We Now Know What the Willard Hotel War Room Was For—and You're Not Going to Believe It

The revelation of the seventh person in Trump's Willard Hotel war room leads to the strangest discovery of the January 6 investigation so far, one so bizarre that it must be read to be believed.

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Introduction

When I discovered that the seventh identifiable figure in the photographs of Donald Trump’s Willard Hotel command center (photographs which had been posted on Instagram by Trump associate Robert Hyde) was Rudy Giuliani girlfriend Maria Ryan, the news meant little to me. It would, I felt, merit little interest from anyone else, either. I now realize that I couldn’t have been more mistaken, as sometimes mundane discoveries lead to appalling ones—something you’d think I’d recall from my experience as a federal-system criminal investigator and then a state criminal defense attorney.

As the identification of Maria Ryan as the seventh entrant into the Willard war room was underway, a Proof reader sent me a January 5 “interview” Ryan had conducted with One America News (OAN) propagandist Christina Bobb. I put the word “interview” in quotes here because, as the above photo confirms, and as Proof has already reported at great length, Bobb was, with Ryan, a member of Trump’s secretive insurrection-week team at the Willard—and therefore her on-air discussion with Ryan on January 5 was in no way a real interview. {Note: Bobb didn’t disclose her association with Ryan during their chat.}

Even odder than the truth of the Bobb-Ryan “interview” was its timing: Insurrection Eve. Indeed (and this was the first sign of the strange story I was about to find myself immersed in as a journalist and researcher) on January 5, 2021, Maria Ryan was being interviewed from the very war room that Bobb was a member of—meaning that Bobb had at some point left the war room, gone in to work at OAN’s television studio, and then conducted an “interview” with the very legal team she was a part of with a fellow team member who was sitting in the very war room that Bobb herself had been using.

So Who Is Maria Ryan?

Before we turn to the Bobb-Ryan interview, it’s worthwhile to briefly summarize who Maria Ryan is besides the current girlfriend of a former president’s former personal lawyer. Per a report by the Concord Monitor, Ryan is an ex-hospital administrator from New Hampshire who “established a high profile away from [her hospital] work” in part by “accompan[ying] former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani to a state dinner at the White House, and on several trips abroad including to Paris, London, Albania and Israel.”

In May 2020—at the doorstep of the 2020 general election, and just as Ryan’s fellow war room participant Christina Bobb was making the leap from Trump’s Department of Homeland Security to OAN—Ryan and Giuliani “launched a radio show [entitled] ‘Uncovering the Truth with Rudy Giuliani and Maria Ryan,’ [that] aired on WABC in New York.” One of the show’s foci was “uncovering voter fraud”, per the Monitor. The newspaper notes that Ryan thereafter attended the Republican National Convention in DC in August 2020, and began spreading the “Big Lie” that Trump had won the 2020 presidential election as early as November 6—just 72 hours after Election Day.

At the time that Ryan and Giuliani formed their radio show in May 2020, the New York Post identified Ryan as Giuliani’s “alleged mistress”, adding that Giuliani’s “ex-wife [Judy Nathan] claimed they were still married when Ryan and Giuliani got together.” Sometime in 2020, Ryan’s son, Eric Ryan, became a part-time driver for Giuliani. In January 2021, Giuliani referred to Ryan as an “associate” as he was acknowledging to Newsweek that Ryan had acted as a member of his legal staff in sending an email to the 2020 Trump campaign demanding “20,000 a day” in legal fees. By the spring of 2021, The Times (UK) was reporting that Giuliani and Ryan were now “in a relationship.”

The Bobb-Ryan “Interview”

What Bobb provided Ryan, Giuliani, and Trump’s war room—a war room that was her own as well—a platform to say on Insurrection Eve is striking. In the exchange, which aired on a TV channel Trump had repeatedly urged his fans to watch in the lead-up to the election, Bobb and Ryan had the following back-and-forth (emphasis in original):

BOBB: So I know you’ve been speaking with the president a lot, can you tell us about his psyche? How he’s feeling? Where’s he at with things? What’s his mental state going forward?

RYAN: We have a remarkable president. Can you imagine? You’re fighting for four years, taking care of the people, a lot of people are working against him—the media, the whole Russian hoax thing—then you know you’ve won a presidency, then the people keep coming out, calling you, “President, they cheated you! President, I have this information!”…[and] he believes in the people, and if the people are saying fraud happened, he’s listening to the people—and he wants it to be rectified! He is a strong, strong man. I have a lot of empathy for what he’s going through, and what he has been going through. And even my callers on Uncovering the Truth, they call all the time with evidence [Trump won the election]. They call about how demoralized they feel, Christina. {The chyron below Ryan reads, “President Trump Determined to Fight.”} People feel like nothing is being done per law and order.

BOBB: Is the president committed to seeing this fight all the way through? Where’s his stamina level at?

RYAN: 100%! Look, what d[id] we coin him [as]? We coin[ed] him two things: the “People’s President,” and, number two, the “Energizer Bunny.” He is committed. He’s all about law and order. He’s all about justice. A weaker man—{the screen now shows Joe Biden}—would have said, “Well, a lot of fraud happened, they cheated, but I’m going to go and live a free life [outside the White House].” But that’s not what he’s destined to do. That’s not what the people want from him. And like I said, he’s really listening to the people.

Having made clear that “law and order” has failed Trump voters, that “the people” (a Revolutionary War callback long used as a catchphrase by pro-Trump insurrectionists) are demanding that Trump fight, that Trump is “determined to fight”, and that he “wants it [the election] to be rectified”, Ryan goes on to repeat every element of Trump’s Big Lie about election fraud—and to issue a demand for the DOJ to “seize Dominion voting machines” and order a “massive” FBI investigation. She also cites a “bigger [anti-Trump] conspiracy” in play, without explaining what she means by that.

For her part, Bobb, with her first four questions, has established her fellow Willard war-room participant as (a) a confidant of the president, (b) a spokesman for Trump, and (c) a credible source of information—doing so on the very television network the man Ryan was speaking for (Trump) had told his followers to watch instead of Fox News (which has since, with Newsmax, become the subject of major MAGA boycott).

That Trump’s team leveraged one of its several “war rooms” before the insurrection has never yet been reported, let alone that it was used on January 5 to present the same message of incitement Trump would offer the next day. Even Giuliani would admit on camera, within 48 hours of the insurrection’s conclusion, that “the [Ellipse] rally didn’t incite anything at the moment…much less later. And if it didn’t incite [violence] at the moment it was said, it’s not going to do it, much less later, because it wasn’t repeated over and over again in some kind of truck riding through there [downtown Washington].” In fact, it appears from the evidence that the very purpose of the war room Giuliani was running the week the Capitol was attacked was to ensure that by the time Trump spoke at the Ellipse, Trump’s comms team, much like “some kind of truck riding through” America, had repeated the same message Trump was offering over and over. Bobb and Ryan were critical to the repetition of the message, as was Giuliani.

