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The end of the Proud Boys seditious conspiracy trial may be growing closer but the hole the defendants seemingly dug themselves into this week with yet more testimony from their own witnesses has grown larger.

Testimony continued briefly this week with Tarrio’s witness George Meza. Meza is the self-proclaimed rabbi and former third-degree Proud Boy who described Jan. 6 as ‘the most patriotic act” in a century in a gushing, white power-hand-gesture-wielding video post mere days after former President Donald Trump incited a mob to descend on the U.S. Capitol. 

As a witness for Tarrio, Meza was meant to credibly convince jurors that while he was admittedly once part of a rowdy, reactive brotherhood unbound by social mores, it didn’t mean that he or fellow members of the group, including its national leader, were ever part of a violent conspiracy to stop Congress from certifying the election in 2020. 

Their support of Trump was prolific but to hear Meza insist upon it, it was only in a wholesome patriotic fashion, the way that any American might exercise their right to free speech and assembly.

But Meza’s claims collided, in the final hour of his appearance before jurors, with the cold reality of the prosecution’s evidence against the defendants. Impeaching Meza was often done with a sober tone from Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason McCullough. 

When Meza, also known as “Ash Barkoziba,” insisted he had been ousted from the exclusive text channel at the heart of the charges; Tarrio’s so-called “Ministry of Self Defense” or MOSD, by Jan. 3, McCullough presented evidence where Meza’s frantic rantings about the 6th had continued into chats dated Jan. 9. 

“I can’t tell what chat this belongs to,” he said, speaking fast. “It’s hard to believe they would let me back in after they kicked me out…The average Proud Boy didn’t even know this chat existed. I question this statement if I made it at all in this chat.” 

Jan. 6 was “mass hysteria” Meza later told the jury. People were simply “emoting,” he said. He denied having any understanding that police were under extreme duress when he was near the Columbus Doors seconds before they were forced open. He denied attacking the door or being part of the breach there. 

And though suspicions had been raised about the truthfulness of his testimony for a little more than a day, before he left the stand he told one of Tarrio’s attorneys, Nayib Hassan, that he never received instruction from the Proud Boy leader to go to the Capitol. There wasn’t even a discussion about going there, Meza testified. 

Hassan worked to elicit testimony through Meza that seemed intent to portray Tarrio as all flash and no substance, or a showboater who simply enjoyed to “razzle dazzle” the masses or antagonize the media. But objections over the scope and relevance on this count were sustained, leaving an already thin argument more impotent.

Battered by Meza’s testimony, it was followed with a First Amendment heavy defense from fourth-degree Florida Proud Boy Fernando Alonso that was rich in controversy.

Like Meza, Alonso was a member of MOSD and told the jury when he joined the chapter on Dec. 31, 2020, it was his understanding that the local D.C. division of Proud Boys didn’t want “any heat” and the Vice City member learned that other chapters of the extremist group were warned about coming to Washington on Jan. 6. 

Nonetheless, Alonso came on the 5th. 

And when he did, it wasn’t because there was a plan arranged to storm the Capitol, he said. Any suggestion otherwise, Alonso repeated through a gruff, often heavy accent, was “just ludicrous.”

He knew to meet at the Washington Monument, however, having consulted the MOSD chat that day, he testified, but there was “no objective” discussed. Alonso told the jury he didn’t know what was going to happen and when a video of Proud Boys shooing press away from their group as they congregated near the Capitol was played in court this week, Alonso said this wasn’t about hiding conduct. 

It was because Proud Boys didn’t want to be “doxxed” and didn’t want attention on their club. 

Though Alonso testified on direct that the Proud Boys weren’t doing “photo ops” on Jan. 6, another defense witness, Proud Boy Travis Nugent, said that’s exactly how he perceived things. At trial, Alonso insisted Proud Boys were “peacekeepers” on Jan. 6. 

“The objective was we were going to walk towards the Capitol, stop somewhere along the line, and say a prayer. That was the only objective I knew of at that point,” he said.

Tarrio always contacted law enforcement before Proud Boys rallied, he told defense attorney Sabino Jauregui, “as he should.”

