Directed by former Proud Boys chairman and lead defendant Enrique Tarrio, the prosecutor said, “These men joined together and agreed to use any means necessary, including force, to stop Congress from certifying the election, and on January 6 they took aim at the heart of our democracy.”
Defense attorneys blasted prosecutors’ effort to find “scapegoats” for what they called an unplanned riot. Instead, they blamed President Donald Trump for inciting the mob and law enforcement leaders for failing to prepare for violence.
It would be an “injustice” to hold Trump’s followers accountable while finding it “too hard to blame Trump … too hard to put him on the witness stand with his army of lawyers,” Jauregui told jurors.
Although charges have been brought against more than 930 individuals in the Jan. 6 attack and a special counsel is investigating Trump, Thursday’s dueling opening statements in a federal court blocks from the Capitol crystallized a major question still unanswered after two years: Who should ultimately bear the greatest criminal responsibility for that day’s events?
Prosecutors before have suggested Proud Boys members played an outsize role in the violence. But for the first time in a 90-minute argument punctuated by the defendants’ own recorded words, videos and photographs on social and encrypted media, the government asserted that the successful breach of the Capitol was not the product of a spontaneous, misguided mob but the result of a preplanned assault by dedicated extremists.
Tarrio and his co-defendants — Ethan Nordean, of Auburn, Wash.; Joe Biggs, of Ormond Beach, Fla.; Dominic Pezzola, of Rochester, N.Y.; and Zachary Rehl, of Philadelphia — have pleaded not guilty to a 10-count indictment. Two charges they face are punishable by up to 20 years in prison: conspiring to oppose by force federal authority or the inauguration of Joe Biden as president, and conspiring to obstruct Congress’s joint session.
According to McCullough, the Proud Boys the day after the Nov. 3, 2020, election began “calling for war because their favored candidate was not elected.” Trump falsely claimed the election was stolen, called demonstrators to Washington in November and December, then later that month announced a “wild” protest in D.C. on Jan. 6 when Congress met.
Until then, Proud Boys were best known for engaging in street fights with their perceived enemies in the leftist antifa movement, before Trump famously refused to denounce the group during a presidential election debate in September 2020, urging them instead to “stand back and stand by.”
On Jan. 6, while Tarrio monitored events from Baltimore, the trio marched to the Capitol with nearly 200 other men, joined the first wave that surged onto the Capitol grounds and fanned out opposite police lines, the government said. There, they pressed forward until they made their way inside, led by Pezzola, who was recorded smashing with a stolen police riot shield the first window of the building to be breached, McCullough said.
Instead, McCullough showed video clips of Proud Boys members at the forefront of attacks on police at the Capitol, where they had assembled that morning even before Trump spoke to supporters at a White House Ellipse rally.
When their turn came, defense attorneys accused the government of cherry-picking statements out of context by their clients, and urged jurors from the overwhelmingly Democratic area to “put aside politics” and prosecutors’ attempts to manipulate their emotions “so you hate them, you hate the Proud Boys.”
“What they share is an ideology. The Proud Boys think that Western civilization is the best. … The Proud Boys think America’s the best,” Jauregui said. “That’s what they fight for. It’s not a political thing, it’s not a racial thing. And they believe in free speech. They believe you should say whatever you want.”
Rehl attorney Carmen Hernandez said Rehl went to the Capitol expecting speeches. He didn’t enter until after the electoral vote count had stopped, and that “not a single message” of 160,000 reviewed by the FBI showed that he “intended to or planned to … disrupt the proceedings.”
As they watched in court, the five defendants sat calmly, neatly groomed and wearing dark suits, ties and white shirts — four wore dark-rimmed glasses — in contrast to their agitated expressions as depicted in government videos.
But they showed the jury the defendants’ own social media posts, including the flashing words “kill them” and clips of groups of men beating others on the streets at night. One post from December 2020 by Tarrio featured Pezzola against a fiery backdrop labeled “Lords of War” and “#J6,” and another included a hype video posted by Rehl showing Trump attorney Sidney Powell saying she would “release the Kraken.”
“This was the image these defendants sought to promote in their fight to keep Donald Trump in office,” McCullough said, concluding. “These ‘lords of war’ joined together to stop the presidential transfer of power.”
This content was originally published here.
