The Phantom Paperwork: How "Antifa Did January 6" Survived Five Years of Debunks

Claim: Federal filings show that "numbers" of the January 6 rioters imprisoned for assaulting officers were BLM and Antifa members "LARPing as MAGA supporters." Verdict: false (truth score 0.05).

Said by Benny Johnson on The Benny Show, "Commie Terrorist BOMBING in NYC, Explosion at FBI Building | Trump Warns of Sleeper Cell Attacks" (July 21, 2026, at 39:10).

Johnson said he could "put the paperwork directly in front of you from the federal filings." He never named a filing. We looked at what the filings and sworn testimony actually show.

First, the strongest case for the claim. John Earle Sullivan was a left-associated provocateur from Utah who founded Insurgence USA. He was inside the Capitol and was sentenced to six years. A December 2024 DOJ Inspector General report confirmed that 26 FBI confidential human sources were in the crowd. Both facts are real. Neither supports the claim. Sullivan was one person, not "numbers." He was convicted for his own riot conduct, not for assaulting officers, and BLM Utah's founder said he was never a member. The IG report found that only three of those sources were tasked to be there, none was authorized to enter the Capitol or incite anything, and there were no undercover FBI agents at all.

Against the claim: in March 2021, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified under oath that the FBI found no evidence of Antifa, BLM or "fake Trump supporters" in the attack. Reviews of the charging documents found far-right defendants and no Antifa or BLM members. Rioters that right-wing media had named as "antifa in disguise" turned out, in their own court cases, to be real Trump supporters. And in January 2025, President Trump granted clemency to about 1,500 January 6 defendants, including roughly 169 who pleaded guilty to assaulting police. The movement treated them as its own, not as infiltrators.

We also trace how the narrative spread. It started on day one with a Washington Times facial-recognition story that Rep. Matt Gaetz repeated on the House floor. XRVision, the firm it cited, called the story false, and the paper retracted it. By late 2021 the claim had shifted to "fedsurrection" and Ray Epps, and in July 2026 it was back alongside "foreign orchestration" claims from our own archive. We also cover why the claim is so durable: identity protection, the false-flag betrayal story, a gesture at evidence nobody can check, and a small real fact inflated into a large claim.

What we still don't know: who the 23 self-initiated informants were, and what the July 2026 "declassified documents" actually contain. If genuinely new primary documents emerge, we will revisit this.