But when pressed, he testified that he never saw any messages about that himself, and he admitted to the jury, that while he considered himself a “good friend” of Tarrio who understood the ringleader’s intentions, he also never saw a single private message between Tarrio and Proud Boy elders or leaders like Nordean or Biggs.

 If he had even an inkling that the plan was for Proud Boys to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6 and stop the certification, well, that would have been an affront so severe to Alonso’s sensibilities, he told the jury, “I would have left right there and then.”

Alonso elaborated on how offended he was at the suggestion that Proud Boys would incite violence. They did charity work and hurricane relief. 

It “insulted” him, in fact, that people could think Proud Boys would even ponder the idea of storming the Capitol.

But in court, jurors heard and saw a different side of Alonso.

In an audio clip, he is heard breezing right over the news that a woman (Ashli Babbitt) had been shot inside the Capitol. From the grounds as people around him exclaim, he is heard only asking if then-Vice President Mike Pence had “betrayed” Trump and whether the vote had been certified. 

“Going on the 6th is not about fighting lefties. It’s about joining patriots on the Capitol steps and awaiting the outcome of history that affects us all,” Alonso once wrote under the handle “Deplorable51” in a message to fellow Proud Boy Michael Priest, also known as Al Tourna, on Dec. 20. Priest was brought into the Ministry of Self Defense by Tarrio, according to application records for the “ministry.”

When Tourna, who used the handle “AL PB,” told him that Jan. 6 would be the moment people would need to “take DC” and then warned that it “may not be peaceful,” Alonso didn’t shrink away. 

Unlike much trial testimony from other defense witnesses who vowed the Proud Boys focus was grounded in defending the Trump-loving masses from antifa, Alonso told Priest going to the Capitol on Jan. 6 “is not for antifa.” 

They were going “as patriots to stand with normies together united awaiting the outcome… when we are amongst them they feel safer and the purpose is what will happen that day…” he wrote. 

“It’s not a meet at Harry’s [bar at] 8 p.m. to go hunt antifa,” he added. 

Alonso had attended the Stop the Steal rally in Washington, D.C. in December 2020 with fellow Proud Boys, and on his application form for MOSD, he said he had “provided intel” to members of the extremist group while they were on the ground in D.C. for the Million MAGA March a month earlier. He stayed in Florida for that event.

Proud Boys engaged in violent clashes with counterprotesters after both of those rallies. After the rally in November, a Black woman with long braids brandishing a knife and surrounded by Proud Boys was knocked unconscious by a man who cracked a helmet over the crown of her head prompting her to crumple to the ground immediately.

Prosecutors say Alonso greeted that violence merrily.

“‘Put up the video of that predator bitch,’” Mulroe said in court, quoting Alonso’s texts found in a Miami Proud Boys channel that counted Tarrio as a member.  Alonso denied writing it. 

It didn’t sound like him, he said. 

But Alonso joked about that violent episode and others, Mulroe told presiding U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly this week as he fought off objections from the defense that this evidence was prejudicial and irrelevant to impeaching one of Tarrio’s few witnesses. But Mulroe convinced Judge Kelly that this show of force, appearing sanctioned by Tarrio, encouraged Alonso to return to the next pro-Trump rally in December and later, to join his fellow Proud Boys in January after Trump’s “wild” invite to Washington. 

Assistant U.S. Attorney Conor Mulroe presented evidence spread out over a series of text messages where Alonso excoriated law enforcement roughly a week before he would officially be invited into the Ministry of Self-Defense by Proud Boy Gilbert Fonticoba, an intimate of Tarrio’s. 

Police in D.C. backed antifa, Alonso wrote on Dec. 23. So too did the FBI. Police had turned their backs on Proud Boys when one of their brothers, Jeremy Bertino, who has already pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy, was stabbed at the Dec. 12 event.

Weeks later on Jan. 6, when defendant Ethan Nordean spoke to a mass of Proud Boys and others gathered at the Washington Monument with a megaphone, it was he who encouraged them to “back the yellow.” Jurors saw this footage of Nordean invoking the Proud Boys black and yellow “colors” in the same way pro-law enforcement groups may invoke their slogan “back the blue.”

