of things that we’ve been seeing.”
While Sullivan initially suggested that he had attended the raid on the Capitol just to observe it, he later claimed that he was there as a covert anti-Trump activist, conducting “
counter-intel” on the pro-Trump “chuds.”
Whatever his motives for being among the rioters, it is important to be clear about what Sullivan did not do with his footage of right-wing rioters forcing their way into the Capitol, overwhelming police officers, and forcibly shattering glass in the barricaded door to the Speaker’s Lobby. He made no effort to distort the footage of the pro-Trump crowd through misleading editing to make them look bad. In other words, whatever Sullivan’s politics, if any, he did not emulate any of
the techniques commonly used by right-wing video journalists who attend left-wing protests with the goal of discrediting the protesters by recording acts of violence and stripping them of all context.
Inside the Capitol, moments after Babbitt was killed, Sullivan could be heard on camera identifying himself to the rioters around him as “an activist.” In the days since then, once he sold his footage of Babbitt’s shooting to news organizations, including NBC and the Washington Post, Sullivan has started to describe himself himself as a journalist instead of an activist.
On Sunday, he changed the self description on
the homepage of his website — which appeared as a line of text over a photograph of himself protesting in tactical gear with an assault rifle outside the Utah state Capitol last summer — from “Activist. Athlete. Motivational Speaker.” to “Activist. Video Journalist. Athlete.”
A screenshot of the homepage of JohnSullivan.org
By Monday morning, he had updated that text to “Video Journalist. Activist. Athlete.” On Tuesday, he replaced the cover image of him protesting with a loop from his video of the pro-Trump mob attacking the barricaded door outside the House and the gun being drawn that would kill Babbitt, and the self-description was updated again, to just “Video Journalist.”
The sudden transformation of his public persona from activist to video journalist was complete by Wednesday, when Sullivan responded to a skeptical question during
a live YouTube Q&A by saying that Insurgence USA, the activist group he founded last year to fight for racial justice, “is not antifa; it’s a media company, actually. You can look it up, it’s an LLC. It’s a media company that I created, and it is also a platform that I like to use as far as telling a lot of stories that are out there.”
Update: Saturday, Jan. 16, 5:07 p.m. EST
John Sullivan was released from custody on Friday by a judge in Salt Lake City, The Deseret News reported, despite objections from Assistant U.S. attorney Bryan Reeves. The Utah magistrate judge ordered Sullivan to wear a location monitor and observe a series of strict conditions, including being barred from social media and from attending protests and possessing a firearm and having his electronic devices subjected to monitoring and searches. He must also must remain at his home and find a job unrelated to his Insurgence USA organization.
Also on Friday, Rudy Giuliani tweeted and then deleted a screenshot from a text message that appears to have been sent by James Sullivan, John’s far-right brother, who claimed he was “working with the FBI” to place blame for the Capitol riot on John and “226 members of antifa.”
Giuliani deleted the message without explaining whether the text had been sent to him by James Sullivan or by someone who received it and provided a screenshot to the president’s lawyer. James Sullivan has not yet responded to a request for comment from The Intercept.
Giuliani citing James Sullivan’s text repeating the unfounded conspiracy theory about his brother being an antifa provocateur was eagerly shared by far-right media outlets, and intensified criticism of him from activists on the left.
Updated: Feb. 11, 12:02 p.m. EST
This article was updated with new information about the death of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick. According to a report from CNN, investigators have determined that Sicknick was not killed by a blow from a fire extinguisher, as anonymous law enforcement officials previously told reporters. The precise cause of his death has not yet been made public, nor has any information about when or where the confrontation with rioters took place.
