Prosecutors alleged defendants viewed themselves as Donald Trump’s army, intent on keeping him in power through violence

Former Proud Boys chairman Henry “Enrique” Tarrio and three other members of the extremist group were found guilty Thursday of seditious conspiracy in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

A jury deliberated for seven days in Washington before finding Tarrio, 39, and other defendants guilty on 31 of 46 counts. The jury returned not guilty verdicts on four counts and continued deliberating on 11 remaining counts. The result was another decisive victory for the Justice Department in the last of three seditious conspiracy trials held after what it called a historic act of domestic terrorism to prevent the peaceful transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden after the 2020 presidential election.

Tarrio, dressed in blue suit and vest with red tie, gazed at his relatives in the courtroom gallery as the verdict was read. The other men fixed their eyes on the jury foreman.

“If the worst happens … we’re standing on principle,” Tarrio said in a jail call shared on social media after closing arguments on April 25, making his first extended public comments since his March 2022 indictment.

Tarrio did not testify at trial, but he contradicted his defense team’s argument to jurors that he was being made “a scapegoat for Donald Trump and those in power.” Instead, Tarrio embraced hard-line Trump backers’ claims that he was being used as “the next steppingstone” to “get to” Trump, who is running again for president. “They’re trying to get to the top and they’re trying to manipulate the 2024 election,” he said in the jail call.

Legal analysts said the convictions on the historically rare and politically weighty crime of seditious conspiracy sent a necessary signal of deterrence to extremists contemplating political violence. The verdict also could pose repercussions for the former president as Special Counsel Jack Smith investigates whether Trump or those around him broke the law in seeking to hold onto power by fanning false and incendiary claims that the election was stolen, pressuring state and federal officials to assist the effort, and sending thousands of supporters who heard him speak at a Jan. 6 rally to march to the Capitol.

“The verdict empowers the special counsel to bring indictments for the efforts to overturn the election,” said New York University law professor Ryan Goodman. “It underscores the enormous stakes in mobilizing Americans to believe the Big Lie and directing an armed crowd to interfere with the congressional proceedings.”

The convictions mark “an important milestone on the journey to accountability for the perpetrators of the insurrection on January 6, 2021 … showing that political violence and attacks on our democratic institutions will be taken seriously by our justice system and will not be tolerated by the American people,” said Lindsay Schubiner, director of programs at Western States Center, a Portland-based civil rights group that monitors anti-democracy movements nationwide.

Over nearly 15 weeks of proceedings, prosecutors alleged that the Proud Boys on trial saw themselves as Trump’s “army.” Inspired by his directive to “stand by” during a September 2020 presidential debate and mobilized by his December 2020 call for a “wild” protest, prosecutors said, the men sought to keep Trump in power through violence on the day that Congress met to certify the presidential election results.

Defense attorneys for Tarrio fought back by blaming the former president, saying prosecutors were punishing the Proud Boys for their political beliefs, for an unplanned riot triggered by Trump’s incitement of angry supporters, and for law enforcement failures.

All defendants were convicted of at least one count punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Tarrio and fellow Proud Boys leaders Ethan Nordean, Joe Biggs and Zachary Rehl were found guilty of three such crimes: seditious conspiracy — or plotting to oppose by force Congress’s confirmation of the election result — conspiring to obstruct the congressional session, and actually obstructing the proceeding.

The jury did not come to an agreement on whether rank-and-file member Dominic Pezzola, who joined the Proud Boys in late 2020, was part of either conspiracy, but it did find him guilty of the obstruction charge, as well as of assaulting police, stealing a riot shield and smashing the first window breached by rioters. All five were convicted of conspiring to block lawmakers and police from doing their jobs.

U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly directed the jury to resume deliberations over Pezzola as well as whether to hold all five men responsible for aiding Pezzola’s destruction of government property and another Proud Boys member who threw a water bottle at an officer.

Tarrio is the first person not present at the Capitol to be found criminally responsible at trial in the violence that injured scores of police, ransacked offices and forced the evacuation of lawmakers. The government alleged he watched from Baltimore after being expelled from D.C. one day earlier pending trial for burning a stolen “Black Lives Matter” flag at an earlier pro-Trump rally in Washington.

Fourteen people have now been convicted of seditious conspiracy for Jan. 6 violence, all followers of two high-profile groups in the alt-right or anti-government extremist movements, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, whose founder Stewart Rhodes and five followers were found guilty in November and January. Four other members of the two groups previously pleaded guilty to the count. Three Oath Keepers members were acquitted but, like Pezzola, were convicted of obstructing the congressional session.

The verdict concludes the last of three Jan. 6 seditious conspiracy trials, the highest-profile cases stemming from the largest prosecution in U.S. history.

Both Tarrio and Rhodes were accused of playing an outsize role in organizing the violence or threat of violence by extremists drawn to the Capitol by Trump’s incendiary and baseless claims that the 2020 election was illegitimate.