It was this realization—that the Willard Hotel war room had a purpose before, during, and after the insurrection—that led this author, and Proof, to the strangest story of the insurrection thus far.

How the Willard War Room Was Used After the January 6 Insurrection May Reveal How It Was Used Before It

January 7 or January 8, 2021

When John Eastman called the Trump legal team’s Willard Hotel suite a “war room” intended to “coordinate [Trumpist] communications”, he meant it. And events would confirm that the room was intended to be used both before the events of January 6, during them, and afterward. Indeed, on January 7 or January 8—the date remains unclear, but it was, in any case, within 48 hours of the insurrection’s failure to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s landslide 2020 election victory—Giuliani used his suite of offices at the Willard to record a 36-minute propaganda video offering alternative facts about the insurrection that he hoped his listeners would subsequently consider “over the weekend” of January 9 and January 10. {Note: The efficacy of Giuliani’s strategy here was subsequently muted by the fact that Trump’s legal team did not upload the propaganda reel to its digital home, Rumble, until January 10.}

In the video, Giuliani pushed numerous false allegations that Proof will not detail at great length other than to say that they follow the same general line of rhetoric that insurrectionists are using today, nearly six months after their attack on the Capitol: the attack was masterminded by leftists, aided and abetted by the U.S. Capitol Police, whitewashed by the Democratic Party with the assistance of a pliant media, and was intended to discredit the America First “movement” generally and Donald Trump in particular. Giuliani tells listeners that what he’s offering them is a “separate narrative” from the one reported by the likes of CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times, opining that this narrative has been “censored” nationwide because U.S. media is an “organ of the Democrat [sic] Party and Joe Biden” that is “completely controlled” by Democrats and Biden in an echo of the “Soviet Union government or the Nazi government…or Communist China.”

But what’s most important to understand about Giuliani’s insurrectionist narrative—that “the [Capitol] riot was preplanned”—is that the narrative itself appears to have been preplanned. That is, Team Trump’s pinning of the events of January 6 on leftists was presaged by the pre-insurrection rhetoric of Trump, Giuliani, and other members of Trump’s inner circle, though the degree to which this mirroring of pre- and post-insurrection rhetoric may not have been coincidental is only now becoming clear.

While Proof has reported for months now, across a number of articles, on the apparent foreknowledge of Trumpist leaders that something terrible was going to happen on Capitol Hill—as evidenced by the fact that, almost to a person, those who plotted the events of January 6 avoided the Capitol on that day despite having said they would go there and having ostensibly been exhorted to go there by Trump—the fact that the war room at the Willard Hotel was so quickly deployed to spread a false narrative about antifa and Black Lives Matter being behind the insurrection raises concerns that the men and women who choreographed January 6 also pre-choreographed its aftermath.

Giuliani’s January 7 or January 8 claim, delivered from the Willard Hotel war room, that those who attacked the Capitol were “skilled…professional rioters” echoes claims he and Trump had been making about antifa and Black Lives Matter for over six months prior to the events of January 6. And yet Giuliani’s depiction of the events of January 6, when he delivered them from the Willard shortly after they’d concluded, was especially implausible: he insisted that an unknown entity had sent to the Capitol individuals “particularly skilled at climbing walls.” He continued: “These people [at the Capitol] were good wall-scalers—not Trump people.” Giuliani then wags his finger at the camera and goes on to explain—in case the point had been missed by anyone—that the overwhelming majority of those Trump supporters who responded to Trump’s public call to come to the White House Ellipse on January 6 were of insufficient physical fitness to climb “the great big mountains in New Hampshire or Vermont, much less Europe.” Giuliani then offered a cornucopia of now-familiar lies about the January 6 timeline, the content of Trump’s speech at the Ellipse, his own ability to perceive what equipment the crowd of tens of thousands that arrived at the Ellipse might have had in its possession on arrival, and far more not worth detailing.

More notably, Giuliani goes on to attack the U.S. Capitol Police, saying that “most” of those who breached the Capitol “were let in by Nancy Pelosi’s Capitol Police. They just opened the door and let them in.” {Note: This may explain why 21 insurrectionist Republican House members just voted against honoring the men and women of the Capitol Police for their defense of the Capitol on January 6.} The sole purpose of the attack on the Capitol, Giuliani says, was to “frame Trump”, a somewhat confusing grand ambition given that Trump had soundly lost the 2020 presidential election and was just two weeks from departing the White House; that Trump had (very publicly) organized and encouraged the march and (very publicly) sent an angry mob to the Capitol after telling them their actions once there would determine if America survived was no roadblock to Giuliani contending the opposite on camera.

Giuliani thereafter showed a grainy video of four white buses and two SUVs and said, without evidence, that it depicted “Police escorting four buses of antifa people to the head of the line…‘the head of the line’ means the people breaking in [at the Capitol].”

One reason to skip an even more detailed accounting of Giuliani’s lengthy, recorded presentation from the Willard war room after January 6, beyond its derangement, is that it is finally focused on only one, absolutely remarkable accusation: that a single man, John Earle Sullivan, plotted the entirety of the insurrection, led the attack on the Capitol, and carefully orchestrated everything that happened on January 6. Giuliani positions Sullivan as the Robert E. Lee of January 6, a strategic genius who should enter the annals of history as being among the most treacherous Americans ever to have set foot on U.S. soil. Giuliani came to this conclusion, he indicates, on seeing a long video from inside the Capitol that Sullivan put his YouTube channel, JaydenX.

That in the video Sullivan was wearing a Trump hat is dismissed by Giuliani as a misdirection. The word “Trump” could “easily have been painted on [the hat]”, Giuliani explains in his January 7 or January 8 video, adding, disdainfully, that the hat didn’t look like “official” Trump gear. Giuliani also ignores the fact that, as The Intercept would later report, “[Sullivan’s] raw footage captured him repeatedly expressing what sounded like genuine enthusiasm for the success of the riot.”

January 12, 2021

On January 12, Giuliani, apparently still at the Willard, extended his media offensive with a thirteen-minute interview with insurrectionist Joe Pagliarulo. Trump’s lawyer repeated his claim that the riot was “pre-planned”, adding that he had “proof” in the form of a “notice that was sent out on January 1, January 2, by a member of BLM and anitfa”, which notice allegedly indicated that “BLM and antifa people” should “ruin” Trump’s rally at the Ellipse. Giuliani names the author of the notice—not surprisingly—as John Earle Sullivan. Giuliani goes so far as to say that Sullivan “conducted” the entire insurrection, which Giuliani dubs, if a bit awkwardly, as a “sophisticated riot.”

“So this thing [the Capitol attack] was planned”, Giuliani sums up for Pagliarulo, “four [or] five days in advance, by antifa, by Black Lives Matter, probably a white supremacist group that works in conjunction with [Black Lives Matter]. It was all intended to destroy Donald Trump….this is a frame-up. It was a complete frame-up….I can prove [antifa and BLM] infiltration [of the Trump crowd on January 6].”

