Four members of the Proud Boys extremist group, including its former leader Enrique Tarrio, were on Thursday convicted of seditious conspiracy for their roles in planning and leading the January 6 Capitol attack, in a desperate effort to keep\u00a0Donald Trump\u00a0in power after his 2020 election defeat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n The verdicts handed down in federal court in Washington marked a major victory for the US justice department in the last of its seditious conspiracy cases related to the January 6 attack. Prosecutors previously secured convictions\u00a0against members of the Oath Keepers, another far-right group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Seditious conspiracy is rarely used but became\u00a0the <\/a>central <\/a>charge\u00a0against the Proud Boys defendants after the FBI identified them as playing crucial roles in helping storm the Capitol in an effort to interrupt and stop the congressional certification of electoral results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEvidence presented at trial detailed the extent of the violence at the Capitol on January 6 and the central role these defendants played setting into motion the unlawful events of that day,\u201d attorney general Merrick Garland later said at a news conference at justice department headquarters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe have secured the convictions of leaders of both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers for seditious conspiracy, specifically conspiring to oppose by force the lawful transfer of presidential power. Our work will continue,\u201d Garland said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those convicted now await sentencing. The verdicts were partial, and hours after the initial four were found guilty of seditious conspiracy, the jury found another Proud Boys member Dominic Pezzola, who smashed a window to gain entry to the Capitol, not guilty of seditious conspiracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tarrio, who was not in Washington for the Capitol attack, as well as Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs and Zachary Rehl were also convicted of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. All five were convicted of obstructing an official proceeding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The trial, which lasted more than three months and tested the scope of the sedition law, was particularly fraught for the defense, the prosecution and the presiding US district court judge, Timothy Kelly. Clashes in court and motions for mistrial were frequent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trump played an outsized role in the trial, given the reverence the Proud Boys accorded the former president. In closing arguments, the prosecution said they acted as \u201cDonald Trump\u2019s army\u201d to \u201ckeep their preferred leader in power\u201d after rejecting Joe Biden\u2019s victory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The former president has long been considered the lynchpin for the involvement of the Proud Boys and others in the Capitol attack when he called for a \u201cwild\u201d protest on 6 January 2021 in an infamous December 2020 tweet and told supporters to \u201cfight like hell\u201d for his cause.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More than a thousand arrests have been made in connection to the Capitol attack and hundreds of convictions secured. Trump was impeached a second time for inciting an insurrection but acquitted by Senate\u00a0Republicans. He still faces state and federal investigations of his attempted election subversion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In court, prosecutors said Tarrio and his top lieutenants used Trump\u2019s December tweet as a call to arms and started putting together a cadre that they called the \u201cMinistry of Self-Defense\u201d to travel to Washington for the protest, according to private group chats and recordings of discussions the FBI obtained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Around 20 December 2020, Tarrio created a chat called \u201cMOSD Leaders Group\u201d \u2013 described by Tarrio as a \u201cnational rally planning committee\u201d \u2013 that included Nordean, Biggs and Rehl. The chat was used to plan a \u201cDC trip\u201d where all would dress in dark tones, to remain incognito.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The prosecution argued that Tarrio\u2019s text messages about \u201cSeventeen seventy six\u201d, in reference to the year of American independence from Britain, suggested the leadership of the Proud Boys saw their January 6 operation as a revolutionary force.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lacking evidence in the hundreds of thousands of texts about an explicit plan to storm or occupy the Capitol, the prosecution used two cooperating witnesses from the Proud Boys to make the case that the defendants worked together\u00a0in a conspiracy\u00a0to stop the peaceful transfer of power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first witness, Jeremy Bertino, told the jury the Proud Boys had a penchant for violence and there was a tacit understanding that they needed to engage in an \u201call-out revolution\u201d to stop Biden taking office, testimony meant to directly support a sedition charge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second witness, Matthew Greene, told the jury he did not initially understand why the Proud Boys marched from the Washington monument to the Capitol to be among the first people at the barricades surrounding Congress, instead of going to Trump\u2019s speech near the White House.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once the Proud Boys led the charge from the barricades to the west front of the Capitol, Pezzola using a police riot shield to smash a window, Greene said he realized there may have been a deliberate effort to lead the January 6 riot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The prosecution persuaded the judge to allow them to use a novel legal strategy: that though the Proud Boys leaders did not really engage in violence themselves \u2013 Tarrio was not even in Washington \u2013 they got other rioters to do so, using them as \u201ctools\u201d of their insurrection conspiracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The defense protested the ruling allowing prosecutors to show the jury videos of other low-level Proud Boys and random rioters committing violence at the Capitol, saying that it amounted to making the five defendants guilty by association.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Notwithstanding the other evidence, the defense\u2019s complaint was that if the jury had to assess whether the defendants\u2019 limited use of violence alone met the threshold\u00a0to \u201cdestroy by force\u00a0the government of the United States\u201d, the outcome might have been affected.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Four members of the Proud Boys extremist group, including its former leader Enrique Tarrio, were on Thursday convicted of seditious conspiracy for their roles in planning and leading the January 6 Capitol attack, in a desperate effort to keep\u00a0Donald Trump\u00a0in power after his 2020 election defeat. The verdicts handed down in federal court in Washington […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":32727,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_post_source_name":"","_post_source_url":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[10620,5522,8217,5304,5178,3663,11183,5307,12708,9649,7960,11381,6693,8032,11282,10507,911,10520,2264,9997,1444,8601,2471,12005,6580,10419,7956,4054,10342,3874,9974,9870,11804,8770,421,3805,11377,11167,5561,9996,5333,6575,13301,13235,8501,10041,7972,6584,11581,9262,6348,10885,2354,6571,2982,3954,10415,594],"class_list":["post-32726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-news","tag-acquitted","tag-arms","tag-army","tag-attack","tag-biden","tag-biggs","tag-boys","tag-britain","tag-by-force","tag-capitol","tag-case","tag-complaint","tag-congress","tag-conspiracy","tag-convicted","tag-court","tag-election","tag-enrique-tarrio","tag-government","tag-guilty","tag-hell","tag-independence","tag-joe-biden","tag-judge","tag-jury","tag-justice","tag-justice-department","tag-kelly","tag-law","tag-lead","tag-leadership","tag-merrick-garland","tag-not-guilty","tag-oath-keepers","tag-police","tag-president","tag-presidential","tag-prosecution","tag-protest","tag-proud-boys","tag-rally","tag-republicans","tag-results","tag-riot","tag-senate","tag-speech","tag-storm","tag-travel","tag-trial","tag-united-states","tag-us","tag-victory","tag-washington","tag-white","tag-white-house","tag-will","tag-work","tag-who"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32726\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}