Shortly after the January 6th Capitol incursion, many on the right claimed that leftist groups were involved as instigators. As far as I know, though, John Sullivan was the only named and charged person who possibly fit that category:
During the storming of the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, Sullivan entered the building with documentary filmmaker Jade Sacker and took extensive video, including video of the shooting of Ashli Babbitt. Sullivan could be heard saying “Dude, this shit’s gonna go viral” after Babbit’s death…
After the Capitol storming, Sullivan said he is not affiliated with BLM or antifa, nor with the pro-Trump crowd, although he supports Black Lives Matter. When asked about the use of antifa hashtags in his social media posts, he rejected being associated with the group, but has stated that he, along with his group, is anti-fascist. He also has called himself a citizen journalist. Saying he was at the Capitol storming as a photojournalist, he filmed himself chanting “we about to burn this shit down” and “we accomplished this shit. We did this together. Fuck yeah! We are all a part of this history”, “We gotta get this shit burned”, and “It’s our house, motherfuckers!” He also used a megaphone and shouted support. He said that he only said and did these things to “blend in” with the pro-Trump mob.
Sullivan has been charged with eight counts related to the riot. And yet, unlike many of the protestors who were far less provocative and violent (Sullivan broke a window), Sullivan has been released.
Now the website Revolver News has some observations and questions about the possible role of other January 6th demonstrators or planners – who may have been government agents. Caveat: there is no evidence that such a thing occurred, but here are the reasons that Revolver strongly suspects there may have been something of the sort:
We at Revolver News have noticed a pattern from our now months-long investigation into 1/6 — and in particular from our meticulous study of the charging documents related to those indicted. In many cases the unindicted co-conspirators appear to be much more aggressive and egregious participants in the very so-called “conspiracy” serving as the basis for charging those indicted.
The question immediately arises as to why this is the case, and forces us to consider whether certain individuals are being protected from indictment because they were involved in 1/6 as undercover operatives or confidential informants for a federal agency.
Here it is useful to draw a distinction between two discrete categories of participants in the so-called Capitol Siege.
The first category is the group of mostly harmless tourists who walked through already opened doors and already-removed barricades, and at most were guilty of minor trespassing charges and light property offenses. The second group consists of those who were violent with police officers, broke down barricades, smashed windows, belonged to a “militia” group engaged in military-style planning prior to the event, discussed transporting heavy weaponry, and so forth…
We are especially interested in the unindicted co-conspirators who belonged to any of the big three “militia groups” — the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and the Three Percenters. Indeed, it is these militia groups whose behavior, statements and planning leading up to and during 1/6 most closely align with the “violent insurrectionist” caricature we hear about in the media, and which the government claims to be going after in its aggressive prosecutions.
If it turns out that an extraordinary percentage of the members of these groups involved in planning and executing the Capitol Siege were federal informants or undercover operatives, the implications would be nothing short of staggering. This would be far worse than the already bad situation of the government knowing about the possibility of violence and doing nothing. Instead, this would imply that elements of the federal government were active instigators in the most egregious and spectacular aspects of 1/6, amounting to a monumental entrapment scheme used as a pretext to imprison otherwise harmless protestors at the Capitol — and in a much larger sense used to frame the entire MAGA movement as potential domestic terrorists.
That idea hadn’t occurred to me before, but it should have. Entrapment is a constant possibility in situations in which agencies such as the FBI infiltrate terrorist or other suspicious groups, supposedly in order to monitor them. I noticed many years ago that some of the Islamic terrorist attacks that were said to have been foiled in this country while still in the planning stages involved either entrapment by government agents or reason to suspect entrapment. And as recently as this past October, the story of the arrest of six men planning to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer seemed to feature FBI entrapment of the accused perps, as well.
Sure enough, in that same Revolver piece I linked and quoted from earlier, there’s more on the Whitmer kidnapping case that fits the entrapment scenario and has some suspicious parallels with certain aspects of January 6th:
…[W]hat if we told you that scarcely three months before the 1/6 Capitol Siege, the FBI arrested 14 people for planning to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and overthrow the State Government — and that the alleged conspiracy to overthrow the State government involved storming of the State Capitol?
And what if we told you that of the 14 individuals who allegedly plotted the “kidnapping” and overthrow of the state government, at least five were undercover agents and federal informants? And as if that’s not enough, many of the individuals allegedly involved in this plot appear to belong to the “Three Percenters,” one of the very same militia groups now blamed for storming January 6.
And, as the cherry on top, what if we told you that the director of the Detroit FBI Field Office, who oversaw the infiltration operation of the Michigan Plot, was subsequently granted a highly coincidental promotion to the D.C. office, where he is now the lead FBI agent for all 1/6 cases?
As crazy as it sounds, all of this is true.
This is highly disturbing. I have no idea if it’s correct, but the information appears to be based on the FBI’s admissions and the DOJ’s own court filings. After what we’ve learned about the FBI’s role in Russiagate, it is unfortunately very believable.
More from Revolver:
The Michigan Plot did not start out as a kidnapping. According to the DOJ’s own indictment, the plot started as a plan to “storm the Capitol building” in Lansing, Michigan. And the “conspirators” would do so by amping up “at least 200 men” from an upcoming unrelated rally planned at the Michigan Capitol building (a rally that was focused on the Second Amendment, not insurrection) by agitating enough rallygoers to run inside and occupy the building.
Paragraph 10 of the FBI affidavit describes the plot to “storm the state capitol”…
There is so much more in the article that I can’t summarize it. but some of it involves various unindicted co-conspirators with roles in the January 6th incursion. Who are they? The article lays out the case for why they may indeed be government agents.
It sounds like a far-out theory, and one I would have thought highly unlikely and perhaps even preposterous just a decade ago. But now I find it believable, although still in the realm of speculation. I’m not aware of Revolver’s track record on this sort of thing – perhaps some of you have light to shed on their history of investigative reporting.
[NOTE: I learned about the Revolver News article last night when I was channel surfing and saw Tucker Carlson do a piece on it.]
