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At 2:42 pm on January 6, 2021, as a fevered crowd coursed through the US Capitol Building in a misguided attempt to ensure that Donald Trump would be declared president after losing the 2020 election, a woman named Ashli Babbitt, wearing a stars-and-stripes backpack and a Trump flag, discovered that the rear entrance to the House chamber was guarded by just three Capitol Police officers.
What happened next remains a legal issue, as prosecutions still wend their way through the justice system, even as Trump promises to pardon the rioters. Some of those accused of crimes that day, who captured it all on their phones, claim the protections of journalists. They are not alone: self-described independent journalists, who document protests of all kinds from the perspective of participants, now regularly claim the defense of reporting when arrested.
But an examination of the cases of some of those present at the heart of the Capitol riot, including two young content creators who captured dramatic video of Babbitt, shows that nothing about this political or journalistic moment is clear or easy to define. Everyone seems to have been filming everyone, for purposes that shifted from moment to moment, while suspecting everyone else of participating in various conspiracies.
The chaos calls to mind the sort of politically infused magical thinking that the writer Michael Kelly defined as “fusion paranoia” for The New Yorker back in 1995, the same year that the Unabomber published a manifesto offering the closest thing to its ethos.
Understanding it might be the key for reporters who seek to cover the waves of turmoil that a second Trump presidency seems set to unleash, often as they stand alongside colleagues who may not really be colleagues.
Right behind Babbitt, as she approached the glass-and-wood Speaker’s Lobby door, was a young conservative content creator, Tayler Hansen, wearing a Baby Lives Matter T-shirt over a black hoodie and displaying a VIP pass from the “Stop the Steal” rally the night before. He recorded the unfolding scene on his phone.
Hansen, who was twenty at the time, and came from a conservative Mormon background in Salt Lake City, had spent the previous six months building his conservative brand on social media by trolling Black Lives Matter protesters. He had posted videos of himself painting the words “Baby Lives Matter” in huge letters on streets outside Planned Parenthood clinics, and captured viral video of a poorly aimed Molotov cocktail setting a protester’s feet on fire in Portland, Oregon.
His anti-abortion stunts had attracted the attention of Fox News and the conservative influencer Benny Johnson. His clip of the Molotov cocktail was remixed to the tune of “Footloose” by a right-wing comedian and tweeted by Trump himself. Days later Hansen accidentally blew his own cover while attempting to “infiltrate Antifa” in Portland and was beaten up. He responded by painting the phrase “ANTIFA = TERRORISTS” on a street in Portland and tweeting video of his mural.
Within minutes of Hansen and Babbitt’s discovery on that January day, the hallway behind them filled with pro-Trump rioters demanding that the officers step aside to let them get at the lawmakers they could see evacuating through the glass panels of the door. “There they are, right there!” Babbitt screamed. “What the fuck!” Another rioter got in the face of one officer and punched the glass, causing it to crack.
As the mob’s fury grew, John Sullivan, twenty-six, dressed in all black, with his phone on a gimbal, made his way to the very front. “Let me through, I’ve got a knife,” he said, and stepped between Hansen and the door. Sullivan, a former Olympic hopeful in speed skating, also came from a conservative Mormon background in Salt Lake City. In the summer of 2020, after George Floyd was murdered, he adopted the persona of a left-wing radical and began calling himself Activist John.
He was viewed with deep suspicion by veteran racial justice organizers, who suspected that his persona was at least partly an act. Within months, activists who had encountered Sullivan in Salt Lake City, Portland, and Seattle denounced him as either “a naive organizer or an agent provocateur” and ejected him from their communities. Some wondered if he was a federal agent; others settled on the explanation that he was just a grifter.
Rather than joining Black Lives Matter, Sullivan set up a rival organization, Insurgence USA, which he registered as a business to both support protests and sell protest-themed clothing and gear. He ran a Twitter account to highlight violent clashes, or “riot porn,” and created a second persona, Jayden X, “A Revolutionary on the Front Lines,” who offered paid subscribers “Revolutionary News.”