Perhaps your attention is now drawn, as mine was when I first saw the quote above, to Giuliani’s incredible claim that the January 6 attack was the work of an historic alliance involving “Black Lives Matter” and “a white supremacist group” (read that coupling a few times to really process it). It was in hearing this extraordinary allegation emanate from the Willard Hotel command center—the claim that John Earle Sullivan, a man of color, was simultaneously a leader of antifa, a leader of BLM, and willing partner with an unnamed white supremacist group—that I knew there had to be more to the story of how and why the Willard team landed on this preposterous narrative rather than another. Indeed it remains unclear—though the account below may help to explain—how Giuliani and the Willard Hotel war room’s participants were so ready with a detailed (if exquisitely improbable) account of the insurrection not long after it ended.

{Note: In summarizing Giuliani’s January 7 or January 8 and January 12 broadcasts from the Willard Hotel war room, I’m leaving out some alternately harrowing and hilarious elements for the sake of brevity. For instance, Giuliani takes a break in mid-propaganda to hawk gold for American Hartford Gold in an exquisitely awkward mini-infomercial; at another point, far less hilariously, he darkly warns that Trump’s Department of Justice—yes, Trump’s not Biden’s—“may be working for somebody besides the United States.” At another point Giuliani lies ruthlessly to Pagliarulo, telling him that the “entry to Congress [the Capitol]” on January 6 happened “fifteen to twenty minutes before” Trump stopped speaking at the Ellipse; in fact, the Capitol was first breached, at its northwest corner, at 2:12PM ET, 62 minutes after Trump finished his speech. Oddly, in his earlier broadcast Giuliani had perhaps accidentally come much closer to the truth, saying that “between the rally and the entrance to the Congress [the Capitol]…[was] I guess was about a half-hour, an hour at most.” Note also that Twitter would subsequently deem Giuliani’s tweets about John Sullivan “disinformation” and remove them.}

So Who Is John Earle Sullivan?

According to a report by the Washington Post, John Earle Sullivan is a provocateur who “[progressive] activists in Utah [had] spent months condemning” prior to the events of January 6, “warn[ing] others [on the left] to be leery of his motives and any events he sponsored.”

As a report by The Intercept explains, Sullivan had only “reinvented himself as a self-described Black liberation activist last year [2020]”, a timeline that would place this conversion—soon universally rejected by the left-wing activists he tried to coordinate with—in the midst of the 2020 presidential campaign. The Intercept adds, critically, that “Watching Sullivan’s footage [from January 6] makes it obvious that he was not leading but following the rioters as they made their way through police lines into the Capitol…[and] again and again, he can be heard celebrating the success of the riot.”

Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that, as The Intercept reports, left-wing organizations in three cities—Los Angeles, Seattle, and Salt Lake City—had issued formal “warnings” to local progressives about the self-dubbed “Activist John” in 2020, with one “detailed briefing document” on him “circulating since November [2020]” being entitled, “John Sullivan: Naive Organizer or Agent Provocateur?” According to Los Angeles Magazine, warnings about Sullivan being dangerous, and possibly an agent provocateur, were also widely spread among leftist activists in two other cities: Washington and Portland. The magazine reports that Sullivan had been “blackballed”—that is, permanently excluded from membership—by Black Lives Matter many months before the January 6 insurrection due to his suspicious conduct. Even the conservative New York Post calls Sullivan “an alleged conman accused of trying to sabotage left-wing movements.”

Insurgence USA—a website and self-described activist group that John Sullivan created after the death of George Floyd in summer 2020, under the claim that Floyd had inspired the birth of the group—infamously misspelled Floyd’s name as “Gorge Floyd” on its welcome page, perhaps undercutting its claims of political commitment.

{Note: Whether intentional or negligent, this misspelling could not have been more unfortunate or, for those of a more skeptical mindset, suspicious. As a noun, the Merriam-Webster dictionary reports, gorge means “throat” or “a mass choking a passage”, and “is often used…to indicate revulsion accompanied by a sensation of constriction.” As is now universally known on both sides of the U.S. political spectrum, Floyd was killed via throat constriction.}

Giuliani’s blithe association of John Sullivan with antifa notwithstanding, Sullivan would himself later assert to Rolling Stone that he is “not…antifa, by any means”, adding that while he believes, generally speaking, that “black lives matter”, he is not affiliated with Black Lives Matter (either the organization or the movement). In fact, Sullivan explicitly disavowed membership in any BLM group, telling Rolling Stone that during the assault on the Capitol he was “worried about people…thinking that I was Antifa or, like, BLM” because of the color of his skin. He added, for reasons never explained to Rolling Stone or any other media outlet, that Insurgence USA had made it its business to “watch[ ] the Trump supporters and what they were putting out”—perhaps not coincidentally, given the information that follows in this article, a past-time also practiced by right-wing organizations. Sullivan reports to Rolling Stone many things that call into question his political associations, for instance in claiming that he had “[known] about the [planned] storming of the Capitol for…probably like four weeks”—much long than the four or five days Giuliani claimed in his presentation on Sullivan—which, if true, would synchronize with the first strategy sessions involving January 6 among the private digital communications channels used by the Proud Boys.

It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that left-leaning activists in Utah and elsewhere were wary of John Sullivan in large part because, as the Washington Post reports, a supposedly progressive event that Sullivan sponsored in Utah “featured members of the Proud Boys, an all-male extremist group with ties to white nationalism.”

But Who Is James Sullivan?

To understand how or why an alleged leftist would invite the Proud Boys to an event, one needs to understand that the story of John Sullivan can never be told in isolation. It must be told in conjunction with the story of John’s far-right brother, James Sullivan.

James Sullivan is described by the Washington Post as a “conservative activist.” But in fact it’s far more than that, according to The Intercept, which reports that James is “an outspoken Trump supporter, a member of the far-right ‘Blexit’ campaign to convince Black voters to exit the Democratic Party, and [was a speaker] at a Proud Boys rally.”

{Note: You can see video of the Proud Boys rally that James was a featured speaker at here.}

One of the key decisions in the brief, supposedly leftist activist career of John Sullivan must therefore be understood in the context of his brother James’s ties to the Proud Boys. Indeed, John’s decision to invite a white supremacist organization to which his brother was and is linked to a rally decried by progressive activists would subsequently give Trump and his campaign the opportunity to allege, as Giuliani subsequently did in both of his major post-insurrection broadcasts from the Willard Hotel war room, that the attack on the Capitol was planned, “four [or] five days in advance, by antifa, by Black Lives Matter, [and] probably a white supremacist group that works in conjunction with [BLM].” The “group” in question appears to be the Proud Boys.

