Until 2:44 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, it had all been going, if not perfectly, at least pretty damn well.

Ray Epps and his crew breached the Capitol perimeter at 12:53 p.m., minutes before the vote certification process in the House Chamber was scheduled to begin.

Minutes later, a parallel crew breached another lightly guarded barricade just to the south, the Capitol Police again offering no real resistance.

At 12:58, the so-called "fence cutter" – not yet arrested – pulled down the temporary fencing protecting the lawn and with it the signs saying, "area closed."
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By 1:06 the undertrained and undermanned Capitol Police began launching munitions into the midst of a largely peaceful crowd of protesters on the Capitol's west side, helping turn them into an angry mob.
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A final complication: President Trump began his speech an hour late, at noon, not 11 a.m. Had he started on time, those thousands of people, allegedly incited by his rhetoric, would have arrived at the Capitol just about 1 p.m to help start a riot.
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Like the others who actually heard Trump speak, Ashli Babbitt did not arrive at the Capitol until after 2 p.m. By this time, all external barriers had been removed.

Ashli entered the Capitol at 2:23 p.m. through an open window. At 2:44 p.m. Capitol Police Lieutenant (now captain) Michael Byrd shot and killed her without warning.

Say what you will about Byrd, but he was not part of the plan. From the planners' perspective, he killed exactly the wrong person – a petite, attractive, unarmed female and a 14-year Air Force veteran to boot.

Worse, John Earle Sullivan, a rogue BLM-affiliated provocateur, captured the shooting on video and promptly sold it to CNN. The face of the protest was now the martyred Ashli Babbitt.

The conspirators could not let this stand. They needed a martyr of their own, and they set out to create one.

On the evening of Jan. 6, a rumor was floated that the protesters had killed a Capitol Police officer with a fire extinguisher.