The Washington Post has published some additional video of the shooting inside the Capitol. If you’ve seen the other videos (I posted them here on Wednesday) they basically begin with a gunshot. These new clips show what was happening before the shot was fired. There’s a significant backstory to this but we’ll get to that in a moment. First, here’s the Post’s description:

As the lawmakers and officials were being evacuated, one rioter wearing a fur-lined hat repeatedly punched the doorway’s glass panels immediately behind the officers, creating extensive damage, the video footage shows. The rioter tried to get around one officer, identified by a patch on his jacket as K. Yetter, while several rioters yelled at the police to let them through.

“We don’t want to hurt no one, we just want to go inside,” one told them.

Another one yelled, “F— the blue!”

The crowd is clearly angry and determined to get through the door. The person filming this new footage starts to try to negotiate with the cops guarding the door:

“We want you to go home,” he said, according to the video. “I’m recording. And there’s so many people. They’re gonna to push their way up here. Bro, I’ve seen people out there get hurt. I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

“We will make a pact,” he said, apparently referring to an agreement to let the officers leave safely if they get out of the way. And a few seconds later the officers do move out of the way. The mob then goes to work on the door, smashing one of the windows with a flag pole and a bike helmet. At this point, Sullivan or someone near him shout’s “There’s a gun! There’s a gun.” It’s a reference to a plain clothes police officer who has his gun drawn on the other side of the door. The officer clearly has his finger on the trigger, ready to fire.

That’s when someone tries to help Ashli Babbitt through the broken window. One shot is fired and Babbitt collapses on the ground. Here’s the full clip and below that the context about the person who filmed it.

The people who stormed the Capitol were clearly Trump supporters. The people in the video above were Trump supporters. However, the person who shot this video is a left wing activist from Utah. His name is John Sullivan and he provided these clips to the Post. Fox News spoke with him  yesterday:

“There’s this narrative going around right now that Antifa was the people there causing the riots, causing the tension, they were the only people breaking into the Capitol, and I wanted to be able to tell a part of history and show that that was anything but the case,” John Sullivan, the founder of Utah-based Insurgence USA, told Fox News Thursday.

Insurgence USA describes itself as “the revolution.” It began protesting racial injustice in policing last year following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.

In August 2020 remarks to a small crowd at a Washington, D.C., intersection, Sullivan pointed to the nearby White House and unleashed a torrent of violent rhetoric. “We … about to burn this s— down,” he said. “We gotta … rip Trump right out of that office right there,” he continued, adding, “We ain’t about … waiting until the next election.” He then led the crowd in a chant of, “It’s time for revolution.”

Here’s the video of Sullivan from August:

You can also get an idea where he’s coming from by looking at his Patreon page, though you’ll have to subscribe to read the content. Last night police apparently questioned him about the shooting but he says he wasn’t arrested:

https://twitter.com/thejaydenxander/status/1347582550269636608

Sullivan has admitted that he entered the Capitol Wednesday through a broken window. At a minimum he should be arrested for unlawful entry like everyone else who was there. But I think police should also look at that video above. Sullivan wasn’t physically threatening but his warning to the cops that they were about to get hurt unless they agreed to leave must have added to the pressure those officers were under. It’s significant because if police hadn’t moved away from that door the glass couldn’t have been broken and Babbitt couldn’t have been shot trying to get through the broken window.