It appears to me, though, that more likely he was mainly an opportunist who wanted to help incite a riot, so he could record it and profit from selling the video rights to various news outlets. in my opinion it is more than just barely possible that Ashli Babbitt might not have died had it not been for the additional incitement provided by Sullivan.John Earle Sullivan made his first appearance in federal court in Utah on Friday on charges he participated in the violent rioting at the U.S. Capitol.
There’s not much question he participated. He filmed it and posted it on social media — including chilling footage of a woman being shot by Capitol police trying to crawl through a smashed window — then posted subsequent videos describing the experience.
The real question, in my mind, is: What was he doing there?
. . .
Sullivan said in a video recorded after the rioting that he doesn’t support Trump or President-elect Joe Biden. He’s not with BLM or Antifa. But he knew, based on social media posts, there would be an effort to overrun the Capitol and he wanted to be there to film what transpired like a citizen journalist.
“Was I an agent provocateur? Was I there to invite violence? I can tell you no,” Sullivan said in the video. “I was there to document the events and be part of history.”
But he did a lot more than document. In a video he can be heard shouting, “Let’s go! This s*** is ours! … We accomplished this s***! We did this together … Let’s burn this s*** down!”
He is seen climbing through a broken window, he confronts law enforcement and tells them to go home, then enters an office and — it appears and the federal charges against him allege — broke a window looking out onto the plaza.
Eventually he and the mob come to the barricaded doors at the Speaker’s Lobby where he films Ashli Babbitt trying to climb through a broken window before being shot by a police officer. Sullivan later shared the video with news outlets and it had more than 18,000 views as of Friday.
I recommend reading the whole article in the link. There are a number of other references to him on the web including this one on Wikipedia.“He incited violence,” his brother said, “people got hurt, and he stood back and watched it on a camera.”
But on some level, it doesn’t matter. The notion that Antifa made good people do bad things is patently absurd. Everyone who participated in the Capitol riot are responsible for their own actions and need to be held accountable.
Hopefully they will — and that goes for John Sullivan, too.
Among the important points in the Wikipedia article are:
Sullivan was treated with suspicion in left-wing activist circles. Labor activist Talia Jane said he is "reviled throughout the activist space", noting he had been escorted from a December 12 event at Black Lives Matter Plaza after he was identified.[3] Many suspected him to be a double agent working for law enforcement. An activist from Portland warned people not to trust him, after he got local activists arrested in September 2020 by leading them down a wrong route and into a police kettle. Anonymous activists from Seattle published a memo in November 2020 accusing him of being an agent provocateur, pointing to his getting activists arrested or exposing their identities. Activists noted that his brother is a pro-Trump supporter, a supporter of the "Blexit" movement and speaking at a Proud Boys rally. After a man was shot in Provo during the protests in summer 2020, a right-wing militia started appearing to police Sullivan's group. During one of his rallies, Sullivan handed the microphone to a Proud Boys member. According to Lex Scott, he told them that his group wanted to work with them, which led to other left-wing activists refusing to work with him. He later got his group firearms training. As he began carrying assault rifles to protest, this invited hostility from both the right and the left.[3][7]
Others believe Sullivan exploited the racial justice movement for self-gain. Lex Scott said that Sullivan seemed to have "a death wish" as he thought it would be "cool, or amazing, if he was killed at a protest and it started a revolution". She has also denied Sullivan is a member of BLM-Utah and expressed suspicions of his seeking fame, adding he never attended any BLM meetings nor worked alongside them to advance their agenda. The Salt Lake Tribune reporter Robert Gehrke also stated that he had been selling merchandise and indulging in self-promotion on many websites; his Insurgence USA website sells protest-related gear, such as black clothing, gloves, and gas masks, branded "bloc gear collective".[3][7] In Signal chat groups, Sullivan would discuss himself from various sock puppet accounts.[6]
