By Alan Feuer and Zach Montague

WASHINGTON – Four members of the Proud Boys, including their former leader Enrique Tarrio, were convicted Thursday (4) of seditious conspiracy for plotting to keep President Donald Trump in power after his election defeat by leading a violent mob in attacking the Capitol on Jan 6, 2021. The jurors in the case failed to reach a decision on the sedition charge for one of the defendants, Dominic Pezzola, although he was convicted of other serious felonies.

The verdicts, coming after seven days of deliberations in US District Court in Washington, were a major blow against one of the country’s most notorious far-right groups and another milestone in the Justice Department’s vast investigation of the Capitol attack.

The trial was the last of three sedition cases that federal prosecutors brought against key figures in the Capitol attack.

The sedition charge, which is rarely used and harks back to the Union’s efforts to protect the federal government against secessionist rebels during the Civil War, was also used in two separate trials against nine members of another far-right group, the Oath Keepers militia. Six of those defendants — including Stewart Rhodes, the organization’s founder and leader — were convicted of sedition; each of the others was found guilty of different serious felonies.

As the verdicts were read in the fourth-floor courtroom, Tarrio, Pezzola and the other defendants — Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs and Zachary Rehl — remained steely. With the exception of Pezzola, the men were also found guilty of conspiring to obstruct the certification of the election, which took place at the Capitol on Jan. 6. All five defendants were convicted of a third conspiracy count as well, which accused them of interfering with the duties of members of Congress that day.

On the conspiracy counts alone, the men could face a maximum of nearly 50 years in prison. And they were found guilty of other felonies as well.

The Proud Boys — who had been fighting on the streets since 2017 for a range of far-right causes — became a central focus of the FBI’s investigation into Jan 6 within days of the attack. The defendants were taken into custody in a series of arrests beginning in January 2021. More than 20 other members of the group from chapters ranging from New York to Hawaii were ultimately charged in separate cases in connection with the Capitol attack.

The sedition trial sprawled over the course of more than three months and was characterized by frequent delays; frayed relations between the defence and prosecution; and several decisions by the presiding judge, Timothy J. Kelly that tested the boundaries of conspiracy law.

Kelly’s rulings allowed prosecutors to introduce damning evidence about the violent behaviour and aggressive language of members of the Proud Boys who had only limited connections to the five defendants. The rulings also permitted jurors to convict on conspiracy even if they found there was no plan to disrupt the certification of the election, but merely an unspoken agreement to do so.

From the outset, the trial provided a unique and disturbing glimpse into the Proud Boys’ culture, as a trove of internal group chats and recordings revealed a toxic stew of machismo, homophobia and misogyny often accompanied by sophomoric humour and rampant alcohol use. The jury heard members of the group engaging in casual antisemitism and, in some cases, promoting outright Nazi sympathy.

Trump loomed large over the proceeding. In closing arguments, the prosecution placed the former president — a figure the Proud Boys revered since his first days in the White House — at the heart of their story.

They told the jury that the defendants and others in the group refused to accept Joe Biden’s victory and that, acting as “Donald Trump’s army,” they organized and ultimately fought “to keep their preferred leader in power no matter what the law or the courts had to say about it.”

A prime example of the Proud Boys’ ties to Trump came in December 2020, when he posted a message on Twitter calling for a “wild” protest to be held in Washington on Jan. 6. Hearing the post as a call to action, Tarrio and his lieutenants organized a group of so-called “real men” — referred to as the Ministry of Self-Defence — to be on the ground in Washington that day.

In private online chats, Tarrio said the group was meant to “standardize event organizing.” But he also added a cryptic message: “ — whispers — Seventeen seventy six.” Prosecutors said that was his subtle way of suggesting that the Ministry of Self-Defence was bent on revolution, and they called the group “a violent gang that came together to use force against its enemies”.

In a series of searches before the trial began, investigators collected more than 500,000 text messages from the Ministry of Self-Defence and other Proud Boys group chats. While some of the messages were overtly violent and hinted at action at the Capitol, none set forth an explicit plan to storm the building or to forcibly disrupt the election certification taking place inside.

Lacking a smoking gun, prosecutors used two cooperating witness, Jeremy Bertino and Matthew Greene, to make what amounted to an inferential case that the five defendants had worked together to violently subvert the democratic process.

From the start of the trial, prosecutors faced another difficult hurdle.

The Proud Boys as a whole were some of the most violent actors in the huge mob that stormed the Capitol as scores of its members played decisive roles in breaching barricades and assaulting the police.

But violence by the defendants themselves — who were mostly leaders of the group — was relatively limited. Tarrio was not even in Washington on Jan. 6, having been kicked out of the city days earlier by a local judge presiding over a separate criminal matter.

To build a case against the five men on trial, prosecutors convinced Kelly to let them introduce videos of other Proud Boys and Trump supporters in the crowd who had acted violently, even if they had only limited connections to the defendants. Prosecutors argued that Tarrio and the other defendants wielded the other rioters as “tools” of their conspiracy — a novel legal strategy.

The defence was outraged by this theory and argued — unsuccessfully — that the approach was “absurd” and armed the prosecution with “an expanded power.”

“The argument is that just because defendants associated with people who did bad acts, they did bad acts,” Nicholas Smith, Nordean’s lawyer, said in court. “The other term for that is guilt by association.”

Unlike the Oath Keepers, who were largely rendered defunct by the Justice Department’s Jan 6 prosecution, the Proud Boys have by and large survived. While they have dismantled their national leadership, they remain, in words Bertino used from the stand, “foot soldiers for the right”. The group in recent years inserted themselves at the local level into conflicts over issues like coronavirus restrictions, the teaching of anti-racism in schools and efforts to use threats and violence against drag shows.

Several members have also sought more traditional levers of power and run for public office. The most successful of these efforts took place in Miami, where a half-dozen current and former Proud Boys secured seats on the Miami-Dade Republican Executive Committee, seeking to influence local politics from the inside.

-New York Times