The significance—to Trump and his Willard team—of John Sullivan’s odd association with the Proud Boys, and his brother James’s even deeper links to the Proud Boys, can’t be overstated. On January 8, as Giuliani was preparing his first response to the insurrection on Trump’s behalf, the Wall Street Journal was reporting that a group of men in “blaze orange hats” (exclusively reported by Proof to be the Arizona Proud Boys, a fact later confirmed by major media) had initiated the assault on the Capitol. It was essential to the Willard team, therefore, to be able to not only use footage from inside the Capitol recorded by John Sullivan (see below) to pin the January 6 attack on antifa and BLM, but also to say that John Sullivan’s ties to the Proud Boys meant that the Proud Boys were part of John Sullivan’s left-wing operation, too.

If all that sounds crazy to you, it should. It is crazy. But it’s nothing compared to the saga of the Sullivan brothers, which—once understood—puts all of the foregoing in a new light. While other outlets have reported on some of the facts below, none offer the new information Proof does here, as it just emerged in the last week, and appeared only on an obscure information channel few in major media would think to monitor.

The Sullivan Brothers Saga: A Tragedy in Five Acts

Prologue

A review of the bizarre tale of James and John Sullivan resists any conclusion but the following: two brothers—one (James) a Trump supporter by virtue of his worldview, and the other (John) a Trump supporter by virtue of anger toward the establishment—had both developed extensive ties with the Proud Boys by 2020, and had both begun to see the utility of Trump as a vehicle for their own personal and political ambitions, but had different perspectives on how to advance Trumpist nihilism. James, by a hair the more conventional activist of the two, would ultimately found a far-right organization in Utah (see below), while John, more violent and impetuous than his brother, would seek to advance the cause by infiltrating and destroying leftist groups from the inside.

Unfortunately for James, John’s briefly convincing portrayal of a left-wing activist in 2020 caused pro-Trump activists to doubt James’s sincerity as a Trump supporter. By mid-2020, the blowback against James from John’s mischief was such that James had decided to expose John as an agent provocateur and work toward his banishment from left-wing circles; if successful, James could reestablish his pursuit of a conventional path as a far-right activist.

With this background in mind, one can better understand a shocking June 9 interview given by James—on the topic of his brother John—to a YouTube host named “Soonie.”

Act I: Summer 2020

James Sullivan tells Soonie that in July 2020, he “worked with the FBI and local police on indicting [John] and giving him a character analysis. He was arrested [for actions during one of his ill-fated ‘leftist’ protests] and then let go.”

In apparent retaliation against James for cooperating with the FBI against him, John—as James describes it—“actually ended up moving to Sandy, Utah, here where I live, and he continued to do Insurgence USA.”

Once John was living in the same town as him, James quickly found that his continued familial association with John was once again damaging his reputation in pro-Trump circles. Looking for another way to try to get rid of John, James says he “ended up working with a couple of his [John’s] colleagues and getting his community turned against him.” This gambit, unlike working with the FBI and a Utah police department, was successful; as a result of it, James says in his June 9 interview on YouTube, “[John] kind of disappeared.”

{Note: Because James and John had both had contacts within the Proud Boys as of the fall of 2020, it is possible that the “colleagues” of John’s referenced by James were members of either that far right group or another, and that James bringing the Proud Boys more visibly into John’s perimeter is what finally convinced left-wing activists in John’s orbit to abandon him. While it is also possible that James, a far-right activist, worked with left-wing activists to destroy John’s reputation, James does not say this, nor does it track with his history as someone who partners with white supremacists and other radical Trumpists, not with antifa or Black Lives Matter.}

James’s claim to have worked with unspecified “colleagues” of John’s to turn left-wing activists against him synchronizes with the timeline of John’s activities presented by the Washington Post in this report: “Later in the summer [of 2020], [John] Sullivan helped organize a pro-gun-rights rally and marched with self-styled militia members at the Utah Capitol, further infuriating Black activists.” James, a far-right activist in Utah, would have had more cause to be in contact with “self-styled milita members” who identify as “pro-gun-rights” than the “Black activists” from whom James hoped to alienate his brother.

{Note: In his June 9 YouTube interview, James Sullivan notably uses a Proud Boy catchphrase: “fuck around and find out [what happens].”}

Act II: Fall 2020

In the event, all the foregoing was mere prelude to John Sullivan getting revenge against his brother James for (a) working with the FBI and local police against him, and (b) working with unspecified associates of his to get him “blackballed” by BLM.

John’s opportunity for revenge against James came during the Stop the Steal events in Washington in mid-December 2020—events now considered a trial run for the January 6 insurrection. As James Sullivan tells Soonie on YouTube,

December 12, [2020], came, and that was the second [sic] time the [pro-Trump] patriots kind of stormed the Capitol—or DC. And I went out there with a couple of different speakers. [My brother] John had shown up on the other side of the Washington Memorial from where our stage was, and all I saw was a bunch of Proud Boys come over the hill toward the stage and they rushed the stage while a former Utah Speaker of the House, Greg Hughes, was on. And they [the gang of Proud Boys] said [from the stage] that I was working with my brother.

I know you {speaking here to Soonie} said not to mention him, but Kash Kelly was also at that event, and he was very confused as to what was going on. And I was punched and kicked and thrown off the stage. I found out later that John had worked with that [Proud Boy] and another Proud Boy to kind of do the same thing that I [had done] to him, which was turn my following against me. And [John had] paid the Proud Boy to storm the stage to tell [the crowd] that I was working with him and that I was actually antifa, which is insane.

So anyways, I was kind of left on my own [after that]. All the [pro-Trump] leaders in Utah didn’t turn against me, but kind of kept their distance, and from December 12 to January 6, I was just going through mental health stuff.

The important takeaways here appear to be these four:

1. James’s story provides evidence of John Earle Sullivan not just working with a “bunch” of Proud Boys but actually contracting with the Proud Boys to execute a highly public, violent political stunt in 2020, less than a month before January 6.

2. Because we can’t know whether John or James is telling the truth about anything—in some cases, perhaps neither or both are—it remains possible that the story above, told from James’s view and with his preferred gloss, actually obscures the reality: that John and James were indeed working together, as alleged publicly by a Proud Boy, and that the Proud Boy said this not because he had been paid but because it was true—and because both Sullivans had worked with Proud Boys. {Note: The one thing the Sullivans agree on is that each has been linked to Proud Boys.}

3. December 2020 ended with James Sullivan (a) suffering a mental health crisis, (b) needing to get back into the good graces of the Trumpists in Utah and elsewhere, (c) establishing a powerful vendetta against his brother John, and (d) knowing (if he didn’t already) that John was, as of December 2020, working with Proud Boys.

4. John Sullivan was telling the truth. We know this because, as of December 2020, he and James were working together—just as he’d said. {Note: See below for more.}

Act III: Winter 2021

James Sullivan tells Soonie, without explaining further, that on January 6 he stayed far from the Capitol. Was he aware of what his past Proud Boy associates were planning? We don’t know. Was the plan he had to use January 6 to get revenge on John (see below) one he didn’t want to be present for? That seems likely, given its particulars.