On January 6, Sullivan had been recording the riot nonstop for more than forty minutes by the time he joined Hansen and Babbitt. He had captured the progress of the mob as it broke through police lines outside, entered the Capitol, and reached the House. Sullivan recorded himself urging the officers at the Speaker’s Lobby door to stand aside. “Bro, I’ve seen people out there get hurt. I don’t want to see you get hurt,” Sullivan told one police officer. He then offered safe passage for the officers, pinned at the door, to leave. “We will make a path, deadass,” Sullivan said.
When the officers did then step aside, apparently expecting to be replaced by a SWAT team that was not yet in position, Sullivan’s video captured him screaming to the rioters, “Let’s go! Get that shit! Get in there!” As they smashed out three of the four glass panels in the door, Hansen was positioned just behind Sullivan at the left edge of the door, with Babbitt across the hall from them.
Just twenty seconds after the officers withdrew, Sullivan saw a Capitol Police officer in the Speaker’s Lobby raise his gun. “Yo, there’s a gun! There’s a gun!” Sullivan shouted, pointing at the weapon just beyond the shattered glass.
Hansen, standing directly next to Sullivan, echoed the warning and ducked to the floor. He told a photojournalist behind him, Young G. Kim, a professional who had reported from Iraq, “It’s about to get dirty, man. He’s got a gun, get down.” Kim’s recording from the floor shows that two rioters at the door raised their hands to acknowledge the officer’s warning, but Babbitt climbed into the shattered frame of the barricaded door and was shot.
Thirty minutes later, Hansen tweeted a twenty-nine-second clip of his video of Babbitt falling back to the floor, and the frantic effort to save her, which was initially led by Kim, who stopped filming, pulled a flashlight from his backpack, and tried to find the bullet wound. Hansen’s video was quickly viewed millions of times and embedded in the first news reports on the shooting. But the fact that news organizations identified him by using the first part of his Twitter bio—“Founder of Baby Lives Matter”—and not the second part, “Independent Journalist,” enraged him.
Sullivan, who would make more than $90,000 selling his video of the officer stepping forward and firing the fatal shot to CNN, NBC, the Washington Post, Showtime, and Australian television, continued filming in the chaotic aftermath of the shooting. He recorded himself berating the police for killing Babbitt and boasting “I have the video of the guy with the gun” to Sam Montoya of InfoWars, who had also captured the shooting, but from farther back in the crowd. “Dude,” Sullivan told Montoya, “this shit’s gonna go viral, bro.”
In the aftermath of the riot, as federal investigators used footage from social media to identify members of the pro-Trump mob, four men without Capitol press credentials who filmed Babbitt’s shooting—Hansen, Sullivan, Montoya, and Bill Keen, a conservative livestreamer from Kentucky—all argued that they were journalists, entitled to First Amendment protections.
Sullivan’s video did indeed go viral, but because he had spent the previous six months presenting himself as a left-wing activist, and was described that way when he was interviewed by Anderson Cooper that night on CNN, his presence at the front of the mob outside the House quickly fueled right-wing conspiracy theories that he had somehow orchestrated the entire riot.
(That theory took hold so firmly that when I called Sullivan two days after the riot to talk about it for an Intercept article, our interview was interrupted by a woman who came up to him on the street in Washington and asked him, again and again, “Are you BLM? Are you Black Lives Matter? John, will you just answer, are you with Black Lives Matter?” I only discovered later that the woman was Millie Weaver, an InfoWars contributor who had filmed her harassment of Sullivan and posted the video on Twitter, where it was shared by Rudy Giuliani.)
When Sullivan posted his raw footage on YouTube the day after the riot—a single, continuous shot that started with the mob breaking through police lines around the scaffolding set up for Joe Biden’s inauguration, then entering the Capitol and making it to the barricaded doors of the House—a film critic for Artforum compared it to a great work of Russian cinema.