Nordean told the crowd just before 11 a.m. on Jan. 6 that police had let the people who stabbed Proud Boys get away last time. Tarrio had been arrested unfairly just two days before, Nordean wailed. Video footage played for the jury on March 7 showed Nordean passing the bullhorn off to defendant Joseph Biggs next. 

Excitedly speaking to the crowd, Biggs told them it was their “goddamned city” and started chants of “fuck antifa.” But once Biggs would reach the location of what would be the first barrier breach of the day, Alonso testified in court this week that Biggs used the bullhorn again. This time as Proud Boys and non-Proud Boys alike were gathered near the Peace Monument less than 100 yards away from the Capitol, Biggs led chants of “Whose House, Our House” and “1776,” Alonso testified.

Prosecutors contend that Proud Boys relied on “tools” of the alleged conspiracy to pull it off and that included Proud Boys as well as non-members, the  “normies” at the Capitol. In sum, the Justice Department argues Proud Boys believed they could whip the “normies” into a frenzy and this would aid them to breach barricades, subsequently overwhelm law enforcement and get inside the Capitol to stop the certification.

After the Stop the Steal rally just three weeks before the insurrection, positive attitudes toward law enforcement among Proud Boys had dried up, prosecutors allege, and the group’s anger morphed and hardened into a multi-layered paranoia: Trump’s “victory” was stolen. Cops in D.C. had sided with “antifa.” The Democrats and radical left needed to be stopped. 

In a text chat seized off Tarrio’s phone dubbed “Croqueta Wars,” Tarrio and other Florida Proud Boys including Gabriel Garcia, George Meza, Pedro Barrios, and others, shared messages about efforts to keep Trump in power. On Dec. 17, Alonso forwarded a message to the group that laid out a “plan” for Trump to win. He had “dueling electors from 7 state legislatures [and] he has VP Pence as final arbiter of the ballots to accept,” Alonso’s friend “Tim Moore” wrote in the forward. The message was rich in conspiracy theories invoking Julian Assange, Seth Rich, and Sidney Powell’s “Kraken.” 

In the transcript from Alonso’s testimony, during a sidebar with Judge Kelly, Nordean’s defense attorney Nick Smith objected to the introduction of evidence indicating Michael Priest had something a “little less complex in mind” than the theories Alonso forwarded to the Croqueta Wars chat.

While Smith argued it was irrelevant, Mulroe managed to convince Judge Kelly to let in Alonso’s exchange in the next sequence. Priest, as a member of the Ministry of Self-Defense and “tool” of the conspiracy—something Kelly agreed with during the sidebar—was fed up. 

“Unleash the Kraken. Trust the plan. Blah. Blah. Blah. When do we start stacking bodies on the White House lawn?” Priest wrote. 

“Jan. 7,” Alonso replied. 

When Priest told him they would stack the bodies of “RINOs,” or “Republicans in Name Only” first and make Democrats watch, Alonso affirmed in court this week that he said “yes.” But it was just “locker room talk, if you will,” he said. 

In the Ministry of Self-Defense chat on Jan. 3, a day before Tarrio would be arrested and three days before the insurrection, Gabriel Garcia shared a message with MOSD members. It was a blog post from the Hal Turner Radio Show promoting the false claim that a “1776 flag” was flying over the White House that night. But the image wasn’t new. Trump White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino posted an image of a colonial-era flag over the White House in June 2019 though that image was doctored too.

But Garcia seemed to believe it was realand so did others in the Ministry like one Proud Boy identified in chats only as “BrotherHunter Jake Phillps.” When Phillips asked whether the “normies and ‘other’ attendees” were going to “push thru police lines and storm the capitol buildings,” and invoked the violence that unfolded in D.C. on December, Alonso replied: “cue in the music… let the bodies hit the floor, let the bodies hit the floor.” 

On direct, Alonso told Jauregui the “bodies” were “regular people” not the police. The police, he said, were going to make people hit the floor at the Capitol. On cross, he told Mulroe it was just a song. It was just locker room talk. It was all just a joke. 

Norm Pattis, for Biggs, argued during a bench conference that Alonso’s comments were protected under the First Amendment and “no more prohibited than saying you’re going to line up capitalists against the wall and shoot them.” 