Per his June 9 interview, James Sullivan had what he would later call an “agent” follow his brother John into the Capitol. James now claims that he knew John would be at the Capitol because a member of BLM contacted him beforehand and directed him to a Discord channel in which John was talking about organizing a counter-protest at the Capitol on January 6. It’s difficult to credit this version of events for almost too many reasons to enumerate, but chief among them are (a) it’s unclear why a member of BLM would be conferring with a Proud Boy associate like James, and (b) it’s unclear why BLM would be so concerned about a January 6 counter-protest that it would contact a Proud Boy associate to try to stop it.

But the most important two reasons to doubt James’s account of how he knew that John would be going inside the U.S. Capitol on January 6 are these third and fourth ones: (c) John, as would later be highlighted by Giuliani in his video of January 7 or January 8, had put up on his Insurgence USA website that he would be at the Capitol, so it required no Proud Boy-BLM cloak-and-dagger Discord intrigue for James Sullivan to learn that information, but also—and far more astoundingly—(d) James Sullivan knew exactly what John Sullivan was going to be doing on January 6 because the two brothers were filming a movie together.

Act IV: Fall 2020 (a Flashback) and January 6

In October 2020, after John Sullivan—according to James Sullivan—showed up at the vice presidential debate at University of Utah to “instigate the Trump supporters there to support Pence” (a somewhat opaque political strategy and ambition for a supposed leftist), James says that the icy relationship that had developed between him and John somehow melted, and “We [he and John] started going back and forth on both sides [communicating], and a documentary person by the name of Jade Sacker came out to cover my brother and I. Jade was also seen at the Capitol on January 6. So they [Sacker’s group] sent two separate teams to follow John and I out, to follow different things we did.”

One of the first things James Sullivan did, once he knew he was being filmed, was start a new far-right group in Utah called Civilized Awakening, which—both by name and by mission—served as an excellent narrative counterpoint, cinematically, to John’s Insurgence USA. Indeed, when John, to the alleged surprise of his brother James, worked with the Proud Boys to dramatically throw James off a stage in DC, it was during the filming of a movie starring (conveniently) John Sullivan and James Sullivan, presumably with a narrative through-line something along the lines of, “Look how different these brothers are! And how politics divides them!” Whether the scene in the movie that takes place on a stage in Washington in December 2020 was itself (no pun intended) staged is presently unknown.

On January 6, not only did James studiously avoid the Capitol despite his status as an ardent Trumpist and the leader of a right-wing organization in a state whose Trump supporters had extremely deep ties to the insurrection—Utah—he was also watching his brother’s actions, with the help of his “agent,” via “livestream.” Per James, his agent (whether this agent was Sacker’s reported “second team” or an independent contractor is presently unknown) followed John surreptitiously with a video camera. It’s certainly possible, given that John was accompanied by Jade Sacker into the Capitol, that James was merely watching a feed that he, John, and Jade were well aware would be ongoing during the events of January 6 (and the filming of a Sullivan Brothers film).

With both of these two possibilities in mind, here’s what James told “Soonie” on June 9 on YouTube about his brother John’s actions at the Capitol:

[John] was getting a bunch of his Trump-disguised antifa members to follow him, and they went into the Capitol. So actually Ashli Babbitt was right next to my brother when she was shot. He actually pushed her in front of him when the cops came out, and then she was shot, and instead of helping her and trying to save her life, he videotaped her dying.

As John Sullivan’s since-gone-viral video demonstrates, every component of James’s narrative above is false. It was John Sullivan, for all his manifest faults, who urgently alerted the January 6 insurrectionists trying to access the Speaker’s Lobby inside the Capitol that a gun had suddenly appeared on the other side of the glass doors to the Lobby, and that it was being pointed at them; it was John who repeatedly tried to warn the Trump supporters around him that they were in danger. John Sullivan was not standing “right next to” Ashli Babbitt either before or as she was shot, did not push Babbitt at any point, and was not in a position to render aid to her after she was shot.

James’s story about his brother John’s actions on January 6 isn’t false in random ways. It’s false in ways that have since served the dual purpose of (a) allowing James to get revenge on John by turning him in to the FBI (something he had tried to do once before but unsuccessfully, but now found success in doing after agreeing to participate in a movie with John), and (b) getting James back into the good graces of Trumpists in Utah and elsewhere. In the bargain, James also (c) ensured that if John did not go to federal prison for a years- or decades-long bid, he’d be perpetually on the run from Trumpists who believed that—per James’s narrative—John was partly responsible for the death of MAGA martyr Ashli Babbitt. And indeed, as we’ll see momentarily, even if the Babbitt slander didn’t stick, James had ensured that the communications team of the President of the United States would assist him in turning his brother into one of the most infamous villains in America to a percentage of the population: Trump voters.

Perhaps no revenge of a brother upon a brother has ever been so comprehensive or Shakespearean. The Sullivans’ story almost rivals, for intricacy, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.

This might be a good time to note that James Sullivan describes both his academic and professional specializations to Soonie as “marketing and branding.” And on June 9 on YouTube, he also identified his idol in this regard. You probably can guess who it was.

Donald Trump.

Act V: Post-Insurrection (Winter 2021 and Spring 2021)

That James Sullivan is now proud of his handiwork in gaining comprehensive revenge against his brother John is clear. In his June 9 YouTube interview, James smiles and laughs and crows throughout, quite obviously pleased with himself and happy with the outcome of his betrayal of his brother. And why not? The Sullivan Brother Saga (as it might be styled) had led to all James’s dreams coming true—a course of events that ended, but may also have begun with, if you can believe it, Trump’s “communications center” (or “command center” or “war room”) at the Willard Hotel in Washington.

As James explained on June 9 (emphasis supplied):

So from that point, on January 6, I got, I think, over a thousand messages. {Laughs.} I got to work with—I can’t say their names, but they all famously worked on trying to decertify the election because it was stolen—I got to work with those people on investigating John. They [Trump’s legal team] came in [to work with me] almost immediately.

In fact, Rudy Giuliani actually tweeted…messages between us—me giving him a bunch of evidence that I got from an investigative reporter. {NB: The identity of this “investigative reporter” is unknown, but may well be Andy Ngo, given what James says below.} He [Giuliani] wanted to share that with his followers, so he actually tweeted my [phone] number with it and I got blown up {laughs} by—he [Rudy] is definitely an old man! {laughs}—I got over, I woke up, my phone was red hot because I was getting text messages from people all around the country and the world that hated me or wanted to know more information about John.

….