But the government saw it as something else: potential evidence that Sullivan had been an enthusiastic participant in the riot. Again and again in his footage, Sullivan could be heard celebrating the success of the rioters and urging them on. “I can’t believe this is reality! We accomplished this shit, together!” he told a man next to him in full tactical gear with zip-tie handcuffs as the mob surged past the last police line outside the Capitol. When the mob reached the main House door, and someone shouted, “No violence!” Sullivan replied: “It’s too late for that. They don’t listen without that shit.” He could also be heard offering the rioters the use of his knife to open locked doors and repeatedly pressing police officers blocking their way to stand down.
After his first FBI interview, on January 7, Sullivan stopped calling himself an activist and insisted that he had been in the Capitol as a video journalist. “I was there to record,” Sullivan told his YouTube followers in a livestream. “I have my tactics.… I have my ways of going about getting that footage.” Later that week, before he was arrested and charged as a participant in the riot, Sullivan changed the description of himself on the homepage of his site from “Activist. Athlete. Motivational Speaker.” to “Video Journalist.” (Prosecutors later used screenshots of that change to his website, possibly drawn from my reporting that week, as evidence against Sullivan.)
Throughout his trial in 2023, Sullivan insisted that he had been in the Capitol as a journalist. But prosecutors undermined that claim using footage of him recorded that day by Jade Sacker, a documentary filmmaker who had followed Sullivan into the Capitol for her film about how his political activism had created a rift in his conservative family.
Sacker took the stand in Sullivan’s defense, but on cross-examination she was forced to admit that she had recorded him saying, just before they entered the Capitol, that he intended to film inside the building as “a good ploy” to keep from getting arrested.
Federal prosecutors also played jurors a clip of Sullivan saying, on a December 14, 2020, livestream, that his video of Proud Boys rampaging in support of Trump that week in Washington was not journalism. “I don’t make money off of it, so I don’t consider myself a journalist,” Sullivan said.
Sullivan was eventually convicted and sentenced to six years in prison for entering the Capitol, obstructing the police during civil disorder, and possessing a dangerous weapon on Capitol grounds—the knife he had recorded himself offering to rioters. One of the jurors told the Washington Post that they were convinced that Sullivan had intended “to sort of incite the riot, and perhaps his intent was different from the other protesters, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t interrupt the proceedings.”
“There was space for a citizen journalist,” the juror added, “but we also didn’t feel he was that.”
Sullivan, who did not respond to my interview request, will spend the fourth anniversary of the Capitol riot in the low-security federal prison in Oxford, Wisconsin.
According to court documents, Montoya, the InfoWars videographer, and Keen, the Kentucky livestreamer, likewise tried and failed to convince the government that they were in the hallway where Babbitt was killed as journalists.
Keen, who was livestreaming on January 6 until he lost cell service inside the Capitol, had taped a handmade sign with the word “Press” to the front of his leather jacket, and had the name of his Facebook page, “Parrott Media,” written on the back. He gave his video of Babbitt being shot to WDRB News in Louisville the day after the riot; it included audio of himself shouting “Go! Bust it down!”
Although the FBI noted that Keen “described himself as a member of independent media” in an initial interview, the agent reported that he “admitted he has no formalized training in reporting and no official media credentials.” Keen eventually agreed to plead guilty to illegally demonstrating inside the Capitol and was sentenced to eighteen months’ probation in early 2024.
The government also rejected Montoya’s claim that his work for InfoWars that day had been journalistic. Prosecutors argued that Montoya appeared to be in full support of the riot in the forty-four minutes of his raw footage posted online by InfoWars.
Even after he agreed to plead guilty, Montoya called himself “a member of the media” at his sentencing hearing in federal court in 2023. That claim failed to impress US district judge John Bates. “He was more than just a reporter,” the judge said before sentencing Montoya to thirty-six months of probation. “He was not just an observer. He was a participant.” Montoya, he added, “doesn’t get a free pass…just because he considered himself a journalist.”
