Trump's enablers on the right would love to absolve both him and themselves for their part in the riot that took place at the Capitol last week. Here's the latest nonsense coming from Giuliani and others who are continuing to claim that it was some false flag operation and a member of Antifa forced all of those poor helpless Trumpers to storm the halls of Congress.

The Intercept has a good rundown of just who John Sullivan, the self-described "activist" who filmed the fatal shooting of QAnon cultist Ashli Babbitt during the storming of the Capitol building. Sullivan describes himself as a journalist, and has attempted to align himself with the BLM movement (sadly, with the help of some in our corporate media) but, as the Intercept article explains, Sullivan has been "treated with suspicion or outright hostility by a number of left-wing organizers associated with Black Lives Matter and anti-fascism in Utah, California, and the Pacific Northwest."

Months before Sullivan embedded himself in the right-wing mob that broke into Congress, a racial justice activist in Portland warned members of the movement “to not associate with Activist John,” calling him “deceptive, dangerous and daft.” According to the activist, who goes by the name Gila on Twitter, Sullivan was responsible for dozens of protesters getting arrested at a Portland demonstration in September because he argued with local activists about the route to take “and led people down a dark street straight into a police kettle. Even though he had zero knowledge of the area he insisted people follow him and disregarded warnings from security.” Sullivan, the activist wrote, “is living in a fantasy land.”

Activists in Salt Lake City, Seattle, and Los Angeles have made similar warnings, and a member of the Seattle protest community shared a detailed briefing document on him headlined “John Sullivan: Naive Organizer or Agent Provocateur?” that has been circulating since November. The anonymous author of that memo also drew attention to the fact that his brother, James Sullivan, is an outspoken Trump supporter, a member of the far-right “Blexit” campaign to convince Black voters to exit the Democratic Party, and spoke at a Proud Boys rally in Portland.

Others on the left are convinced that John Sullivan has no real political convictions and is simply exploiting movements for racial justice and against fascism for personal gain. “Activist John,” they speculate, is a character Sullivan has invented, and the protests he organizes are a kind of performative, karaoke activism.

The founder of Black Lives Matter Utah, Lex Scott, responded to a Fox News report calling Sullivan “a BLM activist” with a TikTok statement in which she said he “never has been and never will be” a member of the group and called him “a thorn in our side.”

As CNN reported yesterday, Giuliani is using Sullivan's presence there as somehow being proof that Antifa, rather than himself and Trump and others who egged them all on from the stage just before the riot started, is responsible for the carnage that ensued:

President Donald Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani has been working to bolster conspiratorial claims that left-wing agitators played a dominant role in the last week's Capitol riot.

Giuliani claimed in a tweet on Friday that has since been removed by Twitter that the Capitol siege was carried out "by groups like ANTIFA trained to riot."

Giuliani has zeroed in on self-described leftist activist John Earle Sullivan of Utah, who was charged in federal court Thursday on three counts related to the Capitol riot, and has argued that the presence and statements of Sullivan and other unidentified rioters indicate that the storming was driven by forces opposed to Trump.

"We have people who invaded like Mr. Sullivan and his apparently Black Lives Matter directed group of rioters and looters and whatever else they are," Giuliani said in a Thursday episode of his podcast titled "Another FRAME UP."

He also claimed that the riot was something "that the President had nothing to do with."

Marcy Wheeler has more on Giuliani and Jack Posobiec's claims of a false flag:

Sullivan is charged with violent entry of Congress and impeding police officers during a civil disorder. He is not charged with breaking the window.

Even before his arrest, left wing activists had described concerns in that community, going back some time, that Sullivan was a provocateur working with others, including his brother James, who has ties to the Proud Boys and runs a pro-Trump organization.

But shortly after Sullivan’s arrest was reported, right wing propagandist Jack Posobiec pounced on his arrest, claiming it showed that BLM was behind the attacks and and that Sullivan’s actions led to Babbitt’s death [...]

Then, in the middle of the night Rudy’s time, he posted a text from what appears to be John’s brother James. [...]

Rudy presents this as proof that the riot was conducted by Antifa. But it instead seems to show that John’s brother (the phone number is in Utah, where they’re from) claimed to be, “working with the FBI,” had gotten his “agent” and three others out of trouble (Rudy did not show when he received this text, so it may have predated John’s arrest). [...]

A Nazi sympathizer and the President’s lawyer seemed prepared to speak from the script that Donald Trump seems to have written the day before the riot, when he moved towards naming Antifa a terrorist organization. The OANN propagandist and chief purveyor of fraudulent claims about the election are attempting to use the arrest of John Sullivan to claim that their own people did not plan out this coup attempt.

In the process, however, Rudy Giuliani may have tied the President and the Proud Boys, and the Pentagon together in the plot. And Rudy’s calls to Tommy Tuberville after people had already died, that ties people n Congress to the attempts to assassinate members of Congress.

Of course this is making the rounds on Facebook as well, as many of you with right-wing relatives you haven't cut ties with may already be well aware of: Facebook posts wrongly claim left-wing activist, antifa ‘incited’ US Capitol mob