Fast forward to now [spring 2021], because of the work the investigative team has done, and myself being a part of it, and the [work the] prosecution team [at DOJ] has done, the $90,000 [John] got for selling the footage of Ashli Babbitt was seized, [and] his computers, his phones, his laptops, any form of communication was seized, all of his bank statements from every account that he has were seized, and they were able to actually—not with his [January 6 video], but with the other ones that they’ve sourced—they were able to track every single benefactor, sponsor, and donor that antifa used on [January] 6th, including the names of all the paid actors that were there.

It case it’s unclear in the above passage, “the investigative team”, and thereafter the collective pronoun “they”, appears to refer to Rudy Giuliani’s team from the Willard, which James distinguishes from investigators at DOJ. Indeed, James notes that one of the people he is now working with is infamous far-right provocateur (and self-styled “investigative journalist”) Andy Ngo, a man who, James assures Soonie, “has stuff on John.”

James Sullivan had thus, in one fell swoop, destroyed his brother and made himself a MAGA hero—the man who rescued the insurrection from being a debacle pinned on Trump, and who thereby preserved Trump’s chance to run for president again in 2024.

James now says he is “very excited” about testifying against his brother at a trial that is intended to put his brother in a federal prison for years or perhaps even decades.

Epilogue (Part I): Winter 2021 (a Flashback) and Spring 2021

As James says above, his contact with the Willard Hotel communications team was “almost immediately” after the events of January 6, indeed so quick that within 24 to 48 hours after the insurrection Giuliani not only had knowledge of John Sullivan’s video—a knowledge Giuliani then shared (contrary to his claims that it or Sullivan’s name was being “censored”) with most of major media, which had by then made John Sullivan into a sudden star—but also had access to film of an unnamed insurrectionist outside the Capitol, as the attack on the Capitol was unfolding, saying to a camera,

America, we are under attack! Not by these police officers necessarily, but by the Deep State! We are in the middle of a militant, leftist, Deep State, globalist operation! [They’re] trying to make Trump supporters look like idiots, and that we’re violent agitators—when truth and fact, there are people dressed up in MAGA hats and other gear that are pretending to be MAGA supporters! And they’re instigating! They’re playing on the emotions of all Trump supporters! {He points to a crowd of Trump supporters.} Listen to this! Listen to this! These are people that love cops! We love the police! But a few antifa dressed up as Trump supporters!

One might be impressed by the foresight displayed here by a Trump supporter to, in the midst of a violent insurrection, apprehend that the whole event was a vast left-wing conspiracy, and to immediately get in front of a camera to declare that, and to then see the resulting video in the hands of the lawyer of the President of the United States in 48 hours—but it appears the inexorable movement of the video toward the Willard Hotel war room was not a mere coincidence, not just because the narrative it expounds upon was the very narrative James Sullivan (who would shortly be working with Giuliani) was then working on, but because of a slip-up by Giuliani on camera.

Attempting to identify for Rumble viewers the man speaking to the camera, Giuliani repeatedly names him—glancing down at a paper in front of him—as Nick Fuentes, a nationally known white supremacist, Stop the Steal lieutenant, and Proud Boy ally who is now under federal investigation for his role in the January 6 insurrection and who is definitely not the man who appears in the video Giuliani is presenting. Unless Giuliani is the unfortunate victim of one of the great coincidences in U.S. political history, the man he is naming for his listeners is the source of the video, rather than its narrator.

But there are four further reasons to suspect that the Willard Hotel war room got both this video and information about John Sullivan via associations it had developed pre-insurrection, rather than merely after the fact:

(1) James Sullivan’s sophisticated operation. While Giuliani on some level must be joking in calling the attack on the Capitol a “sophisticated plot”—it was treacherous and historically seditious, but by no means well-organized—James Sullivan’s plot to establish that antifa was responsible for the attack on the Capitol was exceedingly well-organized. James had an “agent” secretly following his brother John through the mob assembled at the Capitol; James had that agent recording a “livestream” of John’s activities that James could monitor in real time; James says (whether this is true or not we can’t know) that he had been secretly monitoring John’s activities on Discord for weeks to determine in advance exactly where John would be going and when; John was literally—with his brother’s knowledge—in professional filmmaking cahoots with Jade Sacker, the filmmaker who James knew would be accompanying John into the Capitol, meaning he could at any time get information on John’s plans from someone reliant on him (James) due to him being the subject of that person’s ongoing documentary; James was “almost immediately” in touch with the president’s legal team after the Capitol was cleared, with James implying that it was the president’s legal team that contacted him (suggesting that he had sufficient prior contacts within the Proud Boys or Stop the Steal that he could have confidence he’d get the story of what John did out quickly); James had sufficiently monitored far-right chatter prior to January 6 to know that he had to stay far from the Capitol if he wanted to avoid the mass arrests sure to follow the events there that he expected John to be swept up in; James had a prior history of working with the FBI and law enforcement to try to ensnare John, as well as a history of working to ensnare John alongside figures he’s now unwilling to name (calling them “colleagues” of John, perhaps euphemistically, as the only colleagues John was known to have worked with profitably were Proud Boys); James has training and experience in “marketing and branding”; and he now brags about being on the “investigative team” working to pin January 6 on both antifa and BLM, which team happens to be former President Donald Trump’s Willard Hotel communications team.

(2) The prior actions of Trump and his team. According to an investigative report by Vanity Fair, days before the insurrection Trump darkly warned the Pentagon that there would be so much violence at the Capitol on January 6 that “10,000 troops” would be needed to quell it, and Trump indicated that all of the violence would come from a horde of antifa that he expected would be descend on the Capitol. Trump had initially announced his intention to declare antifa a terrorist organization in May 2020, but then, the day before the insurrection, he signed an Executive Order that, per investigative journalist and former Intercept contributing editor Marcy Wheeler, “put Antifa on the same kind of exclusionary footing as Communists or ISIS terrorists.” When Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, says immediately after the insurrection that Team Trump had “proof” that antifa pre-planned disrupting the pro-Trump march on the Capitol, Giuliani does not say that the evidence was received post-insurrection, indeed he dates it to “January 1 or January 2”—which may explain why, on January 3 per both Vanity Fair and subsequent testimony by then-acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, Trump was discussing with the Pentagon his certainty that antifa would be present on January 6. In short, Trump’s communications team appears to have spent the days before the insurrection preparing a marketing package for public consumption that would pin any chaos, destruction, or violence that resulted from Trump’s actions on the American left.

It’s unlikely that the Willard war room’s communications and legal experts would have had any less apprehension of the utility of this false (“antifa did it”) narrative than the non-expert Trump supporters who spent the weeks prior to the insurrection crowing about how violence on January 6 might enable Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, declare martial law, and use martial law to do what Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, Michael Lindell, Lin Wood, Patrick Byrne, and others had been advising him to do: seize voting machines in battleground states and hold new special elections (under military supervision) in every battleground state. As recently as ten days ago, a San Jose Mercury News headline blared, “Militia Plotted ‘War’ against California Cops, Impersonating Antifa, Taking Up Arms If Trump Invoked Insurrection Act, Feds Say.” Other federal cases tell a similar story, revealing Trump supporters hoping for an appearance by antifa at the Capitol so that sufficient violence would ensue to set up a chain of events ending, they hoped, in a second Trump term.

