A week before the January 6th Capitol attack, a political operative with ties to Roger Stone encouraged Trump supporters on a conference call to “descend on the Capitol,” because lawmakers “need to feel pressure,” according to The New York Times.
Jason Sullivan, who worked for Stone’s pro-Trump political action committee during the 2016 election, encouraged his audience to go to Washington D.C. on the 6th so that Congress would “understand that people are breathing down their necks.”
“If we make the people inside that building sweat and they understand that they may not be able to walk in the streets any longer if they do the wrong thing, then maybe they’ll do the right thing,” said Sullivan, a communications specialist who calls himself ‘The Wizard of Twitter.’
“We have to put that pressure there,” he added.
Sullivan also predicted that Trump would invoke “a limited form of martial law” on Jan. 6. “I don’t see any other way around it, because he’s not going to allow an election fraud to take place,” he said.
Sullivan, like many Trump loyalists, encouraged protests on the 6th because it was the day Congress was scheduled to certify Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 election. That constitutionally-prescribed process was eventually delayed by rioters for a few hours.
In a statement to The Times, Sullivan said “I in no way condone the violence of any protesters.” He claimed he “only promoted peaceful solutions where Americans could raise their voices and be heard as expressed in our First Amendment.”
The Times obtained a recording of the call, the circumstances of which represent a head-spinning hodgepodge of fringe right-wing ideas. It was hosted by a group of anti-vaccine activists who were planning to travel to D.C. to protest the 2020 election on January 6th.
According to The Times, the call was recorded by an Arizona law student, Staci Burk, who was assisting attorney Sidney Powell in her ill-fated efforts to challenge Biden’s win in court. Members of a right-wing paramilitary group, the 1st Amendment Praetorian, insisted on providing Burk with security, even though she didn’t want it. When they posted up at her home, she feared for her safety and began making audio recordings. One of them contained the Sullivan conference call in question.
The Times provides additional context:
The recording of the call, which took place on Dec. 30, 2020, emerged as the Justice Department has expanded its criminal investigation of the Capitol attack. It offers a glimpse of the planning that went on in the run-up to the storming of the Capitol and the mind-set of some of those who zeroed in on Jan. 6 as a kind of last stand for keeping Mr. Trump in office.
It also reflects the complexities that federal prosecutors are likely to face as they begin the task of figuring out how much — or even whether — people involved in the political rallies that preceded the assault can be held accountable for the violence that erupted.
After more than a year of focusing exclusively on rioters who took part in the storming of the Capitol, prosecutors have widened their gaze in recent weeks and have started to question whether those involved in encouraging protests — like the one that Mr. Sullivan was describing — can be held culpable for disrupting the work of Congress.
Sullivan has since spread ideas associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory. At a recent event attended alongside Powell and Michael Flynn, the disgraced former general, Sullivan called Hillary Clinton a “godawful woman” and made a gesture suggesting she should be hanged.
