Proud Boys leader a scapegoat for Trump, attorney tells January 6 trial

A defense attorney argued on Tuesday at the close of a landmark trial over the January 6 insurrection that the US justice department is making the Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio a scapegoat for Donald Trump, whose supporters stormed the US Capitol.

Tarrio and four lieutenants are charged with seditious conspiracy for what prosecutors say was a plot to stop the transfer of presidential power from Trump to Joe Biden after the 2020 election.

In his closing argument, the defense lawyer Nayib Hassan noted Tarrio was not in Washington on 6 January 2021, having been banned from the capital after being arrested for defacing a Black Lives Matter banner. Trump, Hassan argued, was the one to blame for extorting supporters to “fight like hell” in his cause.

“It was Donald Trump’s words,” Hassan told jurors in Washington federal court. “It was his motivation. It was his anger that caused what occurred on January 6 in your beautiful and amazing city. It was not Enrique Tarrio. They want to use Enrique Tarrio as a scapegoat for Donald J Trump and those in power.”

Seditious conspiracy, a rarely used charge, carries a prison term of up to 20 years.

Tarrio is one of the top targets of the federal investigation of the riot, which temporarily halted certification of Biden’s win.

Tarrio’s lawyers have accused prosecutors of using him as a scapegoat because charging Trump or powerful allies would be too difficult. But his attorney’s closing arguments were the most full-throated expression of that strategy since the trial started more than three months ago.

Trump has denied inciting violence on January 6 and has argued that he was permitted by the first amendment to challenge his loss to Biden. The former president faces several civil lawsuits over the riot and a special counsel is overseeing investigations into efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the election.

A prosecutor told jurors on Monday the Proud Boys were ready for “all-out war” and viewed themselves as foot soldiers for Trump.

“These defendants saw themselves as Donald Trump’s army, fighting to keep their preferred leader in power no matter what the law or the courts had to say about it,” said Conor Mulroe.

Tarrio, a Miami resident, is on trial with Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola. Nordean, of Auburn, Washington, was a Proud Boys chapter president. Biggs, of Ormond Beach, Florida, was a self-described organizer. Rehl was president of a chapter in Philadelphia. Pezzola was a member from Rochester, New York.

Attorneys for Nordean and Rehl gave closing arguments on Monday.

Tarrio is accused of orchestrating the attack from afar. Police arrested him two days before the riot on charges that he burned a church banner during an earlier march. A judge ordered him to leave Washington after his arrest.

Defense attorneys have argued that there is no evidence of a conspiracy or a plan for the Proud Boys to attack the Capitol. Tarrio “had no plan, no objective and no understanding of an objective”, his attorney said.

Pezzola testified he never spoke to any of his co-defendants before they sat in the same courtroom. The defense attorney Steven Metcalf said Pezzola never knew of any plan for January 6 or joined any conspiracy.

“It’s not possible. It’s fairy dust. It doesn’t exist,” Metcalf said.

Mulroe, the prosecutor, told jurors a conspiracy can be an unspoken and implicit “mutual understanding, reached with a wink and a nod”.

The foundation of the government’s case is a cache of messages Proud Boys leaders and members privately exchanged in encrypted chats and publicly posted on social media before, during and after the deadly January 6 attack.

Norm Pattis, one of Biggs’s attorneys, described the Capitol riot as an “aberration” and told jurors their verdict “means so much more than January 6 itself” because it will “speak to the future”.

“Show the world with this verdict that the rule of law is alive and well in the United States,” he said.

The justice department has secured seditious conspiracy convictions against the founder and members of another far-right group, the Oath Keepers. But this is the first major trial involving leaders of the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist group that remains a force in mainstream Republican circles.