(3) The actions of Roger Stone aide Enrique Tarrio, the national leader of the Proud Boys. The Washington Post describes Enrique Tarrio, the nation’s most powerful Proud Boy, as an “aide” to longtime Trump adviser and self-described “dirty trickster” Roger Stone—and does so because Stone testified under oath that that’s exactly what Tarrio is. With this in mind, it’s concerning that, according to a report by ProPublica, it was Tarrio who first came up with the idea of the Proud Boys dressing up as antifa for their storming of the Capitol on January 6. As the digitial media outlet reports, Stone’s aide wrote on Parler, “The Proud Boys will turn out in record numbers on January 6, but this time with a twist...We will not be wearing our traditional Black and Yellow. We will be incognito and we will spread across downtown DC in smaller teams. And who knows....we might dress in all BLACK [antifa “black bloc”] for the occasion.” Tarrio’s message is below:

Post-insurrection, Proof exclusively reported that the communications director for the Proud Boys, Eddie Block, confessed on camera on January 7 that Enrique Tarrio’s plan was executed (Proof reporting also reveals that Block and Tarrio were in contact on January 6). Here’s Block answering a user’s question during an hour-long “AMA” (“ask me anything”) while waiting for his flight at the airport in San Francisco on January 7:

[Reading a viewer’s question out loud]: “Why didn’t we wear Proud Boy colors yesterday?” Because we heard that antifa was going to try to wear Proud Boys colors to try to fit in with us, so we decided to try to look like them [antifa] instead. That’s why. And no, we’re not going to do it again next time. So don’t think, antifa, you’re going to figure us out—because we change our shit up all the time.

These public statements by Proud Boy leaders, one of them a Roger Stone aide, offer a backdrop to Giuliani—from the post-insurrection comfort of a hotel room steps away from the hotel room of Roger Stone—accusing the Proud Boys of working with antifa and antifa of coordinating the whole of the insurrection on January 6.

But these statements also offer a backdrop to Giuliani secretly communicating with a Proud Boy associate—James Sullivan—shortly after the attack on the Capitol, and using the information provided to him by that individual to try to exculpate his client Donald Trump from any liability for an insurrection he publicly incited.

(4) John Sullivan’s confession. We know that John Sullivan believed that in breaching the Capitol he was participating in a joint film project with his Proud Boy-linked brother because he said so—spontaneously, it appears—on film. Not only was Jade Sacker, as Los Angeles Magazine reports, in the midst of filming a Sullivan brothers documentary as she accompanied John Sullivan into the Capitol, she and John exchanged words on that subject while inside the seat of America’s government. Per the New York Post, at one point in John’s footage of the Capitol attack he refers to his actions as being intended for the film Sacker was making on him and his far-right brother, exclaiming to Sacker, “Is this not going to be the best film you ever made in your life?”

Epilogue (Part II): January 15, 2021

On January 15, 2021, Rudy Giuliani—apparently still at the Willard Hotel—tweeted out the following:

As Politico reported following the tweet above, less than ten days after the attack on the Capitol, Giuliani has been caught by the New York Times accidentally broadcasting a text conversation between himself and James Sullivan. In addition to admitting to Trump’s legal team that he had an “agent” following his brother John on January 6, James made clear in his text that he understood what Trump, Giuliani, and the entirety of Trump’s communications and legal teams would have wanted to hear on January 15: that he (James) was “working with the FBI to expose and place total blame on John and the 226 members of antifa that instigated the Capitol ‘riot.’”

The language of the text strongly suggested that it was not the first communication between James Sullivan and Giuliani, not only due to the casual nature of James’s reference to having an “agent” at the Capitol—a startling claim written as though it would be no surprise to Giuliani to hear—but also because the “226” names of antifa members that James references appear to correspond to the following statement from his June 6 You Tube interview, in which “they” appears to be a reference to the team from Trump’s war room at the Willard: “they were able to actually—not with [John’s] [January 6 video], but with the other ones that they’ve sourced—they were able to track every single benefactor, sponsor, and donor that antifa used on [January] 6th, including the names of all the paid actors that were there.” This would not likely be a reference to the DOJ, as (a) the DOJ would not share its receipt of such evidence with a defendant’s brother, and far more importantly (b) this text was sent on January 15, well before DOJ would have had an itemization of its evidence against John to present to James (if for some inexplicable reason it had wanted to do so). Indeed, the date of the text makes it more probable that the “226” names had been acquired by James as part of his work for “the investigative team” (Trump’s legal team) and had nothing to do with any FBI investigation of John at all.

Lest any of this seem speculative, it’s important to recall that in his June 9 interview James made clear that “they” referred to “the investigative team,” and that “the investigative team” corresponded directly to this earlier interview comment of his:

I got to work with—I can’t say their names, but they all famously worked on trying to decertify the election because it was stolen—I got to work with those people on investigating John. They came in [to work with me] almost immediately.

Also notable here is that James recognizes he mustn’t name any of the participants in Trump’s Willard Hotel war room, as indeed, post-insurrection, Giuliani would appear to be the only Trump agent authorized to identifiably broadcast from that space (as opposed to prior to the attack on the Capitol, when, as noted above, Maria Ryan—at a minimum—had done so).

Giuliani’s accidental tweeting out of private correspondence between himself and James Sullivan—the brother of the man Team Trump was then calling the mastermind of the attack on the Capitol, and therefore a very odd person for Team Trump to be in secret contact with—led to a flurry of investigative reporting about James Sullivan.

What that reporting revealed was a plot even more sophisticated than described above.

According to a lengthy report in the International Business Times, James Sullivan sought “black/minority republicans” to go to the Capitol on January 6, which might not have been considered unusual—James is himself a Black Republican, and has long exhibited an interest in bringing more Black Americans into the GOP—but for the language James used in his recruitment advertisement on social media. He told prospective recruits (or payees, as it remains unclear if these individuals were paid to be actors in James’s film with his brother and Jade Sacker) that the purpose of his recruitment was to “eradicate” Black Lives Matter, which he described as a “perverted, self-oppressing, racist, socialist movement.” He added that he needed recruits who “aren’t afraid of antifa” (meaning, presumably, that they would need to be willing to be around antifa activists and/or be willing to be confused for antifa activists) and that while “security has been taken care of”, he “can’t say more than that.” He wanted anyone responding to his ad to message him “private[ly]”, presumably so their names wouldn’t be public.

It’s important to recall, reading this, that James had no plan to be at the Capitol himself.

It’s important also to recall that Roger Stone had been the key fundraiser for “security” at the Capitol, specifically security that couldn’t be discussed in public because it was going to be provided—as it was for Stone—by armed militiamen, including many (as it turned out) who were part of a conspiracy to storm the Capitol and thereafter possibly kill members of Congress.