On the first anniversary of the riot, Sullivan tweeted at the January 6 committee, “I do find it strange” that Tayler Hansen was never arrested. Hansen responded, “Because unlike you, I’m a real journalist.”
Hansen’s statement that he was in the Capitol as a journalist and not a participant in the riot was never tested in court. Although he said in a podcast that he was contacted by the FBI, he claims that he refused a request to come in for an interview and was never charged with a crime.
Hansen, unlike Sullivan, Montoya, and Keen, only released a handful of brief clips of his footage. A review of the video Hansen did post from that day, and from the night before the riot, suggests that he was engaged in a kind of social media activism that is not traditional reporting.
About an hour before Babbitt was shot, Hansen stood in the middle of the pro-Trump riot outside the Capitol, conducting rapid-fire Instagram interviews—apparently seeking to unmask anti-fascist infiltrators.
He approached two people as rubber bullets and stun grenades landed all around. “This is fucking crazy,” a man in military gear, with a strip of orange tape on his helmet and a baseball bat in his hand, told Hansen after hurling a water bottle at the police.
“Hey, what’s the solution to this right here, man?” Hansen asked. “To execute these fascists,” the man said. When Hansen posted that video on Instagram, he added a caption implying that the man must have been an infiltrator instigating violence to frame innocent Trump supporters. “Is this something a Trump Supporter would say about The Police?” Hansen asked.
When a photographer in a gas mask appeared, Hansen said aloud that he had spotted “another one” and stuck out his mic. The woman declined the interview request and kept moving. “Oh, I recognize you from Portland,” Hansen told her as she raised her Nikon camera to shoot the line of riot police. “So you got Antifa here too,” Hansen told his Instagram audience.
That night, before he was interviewed by Laura Ingraham on Fox as a witness to the fatal shooting of Babbitt, Hansen assured his Twitter followers that he had recorded “video evidence confirming ANTIFA’s presence within the Trump supporters.”The next morning, he repeated the claim to Alex Jones on InfoWars, insisting that he had caught “antifa members I know from Portland… staging photo shoots to make it look like Trump supporters are attacking officers.”
But Hansen was wrong. The man eager to execute Trump’s enemies was Robert Gieswein, who ran a far-right paramilitary training camp in Colorado and had marched to the Capitol that morning with the Proud Boys, who gave him the orange tape strip to identify him as a “friendly.” A patch on his vest carried the insignia of his militia group, the Woodland Wild Dogs, which Hansen mistook for the logo of a heavy metal band “out of Portland, Oregon.” Gieswein’s statement to Hansen was later used as evidence against him in court, and he was sentenced to four years in federal prison for assaulting police officers.
The woman Hansen mistook for “Antifa press” was Amy Harris, a veteran photojournalist on assignment for Shutterstock whose work has been published by the New York Times and the Washington Post. Harris had been in Portland, she told me by email, “as well as 20 other cities covering protests throughout 2020” but “as a photojournalist,” not antifa. She was at the Capitol on January 6 on an embed with the Proud Boys, whose leader, Enrique Tarrio, had granted her unprecedented access for a documentary profile of the far-right group.
(In fact, Harris had become so close to Tarrio that she had spent much of January 5 with him. She had picked him up from jail, let him use her phone to access his encrypted messaging accounts, and even accompanied him to a clandestine meeting with Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the anti-government Oath Keepers militia, in an underground parking garage in Washington. Footage of that meeting, recorded by the documentary filmmaker Nick Quested, would later be released by federal prosecutors and featured in Quested’s film 64 Days.)
Although Hansen holds a grudge against news outlets that identified him as an anti-abortion activist in reporting on his video of Babbitt’s shooting, his own Twitter feed showed that he had spent the night before the riot with leading figures in the plot to overturn the election.
