Enrique Tarrio was not at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, but an hour’s drive away at a hotel in Baltimore. But he knew what was going to happen in the capital, Washington: His Proud Boys, a right-wing militia, would use force to try to prevent the confirmation of Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election. He kept in touch with his people in front of the Capitol via text messages.
Tarrio now faces a long prison sentence for the day of shame. He was found guilty back in May, when a jury found he was guilty of conspiracy to insurgency. On Tuesday, a federal judge in Washington imposed the sentence: he sentenced the 39-year-old from Florida to 22 years in prison.
Tarrio’s punishment is the most spectacular in connection with the storming of the Capitol because it is the longest and concludes a series of sentences against the Proud Boys. The head of a second militia, the Oath Keepers, had already been sentenced to 18 years in a separate trial in May. Ethan Nordean is just as long behind bars as Tarrio, a former leader of the Proud Boys, has just been convicted. Three other Proud Boys have received prison sentences of between 10 and 17 years in the past few days. These are the toughest sanctions that have been imposed so far in the proceedings against the more than 1,100 accused in connection with January 6, 2021: the militia chiefs are considered the ringleaders of the violent protest.
A popular pattern: show remorse – and then hope for Trump’s pardon
Tarrio’s crime weighs particularly heavily, the judge said at the verdict. Tarrio was “the leader of the conspiracy”, “driven by revolutionary zeal”. The judge therefore decided to impose a particularly high sentence intended for terrorists. However, he did not go as far as the prosecution wanted. She wanted Tarrio jailed for 33 years.
Defenders tried to portray Tarrio as Donald Trump’s puppet, a simple foot soldier, stray but not a terrorist. Tarrio himself was purified and described January 6, 2021 as a “national shame”. Although he again denied planning a violent coup, he apologized to the police and the people of Washington for his behavior. However, other convicts had also shown themselves to be so remorseful in front of the court – only to boast a little later on right-wing radio shows that Donald Trump would pardon them when he was re-elected president.
Unlike the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys did not disband, although the FBI arrested the leaders of both militias shortly after January 6th. Rather, the Proud Boys regrouped without the national leadership. Now they show up in attacks on drag shows or in heated discussions on local school committees. This has even enabled them to recruit new members and open new local branches – not surprising given the authoritarian tendencies in the American right and particularly in Trump’s supporters.
Trump had approached the Proud Boys directly during the 2020 election campaign, which describes itself as a “pro-Western fraternal organization for men”. “Stand back and stand by,” Trump said after a summer of violence on the right and left, a call that right-wing supporters of the militia took as a clear order to be ready for more acts of violence. After Donald Trump’s election defeat, Tarrio saw the emergency come.
The investigators did not find detailed coup plans among the militias. Tarrio, for example, had babbled rather vaguely in chats about revolutionary times like 1776, when the USA began its war of independence. But investigators, the jury and the judge saw it as proven that Tarrio had given his people targeted signals to prepare for violent protests and deliberately advanced into the Capitol on January 6, 2021 to prevent the peaceful transfer of office to the next president.
The trial of the most prominent defendant is scheduled to begin in March
Tarrio, then the leader of the Proud Boys, was absent from the capital because a judge had recently banned him from the city in another trial. The militia leader stole a Black Lives Matter flag from a historic church and set it on fire, earning him another five-month jail term.
The penalties now imposed on the militia leaders show that the legal process of dealing with the “Day of Shame” is progressing. A little more than half of the accused have now been convicted, and more than half of them are going to prison. Now that the leaders of the storming of the Capitol have been convicted, the top man is missing: Donald Trump was indicted by Special Counsel Jack Smith in August in connection with January 6th. His trial is scheduled to begin in March.