WASHINGTON — A federal judge sentenced the Utah man who filmed the fatal shooting of Ashli Babbitt on Jan. 6, 2021, to six years in prison Friday for instigating the mob against police.
John Earle Sullivan, 29, was convicted in November of five felonies and two misdemeanor charges for obstructing the joint session of Congress, civil disorder and carrying a knife into the U.S. Capitol.
Sullivan, a former Olympic speed skating hopeful who rebranded himself as an activist in 2020 under the online moniker “Jayden X,” gambled at trial that he could convince a jury he e was acting as a citizen journalist who put himself in harm’s way to document a historic moment. Sullivan said he began recording civil unrest in 2020 amid the nationwide protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. It was then he incorporated his company, Insurgence USA, in Utah. On Jan. 6, Sullivan was being followed by a photographer, Jade Sacker, who was making a documentary film about the political divisions between Sullivan and his brother, James, who is a right-wing activist.
Sacker’s footage, which was played at trial during her testimony as a defense witness, shows Sullivan wearing a ballistic vest and using a bullhorn to repeatedly call out support for the crowd. At one point he can be heard yelling, “We’re about to burn this s*** down!” At another point, as a group of rioters including several members of the Proud Boys breaks through a police line, Sullivan shouts, “This is our f***ing house!”
Sullivan himself took the stand in his own defense, only to face damning cross-examination from Assistant U.S. Attorney Rebekah Lederer. In a series of questions, Leder dismantled Sullivan’s claims of being a member of the Black Lives Matter movement and a journalist. She noted he’d been run out of the Utah and Portland activists communities and quoted a November 2020 message to the Seattle protest community warning others about his “grifting/profiteering, self-promotion/clout chasing, sabotage of community actions” and his brother’s ties to the Proud Boys.
Lederer also played jurors a clip Sullivan recorded of himself inside a D.C. hotel room on Dec. 14, 2020. In the clip, Sullivan responds to a question from someone watching his stream about whether he is a journalist.
“I don’t make money off of it so I don’t consider myself a journalist,” Sullivan said.
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth repeatedly rebuked Sullivan for his attempts to adopt the “protective veneer of a journalist” to hide what he really was on Jan. 6: a “chaos agent,” as Lamberth described him.
“He wanted to exploit others to sow chaos and undermine our system of government,” Lamberth said.
The judge, a Reagan nominee who has overseen dozens of Jan. 6 cases, said Sullivan was unique among other Capitol riot defendants in that he came to D.C. not to support former President Donald Trump but rather to advance his own agendas of personal profit and anti-government agitating.
“For Mr. Sullivan, violence was an end in and of itself,” Lamberth said.
Lamberth sentenced Sullivan to 72 months, or six years, in prison and three years of supervised release. Sullivan was also ordered to pay $2,000 in restitution and will lose approximately $90,000 he made off selling his footage of the riot that was seized following his arrest.
Sullivan’s attorney, Steven Kiersh, asked Lamberth to recommend Sullivan be placed in a low-security facility as close to Utah as possible.