At the end of his testimony on Tarrio’s behalf, Fernando Alonso said under oath that as far as overtaking the U.S. government was concerned or storming the Capitol, he had no part in it or wanted no part in it. It was a reprehensible suggestion. That was behavior that wouldn’t make him proud. 

Yet, Mulroe pointed out to him, he sat in court today with a yellow shirt bearing the Proud Boys laurel on its chest, hiding just beneath his fleece. And he didn’t seem insulted when Priest talked about storming the Capitol. No one else seemed put off by the suggestion in MOSD either, that Alonso could recall. And though he had claimed he knew Tarrio’s intent, he wasn’t ever a witness to meetings or calls or chats that Tarrio may have had with elders, leaders, or even local police in advance of a Proud Boys official event. 

There was no indication one way or the other to Alonso, Mulroe elicited, that Tarrio had even told local police Proud Boys would plan to meet at the Monument on the morning of the 6th. And he certainly had ample opportunity: Tarrio was arrested on the 4th and ordered by law enforcement to stay out of Washington after his release on the 5th. 

Yet, Mulroe elicited, there was no indication that law enforcement was hipped to the Ministry of Self-Defense’s plan to gather at the Monument with what Alonso said was at least 100 men.

Alonso never went into the Capitol on Jan. 6. He never went with the defendants or anyone else that day to hear Trump, their man of the hour, speak at the Ellipse. When people were breaching the Capitol, he told the jury he thought it would be “too extreme” for anyone to go inside or past police lines. Police could shoot them, he testified.  Alonso, like other Proud Boys on Jan. 6, carried a radio but like other members, he claimed “there was no communication” on it. He downplayed evidence of him railing over Proud Boy Eddie Block’s decision to circulate  footage from Jan. 6 just a week after the insurrection. The wheelchair-bound Block, he told Mulroe, was doxxing them. 

“Crip or not,” Alonso wrote in a Proud Boy chat. “Snitches get stitches.” He added later: “That fuck needs to be duct taped to the National Mall, his scooter placed at the top of it.” 

Congress went into recess on Jan. 6 ultimately stopping the certification for several hours after the mob had rushed past police barriers, subsumed the Capitol steps, tunnels, archways, and inaugural scaffolding before streaming through broken windows or doors like the 20,000-pound Columbus Doors that were ripped from their hinges. 

Tarrio, it appears now, is unlikely to testify on his own behalf. 

Following suboptimal testimony from Tarrio’s witnesses this week, defendant Ethan Nordean squeezed in witness testimony from an FBI confidential human source and Proud Boy who appeared in court using only his middle name, “Ehren.” 

Unfortunately for the defense, “Ehren,” testified under cross-examination that he was not at the Capitol on Jan. 6 as an FBI informant in any meaningful sense. He was there, he affirmed, as a member of the Proud Boys. Though the spelling of his name was not reported into the record, “Ehren” would appear to be the individual that Jan. 6 internet sleuths have identified as “TrackSuitPB.”

In video footage, jurors could see how “Ehren” entered the Capitol carrying zip tie cuffs he said he acquired incidentally as a memento of sorts. At another point, he appears in capitol CCTV  footage flanked by Kansas City Proud Boys like William “Billy” Chrestman, Chris Kuehne, and others, as he helps place a podium under an interior electric gate to keep it from closing while others set chairs in the way. Police are seen working over and over to drop the barrier as rioters advanced.

Poking holes in the defense’s direct and indirect suggestions over these many weeks of trial that the FBI was responsible for guiding the violence of Jan. 6, “Ehren” admitted he wasn’t instructed by the bureau to obstruct the gate. Or enter the Capitol. Or impede police. In hindsight, he admitted, he shouldn’t have helped prop open gates police were trying to lower at all.

While he testified, evidence was also presented to strongly support the government’s claim that he was playing up the “informing” he offered to the FBI. 

“Ehren” texted his handler on Jan. 6 at 1:02 p.m. ET just as barriers were overrun: “Pb did not do it, nor inspire. The crowd did as a herd mentality. Not organized. Barriers down at capital [sic] building crowd surged forward, almost to the building now.” 