As an attorney and former investigator, I do think it’s safe to say that, in view of all the evidence, a working “theory of the case” with respect to James Sullivan’s bizarre call for Black conservatives is that he knew his brother John would be going to the Capitol as part of a film he was then making with him, and he wanted a large group of Black Republicans posing as antifa and/or BLM activists to follow John wherever he went—whether with John’s knowledge or without is unclear—so that the “agent” James sent after his brother who was “livestreaming” him would be able to send James video (which video James would then send to Trump’s communications team or other well-placed Trump supporters) that made it look like, as James would later claim without evidence, John had been followed into the Capitol by a gang of antifa or BLM radicals.

Essentially, James was casting for a movie scene—except he planned for the scene not just to find its way into a movie but to send his brother to federal prison and exculpate a sitting president of the United States.

At present, there is no other “theory of the case” warranted by the evidence available. It is hard if not impossible to see what other purpose James Sullivan could have had for asking Black Republicans to go to the Capitol as part of an effort to “eradicate [BLM],” under circumstances in which he knew his (falsely) BLM-associated brother, who was in fact associated with the Proud Boys—who’d be leading the attack on the Capitol—was going to be filming himself breaching the seat of American government.

Conclusion

At the end of every episode of the beloved children’s cartoon Scooby Doo, the Scooby Gang pulls a mask off the ghost, ghoul, or goblin that has been chasing them for the past 23 minutes to reveal that their once presumptively supernatural scourge is in fact “Old Man Withers!” or “Lady Penumbra!” It’s tempting to come to the conclusion of The Sullivan Brothers Saga and feel like, when the last mask is ripped away from the last adversary in the play, the face revealed is that of the most cartoonish Trumpist villain: Roger Stone.

Roger Stone’s aide, Enrique Tarrio, concocted the plan—subsequently executed, per Eddie Block—that saw the Proud Boys who planned to lead the attack on the Capitol (which attack they did ultimately lead) dress up as antifa so no matter what happened at the Capitol, it could either (a) be blamed on Trump’s enemies as a political matter, or (b) be blamed on Trump’s enemies in a way that permitted Trump to take extraordinary actions on January 6 that might extend his presidency. Certainly, two brothers with strong and abiding ties to the organization run by Stone’s aide, the Proud Boys, appear to have begun plotting in the late fall of 2020—likely shortly after the election, around the time the 2020 Stop the Steal movement was born, given that by early October the ice between them had only just begun to melt, per James—to use James’s marketing and branding experience to create a film that would, in the balance (at least one and possibly both of them believed) destroy antifa, destroy BLM, and make them heroes to the anti-establishment, Proud Boy wing of the Republican Party under Trump. {Note: There is no evidence of any wrongdoing whatsoever by Jade Sacker.}

Whether John taking the fall for James’s scheme was planned in advance or simply a fringe benefit for the one of the two brothers (James) most insistent on getting revenge against his sibling is unclear, but what is clear is that the members of Trump’s Willard Hotel war room moved with uncommon quickness to tell a story about January 6 so preposterous that it seems as likely to have been deliberate as merely felicitous.

Certainly, the video outlining the antifa “plot” that Giuliani appears to have gotten from the Proud Boy-linked white supremacist Nick Fuentes almost immediately after things had gone south at the Capitol ended up in Team Trump’s hands shockingly quick—much as Giuliani’s outreach to James Sullivan was so fast it appeared to surprise even Sullivan. Meanwhile, Roger Stone’s lies about his stay at the Willard, documented in enormous detail at Proof, consistently appear geared to disassociate him from the Trump war room located steps from his own hotel room, disassociate him from precisely the sort of groups (including both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers) providing the “security” James Sullivan spoke of pre-insurrection, and the very Stop the Steal movement (headed by himself, Alex Jones, and Ali Alexander) with which Nick Fuentes has been affiliated.

Were Roger Stone not a self-declared “dirty trickster” with no moral or ethical code and a decades-long history of political “ratfuckery” unparalleled in American history—some of which was revealed, in 2020, to be provably felonious—we might consider all of this a coincidence. The dozens of interviews Stone gave on InfoWars and far-right podcasts after the insurrection in which he accused antifa and BLM of waging an attack he well knows was conducted by the very groups he’d worked alongside for months and even years could likewise be deemed coincidental. Stone’s lies about every aspect of his trip to DC and the leadup to same, during which he met President Trump at his home in south Florida, could be seen as the reflexive lies of a pathological liar rather than lies told according to a scheme or plan or modus operandi. That Stone received a historically corrupt pardon from Trump that was near-universally presumed to be in return for unspecified value provided to the former president, which pardon saved Stone years of sitting in a federal prison, could be deemed a mere perk of Stone’s friendship with Trump rather than anything that might inspire Stone to hatch a plot with one of his top aides. That Stone is literally the father of the fraudulent-from-birth Stop the Steal “movement”—which he created long before Trump lost the popular vote in 2016—could also be ignored.

Proof takes no final position on any of this, other than to say it all sounds preposterous unless and until one researches how many major-media reports, otherwise inexplicable lies, and previously inscrutable movements by Trumpworld figures are explained by it.

While certain beats in a pre-fabricated scheme to use antifa and BLM as cover for an armed insurrection and illegal coup may have ended up more a matter of serendipity than planning, it is now hard to believe that the Willard Hotel war room, which was broadcasting Trump’s Ellipse message well before the then-president took the stage near the White House on January 6, was erected solely to deal with the fallout from January 6 rather than to shape its contours in advance. Indeed, the notion that one of Trump’s January 6 war rooms might have been dedicated, ex ante, to, with other tasks, collecting evidence (real or fabricated) that antifa and/or BLM was spearheading a big, violent assault on the Capitol seems not at all far-fetched, and indeed almost de rigueur.

While the Capitol did not end up getting occupied long-term, as many of its attackers had hoped—which occupation would have delayed the certification of Joe Biden’s victory long enough for Trump’s legal team to get the “ten-day” extension they’d been publicly demanding, and which appears to have been essential to Trump’s plan for January 6—and while the Willard Hotel war room was therefore not needed to aid in an ex post justification of an invocation of the Insurrection Act of 1807, the fact that James Sullivan continues to work with Rudy Giuliani and Maria Ryan’s legal team to exculpate Trump suggests that him doing so is considered useful to giving Trump the option to run in 2024 if he chooses (hopefully with the support of some independents convinced by his self-exculpation). If so, we are sure to encounter Stone, Tarrio, Jones, Giuliani, Ryan, Bobb, Eastman, Russell Ramsland Jr., Joe Oltmann, and a cast of scores of Trumpist agents again—and the several war rooms scattered across Washington by Team Trump on Insurrection Eve and Insurrection Day will have served their penultimate purpose.

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