Enrique Tarrio, one of the Proud Boys’ former leaders, and three other members were found guilty today of seditious conspiracy for conspiring to keep Trump in office after losing the election by inciting a mob to attack the Capitol building on January 6, 2021.
Two counts against the fifth co-defendant were not decided by the jury. After a trial that lasted almost four months, the results were announced.
Sedition is a crime that carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in jail.
crimes On January 6, 2021, all five defendants were found guilty of a number of lesser crimes relating to their actions.
In 2017, he participated in a bloody Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the following year, he took charge of the Proud Boys.
He is a Miami-born Cuban-American who served as Trump’s former director for Hispanics in Florida. Because of his notoriety, he made a brief bid for Congress in 2020.
On the day of the riot, the proud boys congregated in front of the Washington Monument before proceeding to the Capitol. On that particular day, the organization had more than 100 attendees, and scores of them ended up being detained.
Prosecutors have presented numerous texts, social media posts, and recordings in court to demonstrate that the group’s acts were part of a planned plot to thwart the verification of the 2020 election results.
Numerous violent threats have been repeatedly posted online by The Proud Boys. For instance, Joe Biden stated in a tweet from November 2020 that “YOU must remember that the American people are at war with YOU. Not Trump… No serenity. “No mercy.”
Others discussed the civil war, executions, and “traitors” in their writings.
Trial Due to a sluggish jury selection process, defense attorneys’ pleas for a mistrial, multiple disagreements over witnesses and evidence, and worries about potential juror intimidation, the trial ended up lasting more than twice as long as it had been anticipated.
The mob was loosely organized, generally nonviolent, and there was no deliberate plan to storm the facility, according to the defendants’ attorneys.
They also mentioned that Tarrio, a seasoned police informant, had been in touch with a Washington police officer ahead of January 6 to let him know what the group had planned for that day.
Their attorneys blamed Donald Trump during closing arguments, claiming that they merely adopted his recommendation to visit Washington on January 6 by doing so.
The commander in chief remarked, “Be there, it will be wild. And that’s exactly what they did,” Norm Pattis, Biggs’ lawyer, said in reference to one of Trump’s tweets.
Gavin McInnes, a co-founder of Vice who left the media organization to pursue a career as a right-wing commentator and podcaster, created The Proud Boys in New York in 2016.
They describe themselves as a “Westernized fraternal organization” or a “all-male drunken club.”
However, they are better known for their frequent altercations with left-leaning anti-fascist activists in US cities.
The Proud Boys of Portland, Oregon boasted about arrests and street violence in a 2019 BBC documentary.
After the September 2020 presidential debates, they gained widespread recognition. Joe Biden brought up the group during a discussion on radicalism. In response, Donald Trump said, “Proud boys, stand back and wait.”
Video of the argument was played in court, and the defense team unsuccessfully tried to compel Trump to testify that the defendants were following the president’s directive from January 6, 2021.
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