During his interviews with the FBI in the summer of 2021, he claimed he was standing 100 people back from the front of the first breach. In court, however, footage showed him more like 20 or 30 people back. He was also close to defendant Zachary Rehl at one point as Rehl filmed from the fore of the crowd.

FBI Agent Nicole Miller testified earlier in the trial that in this particular clip shot by Rehl, she was able to identify the Philadelphia chapter president’s voice screaming “Fuck them! Storm the Capitol” moments before Proud Boy William “Billy” Chrestman is seen scrambling over snow fencing and outnumbered police start to run backward. “Ehren” told the jury he followed Chrestman. The crowd’s chants of “fight for Trump” reverberated as they ran closer to the Capitol. There were hundreds of people behind them, he affirmed. 

When he approached the terrace of the Capitol, he said in court that he saw people topple barricades. 

And yet, he told his handler that the Proud Boys didn’t inspire the breaches.

“Ehren” said he had sent his text vouching for the Proud Boys to his handler earlier than the handler received it but bad cell service caused his message to go through on delay. His testimony around the timing of the message changed over two interviews with the FBI and diverged again once he appeared in court this last week. 

“Ehren” told Nordean’s attorney on direct that his handler urged him: if he saw a crime committed and was asked to talk about it, he was to be truthful with the bureau. 

On cross, he testified under oath that the FBI never “embedded him” with the Proud Boys. He was tasked to report on “antifa” or leftist violence, then a focus for Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr. “Ehren” was never part of MOSD or the Boots on Ground chat created just for Jan. 6. He said it was his local chapter president who told him to go to the Washington Monument on the 6th and not to wear Proud Boy colors. He never saw messages from Bertino or Tarrio suggesting otherwise but it would seem that information was passed down to him nonetheless.  When he arrived that morning, it was clear, he testified, that Nordean was in charge. 

Proud Boys were to blend in, he said, making themselves identifiable only to each other by slapping a piece of orange tape on their shoulder or arm. Antifa would infiltrate the crowds on the 6th, they believed, “Ehren” testified, and the orange tape allowed so-called Proud Boys brothers to identify each other.

Adding further ammunition to the prosecution’s “tools” argument, “Ehren” also said that Three Percenter Robert Geiswein approached him that morning and asked to march with the Proud Boys to the Capitol. “Ehren” said he told Geiswein he could stick around for a bit but once his brothers started to get on the move, he would have to go his own way.

On redirect by Dominic Pezzola’s attorney Roger Roots, “Ehren” said “Geiswein “didn’t listen very well about staying back once we met with other Proud Boys.”

Indeed, Geiswein would be spotted shoulder-to-shoulder with Pezzola on Jan. 6 just outside of the Senate Chamber. 

 As for “Ehren,” he wouldn’t leave the Capitol until after police told him a woman had been shot. Prior to that moment, he said, he didn’t attempt to de-escalate the situation because he figured if there was an “emergency situation” he “might be asked about it” by his handler. But this testimony ran up against video footage of “Ehren” also pumping his fist in the air in celebration after breaching. 

He rather sheepishly conceded that, in the moment, it all seemed “funny” and “exciting.” 

Witnesses for defendant Zachary Rehl didn’t fare much better this week, save for the largely innocuous testimony of Rehl’s wife, Amanda. Cutting a sympathetic figure, her voice was gentle as she testified and admitted to Rehl’s attorney, Carmen Hernandez, that she was nervous. They married after Rehl graduated from Temple University; she told jurors how three of her uncles were policemen and his father and grandfather were policemen, too. Jurors saw pictures of Zachary’s father and grandfather in their uniforms, including one photo of a young Rehl in tow. They also saw a photo of her child with Zachary, a cherubic-looking little girl of maybe two or three years old. 

On Jan. 6, her husband, she said, left out for D.C. with Isaiah Giddings, Brian Healion, and Freedom Vy. She didn’t come. On the witness stand, Amanda Rehl said she couldn’t distinguish her husband’s voice in the video he shot from the first breach at the Peace Circle. She could hear someone say “Fuck them! Storm the Capitol” but if it was her husband’s, she couldn’t say. 

Testimony from Rehl’s next witness, former West Virginia Proud Boy chapter president Jeff Finley followed. 

