On Sunday evening, a left-wing activist from Utah who participated in the assault on the Capitol still had control of his Twitter account, several days after his arrest.
According to an affidavit, John Sullivan, 26, had a knife and was dressed in body armor, and told others to start a fire to burn down the building.
Sullivan also stated that he was at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, when scores of individuals entered it. Sullivan stated he was wearing a ballistic vest and gas mask while there. He showed the interviewing agent the ballistic vest. He further stated that he entered the U.S. Capitol with others through a window that had been broken out. Sullivan stated he followed the crowd as the crowd pushed past U.S. Capitol Police and followed the crowd into the U.S. Capitol,” the affidavit reads. “Sullivan further stated that he had been present at the shooting of a woman within the U.S. Capitol by a U.S. Capitol Police officer and that he had filmed the incident.
The affidavit continues:
The United States obtained a video of Sullivan, posted on YouTube, in which, while attending a protest in Washington, D.C., Sullivan can be seen telling a crowd, over a microphone, “we about to burn this shit down,” “we got to rip Trump out of office . . . f***ing pull him out of that shit . . . we ain’t waiting until the next election . . . we about to go get that motherf****r.” Sullivan then can be seen leading the crowd in a chant of, “it’s time for a revolution.”
[…]
After the crowd broke through the last barricade, and as Sullivan and the others approach the Capitol Building, Sullivan can be heard in the video saying at various points: “There are so many people. Let’s go. This shit is ours! Fuck yeah,” “We accomplished this shit. We did this together. Fuck yeah! We are all a part of this history,” and “Let’s burn this shit down.”
Despite this, as of roughly 7 p.m. Sunday, Twitter had not yet banned Sullivan’s account, according to a report from Fox News. Twitter permanently banned President Trump from their platform shortly after the assault on the Capitol, falsely claiming that he had incited the violence, and was at risk of inciting more.
Sullivan’s Twitter accounts were finally suspended sometime following the report from Fox News, but not until after he’d used his account to encourage his followers to “wreak some havoc.” Twitter did not respond to Fox News’ request for comment but apparently decided to take action after the report was published.
Twitter has come under fire for the blatantly hypocritical enforcement of its policies. While Trump was banned, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, and China’s Communist Party remain on the platform. The delay in Twitter’s banning of John Sullivan is yet another example of the company’s hypocrisy. While it’s good they finally did the right thing regarding Sullivan, evidence has since come out suggesting that the violence at the Capitol was pre-planned, and had nothing to do with Trump’s speech that day.
_____
Matt Margolis is the author of Airborne: How The Liberal Media Weaponized The Coronavirus Against Donald Trump, and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter, Facebook, Parler, Gab, MeWe, Rumble, and CloutHub.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member