WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal jury on Tuesday is scheduled to listen to a second day of attorneys’ closing arguments within the landmark trial for former Proud Boys extremist group leaders charged with plotting to violently cease the switch of presidential energy after the 2020 election.
A lawyer for former Proud Boys nationwide chairman Enrique Tarrio will handle jurors earlier than they start deliberating, greater than three months after the trial began in Washington, D.C.
It’s some of the critical instances to return out of the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, which briefly halted Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s presidential election victory over Donald Trump. Tarrio and 4 lieutenants are charged with seditious conspiracy — a hardly ever used cost that carries as much as 20 years behind bars.
A prosecutor advised jurors on Monday that the Proud Boys had been prepared for “all-out war” and seen themselves as foot troopers combating for Trump because the Republican unfold lies that Democrats stole the election from him.
“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,” prosecutor Conor Mulroe advised jurors.
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 Proud Boys organizer. Rehl was president of a Proud Boys chapter in Philadelphia. Pezzola was a Proud Boys member from Rochester, New York.
Attorneys for Norden and Rehl gave their closing arguments on Monday. Lawyers for Biggs and Pezzola are also anticipated to make their remaining appeals to jurors on Tuesday earlier than prosecutors give a rebuttal and the case goes to the jury.
Tarrio is likely one of the high targets of the Justice Department’s investigation of the Capitol riot. Tarrio wasn’t in Washington that day however is accused of orchestrating an assault from afar.
The basis of the federal government’s case, which began with jury choice in January, is a trove of messages that Proud Boys leaders and members privately exchanged in encrypted chats — and publicly posted on social media — earlier than, throughout and after the lethal Jan. 6 assault.
Defense attorneys have tried to painting the far-right group as a ingesting membership that solely engaged in violence for self-defense towards antifascist activists.
Nicholas Smith, lawyer for former Proud Boys chapter chief Nordean, stated on Monday that prosecutors constructed their case on “misdirection and innuendo.” He advised jurors there is no such thing as a proof of a conspiracy between unarmed Proud Boys who marched towards the Capitol with beer cans of their fingers, pausing to cease at meals vans.
“They can’t even order McDonald’s, and they’re planning to stop what the government is calling the peaceful transfer of power?” Smith requested. “Where is the conspiracy?”
The Justice Department has already secured seditious conspiracy convictions towards the founder and members of one other far-right extremist group, the Oath Keepers. But that is the primary main trial involving leaders of the far-right Proud Boys, a neofascist group of self-described “Western chauvinists” that continues to be a power in mainstream Republican circles.
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