Finley was easygoing on the stand with responses neatly tailored on direct. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of entering restricted grounds in last April and was sentenced to 75 days. Finley’s first reporting to prison was delayed so he could appear at the trial on Rehl’s behalf. 

Though not a member of MOSD, he was part of the Boots on the Ground chat using the handle “El Jefe.” Finley was often in close proximity to Biggs and the co-defendants on Jan. 6 including at the west terrace where some of the worst fighting of the day occurred. He couldn’t recall whether any police officers asked him not to come inside the capitol that day, however, and he couldn’t identify any of the  Proud Boys Rehl had brought to DC from Philly when Hernandez asked. 

But, he testified succinctly, “no,” he didn’t do anything that day to stop legislators from certifying the election. He was in and out in 10 minutes, he said. 

Finley was a fourth-degree Proud Boy deeply invested in the club—he has a tattoo etched across his chest declaring him a “West Virginia Proud Boy” jurors learned. And in the run-up to the insurrection, prosecutors brought out texts and video showing Finley looking to Nordean as the leader. In his guilty plea, he said as much to investigators and from the witness stand, Finley testified that while Proud Boys marched on the Capitol, it was Biggs, Nordean, and Charles “ Yut Yut Cowabunga” Donohoe, who would sometimes break off from the group for chats he was not privy to. Rehl, Biggs, and Donohoe did the same, he testified. 

Donohoe pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding a year ago this week. 

Finley told the jury he never saw any of the defendants throw projectiles at police and didn’t hear any conversations that led him to believe a plan to stop the certification was in place. He presented Jan. 6 as an opportunity he seized on to “make my voice heard” about potential discrepancies in the 2020 election. 

Yet, prosecutors presented pages of text messages to the jury where Finley urged Proud Boys to delete their communications. Some of the messages showed Finley was furious with Eddie Block for filming, just like Alonso had been. In the weeks after the attack, Finley steadily discouraged Proud Boys from saving information or from having mementos, like challenge coins commemorating Jan. 6, mocked up.

“It would just place you in D.C. give more ammo against you,” he wrote on Jan. 12.

 He deleted his own socials after the 6th but not before making a podcast appearance where he told the interviewer he didn’t know a single Proud Boy who was remotely close to being in the Capitol on Jan. 6. 

“But you were a Proud Boy and you went in with Rehl and three other Philadelphia Proud Boys?” prosecutor Nadia Moore asked Finley in court on March 30. 

He did, he admitted, but in the podcast, the host wasn’t a member of law enforcement so he was in no way obligated to tell the truth. 

When the trial resumes starting Monday, it is expected that defendant Joe Biggs will start to come into focus as his attorneys, Norm Pattis and Dan Hull, make their case. Dominic Pezzola’s attorneys Steven Metcalf and Roger Roots shouldn’t be far behind. While it seemed that Biggs would likely take the stand earlier in the trial, after grueling days for the defense without any immediately obvious pay-off, that likelihood now seems low.

It may behoove Pezzola to try his luck or admit to charges that will be the hardest for him to beat because of compelling video evidence compiled by prosecutors, including video footage of him smashing open a window and allegedly stealing a police riot shield. In the first Oath Keepers case, which in many ways is quite similar to this one, defendant Jessica Watkins admitted to jurors that she impeded officers. In the end, her remorse from the stand may have helped her. She was convicted for impeding officers during a civil disorder (and conspiracy and obstruction) but she evaded a destruction of property charge despite being in the thick of a quite brutal push into the Capitol. She also was not convicted of seditious conspiracy. 

The light is now visible at the end of the tunnel in this three-month-long trial and this week, parties are expected to hash out jury instructions. If there are any Hail Mary moves to be made by the remaining defendants, the window to make them is inching closed.

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The first witness for Henry Tarrio at the now 43-day-old trial was George Meza, a former Proud Boy turned self-professed rabbi who also goes by “Ash Barkoziba.” Meza was discharged from the U.S. military after going AWOL for over six months. These days, as prosecutors elicited, Meza offers prospective converts to Judaism medical exemptions for the Covid-19 vaccine online. 

If the aim of Meza’s testimony was, in some fashion, meant to persuade jurors that the Proud Boys as an organization were tolerant, ideologically passive, or nonviolent or further, that Tarrio’s oversight of the group meant greater standards were enforced that put checks on members who engaged in bigotry or hate, then Meza was unsuccessful. 