Defense lawyers say the government’s theory that Tarrio and his co-defendants could be held criminally liable for using other rioters as “tools” of violence could be applied to many others who weren’t near the Capitol that day.

But U.S. prosecutors have not produced any “smoking gun” evidence explicitly tracing the actions of any of the Capitol’s violent actors to Trump or his advisers — either from a cooperating witness or an actual written message — although that conceivably could change if anyone still facing charges or pending sentencing “flips” and cooperates.

The government’s own evidence at trial showed how challenging the investigation has been. Statements by a lead FBI case agent in internal messages accidentally disclosed to the defense and entered into trial show that investigators only cracked Tarrio’s encrypted phone in late January 2022 — a year after the riot.

Only then, FBI Special Agent Nicole Miller wrote on Feb. 1, 2022, did she believe evidence on Tarrio’s phone cleared the “hurdle” to bring a conspiracy case against him.

The government argued that the Proud Boys’ concerted action on Jan. 6 alone was evidence of a criminal conspiracy, when prosecutors said the group marched to the Capitol even before Trump finished speaking at the White House Ellipse, helped drive rioters forward at several points, and celebrated with “victory smokes” and claims of credit after the Capitol breach.

“Make no mistake …” Tarrio texted, “We did this.”

But prosecutors also cited hundreds of encrypted messages, chats and social media posts involving the defendants. The conversations discussed keeping Trump in power “by any means necessary including force” — as star government witness and Proud Boys cooperator Jeremy Bertino testified — and storming the Capitol. The messages show that the Proud Boys were also angry at police handling of Bertino’s stabbing after a Dec. 12, 2020, rally in Washington, the government said.

The government has previously shown evidence that Tarrio, a former aide to Trump political confidant Roger Stone, was in contact with Trump’s “stop the steal” campaign organizer Ali Alexander and Oath Keepers founder Rhodes throughout the post-election period. Rhodes had shared a proposal for storming Congress — while Tarrio, Nordean and Biggs were each in phone and text contact with Infowars.com founder Alex Jones or producer Owen Shroyer on Jan. 4, 5 and 6.

Stone, Alexander and Jones have denied any wrongdoing and have not been charged with any crime.

The Proud Boys used “1776” as a shorthand for what they wanted to achieve, prosecutor Conor Mulroe said in closing arguments. But he said the defendants’ violent revolution would have reversed the Revolutionary War’s achievement — founding “a nation where leaders were chosen by the people, and power was handed over peacefully under the rule of law — not ruled by a king for life through the power of his army.”

Attorneys for the Proud Boys put on a combative defense, variously urging jurors to blame the violence on Trump, not his followers; accusing the Biden administration of overcharging protesters and locking up political opponents; alleging that a corrupt or incompetent Justice Department hid informants’ and police roles in the violence; and casting the defendants as beer-drinking brawlers who were patriots at heart, not “foot soldiers of the right” who turned from violently battling leftists in the streets to attacking police and lawmakers.

“There were no statements in those chats about stopping the transfer of power on Jan. 6 with or without force,” Tarrio attorney Nayib Hassan said, and defendants had no “shared objective” other than to march, protest and promote the Proud Boys brand.

The government’s entire case was built on a kind of “misdirection and innuendo,” manipulating jurors’ hostility toward Trump and playing to their “anger, emotion and partisan prejudice” to convict the men based on “guilt by association,” Nordean defense attorney Nicholas Smith said.

Tarrio, Nordean and Biggs did not testify at trial, but Rehl said the Proud Boys’ preparations were strictly for self-defense after past violence in Washington. “There was nothing nefarious about it,” he said.

Pezzola took the stand to “take responsibility for my actions” and to clear the others of culpability. But he also attacked prosecutors and said he would stand “against this corrupt trial with your fake charges.”

While prosecutors offered no specific plan centered on the certification, they showed jurors scores of messages in which defendants said they would go to war to keep Trump in office.

The defense struggled with the deluge of videos, Parler posts and Telegram messages amassed by the government, showing Proud Boys cheering and encouraging violence. When Rehl testified that he assaulted no one, the government surprised him with video that appeared to show him firing pepper-spray at police.

But attorneys cast themselves as defenders of the constitutional right to protest, not just of a group they acknowledged could be offensive, crude and even hateful. One — Biggs attorney Norm Pattis — warned darkly that convictions would only exacerbate the country’s divisions and possibly lead to civil war.

For now, the Proud Boys organization is a shell of what it once was. The Jan. 6 prosecution, along with revelations that Tarrio and others have been federal informants, have divided the group. But membership continues to grow, and followers have found a new cause in protesting drag performances and transgender rights events around the country, sometimes leading to violence.

“If you are running a group [that] is somewhat effective … I guarantee you that there are [informants] within your group,” Tarrio said after closing arguments Tuesday in a jail call with reporters hosted by Gateway Pundit. He added that upon his release, he thought he might get out of politics and do “some kind of cultural thing.”