Washington – The former president of the extreme right Group of proud boys Enrique Tarrio and three subordinates were convicted of numerous crimes including seditious conspiracy for their roles in the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
A federal jury in Washington DC found Tarrio, Ethan Nordean, Zachary Rehl and Joseph Biggs guilty of conspiring to prevent the peaceful transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden and of using force and planning to obstruct the certification of 2020 presidential election.
There was no verdict for Dominic Pezzola on the more serious charge, seditious conspiracy and conspiracy to obstruct official proceedings. After the partial verdict was read, Judge Timothy Kelly sent the jury back to deliberate on those charges and several other crimes on which they failed to reach a verdict.
All five were found guilty of several other crimes, including obstructing an official proceeding; obstruct Congress; conspiracy to prevent an officer from performing his duties; obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder and collaboration and destruction of government property.
But Tarrio, who was arrested on January 4, 2021, and not at the Capitol, was found not guilty of assaulting officers. Only Pezzola was found guilty of this charge.
They now likely face a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
Prosecutors had argued that the defendants had conspired to use force illegally, and crowds gathered in Washington, DC, to keep former President Donald Trump in office.
Shortly after the choiceinvestigators alleged that Tarrio began posting on social media and in message groups about a “civil war,” then threatened, “No Trump … No Peace. No Quarter.”
Proud Boys leaders saw themselves as “a fighting force” that was “prepared to commit violence” in Trump’s name, the government alleged.
Allison Dinner/AP
According to charging documents, Nordean, Rehl, Biggs and Pezzola met with more than 100 Proud Boys near the Washington Monument on Jan. 6, 2021, around the time Trump was speaking on the House floor. White. They allegedly marched to the Capitol grounds and communicated by radio.
Prosecutors said the defendants were among the first wave of rioters who broke through the Capitol grounds through police barricades and drove crowds into the building.
Some defendants, such as Pezzola, were accused of breaking windows in the Capitol, while others roused the crowd and pushed through metal barricades and police lines to enter the Capitol.
Tarrio was not in Washington, DC on January 6 because he had been arrested on unrelated charges a day earlier. Still, the Justice Department argued that his planning before the attack, support for rioters during the assault, and comments afterward were enough to charge him with seditious conspiracy.
“Make no mistake, we did this,” Tarrio wrote on social media during the disturbance.
“The spirit of 1776 has resurfaced and created groups like the Proud Boys. And we are not going extinct,” Nordean wrote in November 2020. “Hopefully firing squads are for traitors who try to steal elections from the American people,” Rehl posted.
Prosecutors said Tarrio incited protesters to violence, posting before Jan. 6: “We enter this new year with one word on our minds: revolt.” In text messages, he later compared the Proud Boys’ actions that day to those of George Washington, Sam Adams and Benjamin Franklin.
Defense lawyers countered that the Proud Boys were just a glorified “drinking club” where men shared their anger, and claimed that Tarrio and others had no explicit plan to resist the election results or obstruct the congress Tarrio was merely exercising his constitutional rights, his lawyer argued.
“Did Enrique Tarrio make comments that were egregious? Absolutely,” Tarrio’s attorney rhetorically asked the jury in closing arguments last week. “You might not like what he said, but it’s speech protected by the First Amendment.”
The trial, which began on January 12, dragged from winter to spring with dozens of witnesses called by both sides and thousands of exhibits. Witnesses included a documentary filmmaker who followed Tarrio after the 2020 presidential election, numerous FBI agents who investigated the case, Secret Service employees and former Proud Boys.
Only two of the five defendants, Rehl and Pezzola, testified in their own defense. Rehl said he was not aware of any plans for violence and encouraged anyone to engage with police.
Prosecutors showed video of Pezzola using a stolen police shield to smash a window and smoking a “victory cigar” inside the Capitol. He said he acted alone and testified that he was not part of any criminal enterprise. Pezzola’s attorney, Steve Metcalf, called the government’s case a “fairy dust conspiracy.”
Matthew Greene, a former member of the Proud Boys, testified as a government witness and told the jury that he first joined the group to defend himself against ANTIFA.
He stated that there had been no explicit call to violently resist the presidency of Joe Biden, but a “collective expectation” that they would respond if provoked.
“I can’t say it was openly encouraged, but it was never discouraged,” Greene said of the violence, “And when it happened, it was celebrated.”
Greene, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and signed a cooperation agreement with prosecutors, was pressed by the defense about whether the Jan. 6 violence was planned. He said the crowd was angry but the violence appeared “spontaneous”. However, he stated that the mob’s actions were “implicitly or openly accepted and encouraged by the proud boys” on January 6.
Another cooperating witness in the trial, Jeremy Bertino, 43, was considered Tarrio’s top lieutenant and pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy last year. Like Tarrio, Bertino was not in the Capitol during the attack.
Bertino told the jury that the Proud Boys almost unanimously believed that the results of the 2020 election were stolen from Trump as part of a broad “conspiracy.” He stated that the Proud Boys saw themselves as the foot soldiers of the right, calling themselves “the tip of the spear” in the struggle.
And after the attack, Bertino, who was recovering from an injury, sent a message to Tarrio: “I wanted to be there to witness what I believed to be the next American Revolution…I am very proud of my country today.”
But he also told the court under cross-examination, “I had no conversations with anyone about going into the Capitol building.” In closing arguments, Tarrio’s lawyers questioned Bertino’s reliability as a witness.
They blasted Bertino as a liar and alleged that his testimony had been tainted by his deal with the government.
Prosecutor Conor Mulroe countered the defense’s argument that the seditious conspiracy had to be explicitly planned to be criminal.
“A conspiracy is nothing more than an agreement with an unlawful purpose,” Mulroe said of the law, “A conspiracy can be tacit. It doesn’t have to be in writing, happened around the table, or even with words. may be implied.”
“They were there to threaten and if necessary use force to stop the certification of the election and that is exactly what they did,” he told the jury.
Defense attorneys disagreed.
“If you don’t like what some of them say, that doesn’t make them guilty,” said Rehls’ attorney, Carmen Hernandez.
The trial was expected to last several months, but wrangling between lawyers, sealed hearings and changing court schedules hampered efforts to speed up the proceedings.
“We’re learning to work together. We have seven very different personalities,” defense attorneys warned Judge Kelly in January as the trial began.
At times, the judge’s patience, particularly with defense attorneys, seemed exhausted as he tried to stem the tide of objections, sidebars and interruptions. “For God’s sake,” he pleaded with a defense attorney as they tried to talk last month. “For God’s sake,” said the exasperated judge during closing arguments. The witness’s days limped by.
The verdict came less than a month before Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes is due to be sentenced on a seditious conspiracy conviction. A jury in Washington, DC, found him and co-defendant Kelly Meggs guilty of the major crime, but acquitted three others of the charge.
A group of four other Oath Keepers were separately convicted of seditious conspiracy counts earlier this year, despite efforts by defense attorneys to argue that the charge is too extreme and the Washington, D.C., juries too biased .
Defense attorneys in the trial consistently laid the blame for the riot at the feet of Trump himself, many mentioning the former president in their opening and closing arguments.
Tarrio’s lawyer, Nayib Hassan, was even more explicit, telling the jury in closing arguments that “it was Donald Trump’s words, it was his motivation, it was his anger that caused what happened on January 6.”
“They want to use Enrique Tarrio as a scapegoat for Donald Trump and those in power,” Hassan said.
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