Appearing before jurors wearing angular dark-rimmed glasses and a long button-down shirt, Meza’s testimony was often contradictory. On direct examination, he told Tarrio’s counsel Nayib Hassan that he became a third-degree member of the extremist organization but he couldn’t recall when. He told the January 6 committee he joined the group in September or October of 2020.

He told Hassan the Proud Boys were a “reactionary movement” aimed to protect patriotic Americans from communist leftists and flag-burners. Anyone who held supremacist views would be kicked out of the Proud Boys or “should have been,” he said. 

When he was a member and participated in the Ministry of Self-Defense (MOSD) group chat he said he policed it for anti-Semitic and racist commentary. It was a responsibility he took upon himself, he admitted, because the group didn’t “do enough” to eject bigots from its ranks. 

They did, however, eject Meza. 

He was cagey about why he was ousted, his memory foggy on the finer points. During a pointed exchange with prosecutors during cross-examination, Meza also could not remember the exact date he was ousted but insisted it must have been prior to Jan. 3, 2021. Incidentally, Jan. 3 was the same date that members like Proud Boy Gabriel Garcia of Miami texted Tarrio, Biggs, and other members in MOSD that “yes sir, time to stack those bodies in front of Capitol Hill.” 

Prosecutors say evidence shows Meza was in the MOSD chats through Jan. 6 and wasn’t kicked out until after the insurrection. 

When he was an insider, Meza was a member of MOSD as well as the group’s Boots on Ground channel yet another text forum where, according to prosecutors, Tarrio and his now co-defendants Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola (as well as a host of other Proud Boys charged in separate indictments) coordinated efforts directly or indirectly aimed at disrupting Congress on Jan. 6, 2021. 

The defendants claim the groups were innocuous and largely served as spaces where members could sketch out methods of self-defense against antifa and other perceived enemies of patriots like Donald Trump or his supporters when pro-Trump events were underway. 

The mission of MOSD was about ensuring the “safety of other Proud Boys,” Meza testified.  There was talk of Jan. 6 in MOSD, he said, but he couldn’t recall specific discussions. He also brushed aside suggestions that the group used the space to do things like find “real men” willing to confront police when Jan. 6 rolled around. 

MOSD, he said, was a place where leadership could work toward things like the “thinning out” of members who were unable to curb binge drinking or other unruly behavior at rallies. But at the same time, Meza said Proud Boys did not shy away from taking matters into their own hands when they felt under duress.

After two pro-Trump events in D.C. in November and December 2020 —the Million MAGA March on Nov. 14  and the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally on Dec. 12—the Proud Boys were keyed up. Members had been stabbed during street brawls with antifa, he said. But, he admitted, he didn’t see the stabbings with his own eyes or who started it. 

People got bored. Bored and drunk. And stabbings occurred, he said.

But, he testified, this boys club also sincerely believed it was in the middle of a civil war with antifa. Meza described it as “somewhat of a peaceful civil war… for the most part.” 

Yet, he downplayed the Proud Boys as a drinking club akin to a “fraternity” where “locker room talk” flowed. When one member in MOSD discussed breaking people’s legs or hunting antifa down, for example, Meza said it was hyperbole. 

“It was always reactionary,” he volunteered to Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason McCullough. “It was a lot of poetic hyperbolic statements.” 

“When you’re on the receiving end of violence, does it feel better if it’s just hyperbole?” McCullough asked. 

Defense attorneys objected before he could answer. 

By the time Jan. 6 arrived, Meza testified that he was specifically focused on providing security for Latinos for Trump founder Bianca Gracia. He had been admitted to MOSD after the December 12 rally, he said. Text exhibits indicate Meza was a participant in the MOSD Main chat when Tarrio first out an invitation for a critical video conference hosted on Dec. 29, 2020. 

Ahead of that meeting, defendant Joseph Biggs eagerly told members in MOSD they would soon discuss the “need to make sure guys understand the chain of command” for Jan. 6. In clips from the teleconference played for the jury this February, Proud Boy Charles Donohoe—who has already pleaded guilty conspiracy to obstruct proceedings—is heard emphasizing a need for secrecy among MOSD’s operations.