Hansen’s profile as a far-right social media influencer had earned him a VIP pass to the January 5 “Stop the Steal” rally headlined by Roger Stone. Video posted by Hansen shows that he hung out backstage with the conspiratorial InfoWars host Alex Jones. He also appeared onstage during the rally, in a Baby Lives Matter shirt, holding an umbrella for Dr. Simone Gold, as the pro-Trump doctor who claimed that hydroxychloroquine cured COVID-19 railed against an “experimental, biological agent deceptively named a vaccine.”
After the rally, Hansen joined another InfoWars host, Owen Shroyer, outside the Willard Hotel for a livestreamed burning of a Black Lives Matter flag, in honor of the “political prisoner” Tarrio, broadcast by the far-right streamers Baked Alaska and Villain Report. A video clip Hansen posted on his own Twitter feed showed him wiping his feet on the flag, setting it on fire, and joining in the Proud Boys chant, “Fuck antifa!”
Unlike Hansen, both Gold and Shroyer were later prosecuted for their roles in the riot on January 6, convicted, and sentenced to sixty days in prison. Gold was photographed inside the Capitol, addressing rioters through a megaphone. Shroyer was heard leading the chant “1776!” outside the Capitol and convicted of inciting the mob to revolt. Although Shroyer described himself as a “martyr for free speech,” the Supreme Court rejected his petition to overturn his conviction on First Amendment grounds.
While Hansen was never prosecuted for filming inside the Capitol, he did complain loudly on social media about apparently being subjected to scrutiny by the TSA in the two years after the riot. According to a document Hansen said he obtained from a whistleblower inside the TSA, air marshals did keep tabs on him on eighteen flights in 2021 and 2022, because, the file notes, he was “one of the individuals who trespassed” on January 6 and was “next to the person who was shot.” Hansen’s interpretation of this leaked document was that he had been unfairly “thrown on the Domestic Terrorist watchlist for my reporting.”
In the years since he filmed Babbitt’s shooting, Hansen has carved out a niche for himself in the far-right media ecosystem, starting with a dozen posts on the shooting for The Gateway Pundit, a far-right blog. As the legal scholar Richard L. Hasen wrote last year, the problem websites like The Gateway Pundit pose for the legal system, “is figuring out how to deal with those who are professional faux journalists: They act as though they are following journalistic standards and reporting the news, but they regularly and intentionally distribute false information for profit or political reasons or both.” When Hansen gave his account of what he witnessed on Jan. 6 to the producers of the HBO documentary “Four Hours at the Capitol,” later that year, he was identified as a Gateway Pundit reporter.
Hansen’s effort to clear Babbitt’s name continued into 2022, when he re-edited Montoya’s video to present two frames as proof that she had actually been trying to stop the riot. He then helped fuel the conservative panic over all-ages drag shows, by dressing in drag himself to covertly film performances.
In 2023, Hansen was given a contract to produce videos for Tenet Media, a pro-Trump “supergroup” of six conservative influencers, headlined by Benny Johnson, a former “viral politics editor” for BuzzFeed News who was fired over allegations of plagiarism in 2014 and pivoted to partisan media.
In September 2024, the Department of Justice revealed that Tenet was secretly funded and directed by the Russian government to stir up discord and exacerbate political divisions in the United States. Hansen, like the other influencers, called the allegation that he had unwittingly been on the Kremlin payroll “a complete shock,” but also suggested that the indictments might have been “a big smear job against an uncensored, unapologetic, and America first media company.” Days later, he left for Springfield, Ohio, to join the hunt for cat-eating Haitian migrants.
Update: In an email received after publication, Tayler Hansen wrote that he was in the Capitol on Jan. 6, “as a reporter,” wearing a press pass he had created for himself on his waist, and noted that video he shot at racial justice protests in late 2020 had “already been published in multiple outlets.” He also confirmed that he did not recognize John Sullivan while filming alongside him that day, despite having previously gone undercover to film protests Sullivan helped lead in Provo, Utah and Portland, Oregon in 2020.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated what Tayler Hansen was wearing on Jan. 6, 2021.
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