An anti-Trump activist who once said he wanted to “get” the president out of office entered the Capitol building on Wednesday alongside a crowd of pro-Trump protesters, but said he was only there to “document” this.
“There is a narrative out there now that Antifa was the people who were causing the disturbances, causing the tension, they were the only people who invaded the Capitol, and I wanted to be able to tell a part of the story and show that it was anything but the case, “John Sullivan, founder of Utah-based Insurgence USA, told Fox News on Thursday.
Insurgence USA describes itself as “the revolution”. He began to protest racial injustice in policing last year, following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.
In August 2020 comments to a small crowd at a Washington, DC intersection, Sullivan pointed to the nearby White House and unleashed a torrent of violent rhetoric. “We … about to burn that shit,” he said. “We have to … get Trump out of that office right there,” he continued, adding, “We are not about to … wait until the next election.” He then led the crowd in a cry for “It’s time for revolution”.
John Sullivan, the anti-Trump founder of Utah-based Insurgence USA, said he entered the Capitol Building on Wednesday alongside a crowd of pro-Trump protesters, but said he was only there to “document”.
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Sullivan told Fox News that he did not notice other leftist activists inside the building. But he added that he couldn’t know for sure without talking to everyone individually.
“As far as being able to understand who’s in the crowd, based on being around protests a lot … I didn’t see any people who were originally at the BLM protests,” he said.
Sullivan says he was close to Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt when she was shot and killed on Capitol Hill, and the video appears to show him on the scene.
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Sullivan told Fox News that he regularly attends protests to record what is going on, including a clash involving Proud Boys on Tuesday near DC’s Black Lives Matter Plaza.
“It’s just recording, just, and not being active in it,” he said, although he was arrested in connection with protests in Utah over the summer and admitted to entering the Capitol through a window.
The website of his group Insurgence USA announced an event called “Kick these fascists out of DC” on Wednesday, at the same time as a pro-Trump rally near the National Mall.
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After Trump’s demonstration, a crowd of protesters stormed the Capitol, ransacked Congressional offices and stormed the Senate floor, leading to a chorus of condemnations by members of both major parties. The breach disrupted a joint congressional session designed to validate Joe Biden as president-elect. Congress met again late in the evening and completed the process.
Sullivan tweeted several videos made on the Capitol on Wednesday. One contained a close-up view of the fatal shot by Babbitt, an Air Force veteran, at a barricaded Capitol door. The police later said that she was shot by a police officer.
District Attorney General of Columbia Michael Sherwin announced a series of chaos-related charges on Thursday, including gun possession, assault and theft, and said more would come.
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Utah’s Sullivan prison was in connection with a protest in which another protester allegedly shot a passing driver during a confrontation, according to Deseret News.
Sam Dorman of Fox News contributed to this report.