There would be no social media posts about MOSD, Donohoe urged and at the meeting, Tarrio reiterated this point. Even in the MOSD text channel jurors saw this point was one of several Tarrio listed in a reminder post that was pinned at the top of the channel. When FBI Special Agent Peter Dubrowski testified about the Dec. 29 teleconference, he said while Tarrio, Biggs, and other leaders on the call did not discuss a strategic objective for January 6 that he heard, there was interest for those details expressed by other members. 

Tarrio just wouldn’t come out with it openly, Dubrowski said. He opted to keep information siloed. There was more than one teleconference for MOSD members in the run-up to Jan. 6, Dubrowski testified, but investigators were unable to successfully locate recordings of those videos if they existed. 

As for Meza, he would arrive in Washington on Jan. 5 to stay at the Phoenix Park Hotel.

His mission, he told the jury, was to escort Gracia and others in her entourage as a representative of the Proud Boys on Jan. 6. 

He was to ensure she got to and from the hotel and to the group’s rally. Tarrio, he said, was meant to speak at the Latinos for Trump rally from 10 a.m. to noon though he admitted, Tarrio’s name was never listed on the Latinos for Trump publicity flyer for the 6th. 

The Proud Boys ringleader was arrested on Jan. 4 and promptly received an order to stay out of  D.C. from law enforcement. 

Despite being tapped as security for the high-profile pro-Trump event that the very leader of the Proud Boys was supposed to speak at, Meza testified that he and Tarrio never had any communications about it before Jan. 5.

Further stretching the limits of logical belief, in addition to security for Gracia, Meza told jurors he was there on Jan. 6 as an “independent licensed journalist.” Putting aside the fact that there is no license issued to journalists independent or otherwise, McCullough elicited from the former Proud Boy turned rabbi that he was also interviewing people on the 6th who had never met Proud Boys before. 

The prosecution has alleged that the Proud Boys activated fellow members of their organization on Jan. 6 to breach police lines but further, that they understood their success in applying force to stop the certification would hinge also on raising the hackles of “normies” or everyday people at the rally in Washington. These “normies” were “tools” of the conspiracy, at times, almost as much as some members of the organization were, the government contends. 

McCullough pressed Meza on this point asking him several times if he was positive that he was ousted from MOSD prior to Jan. 3. Presenting a MOSD text chain to the jury, McCullough showed him where a Proud Boy using the handle “BrotherHunter Jake Phillips” told MOSD members: “So are the normies and ‘other’ attendees going to push through police lines and storm the capitol buildings? A few million v. a few hundred coptifa should be enough. I saw a few normie groups rush police lines on the 12th.” 

“Ever see that?” McCullough asked. 

“Never seen it,” Meza said. 

Meza also testified that he didn’t see another comment where “BrotherHunter Jake Phillips” asked, “what would they do if 1 million patriots stormed and took the capitol building. Shoot into the crowd? I think not.” 

Meza did not meet with Proud Boys, including some of the defendants, who gathered at the Washington Monument on the morning of Jan. 6. He told the jury he did not march with any of them when they descended on the Capitol. He said too that he had no cellphone communication with any of them and carried no radio. McCullough, however, showed Meza a picture of himself where a radio is clearly visible on his chest. He stands next to a Proud Boy from Miami he identified as “The Greek.” Also appearing alongside them in the picture is Josh Macias, the co-founder of Vets for Trump. 

This jogged his memory, Meza said. They had radio for the Latinos for Trump event, he said. But they never used them. Someone had given the radios to him but he couldn’t recall who and he said, in any event, they “never figured out how to use them.” 

Former Proud Boy Matthew Greene—who has pleaded guilty to conspiracy and obstruction of an official proceeding already—testified this January that he was tasked to program radios for Proud Boys on Jan. 6 but it wasn’t Tarrio, he told Nayib Hassan, who set him about this project.

When Nick Smith, defense attorney for Proud Boy leader and defendant Ethan Nordean, asked Greene whether those radios were ever used to plan an invasion on the Capitol, Greene also said no. 

Though he said he heard no specific plan for Jan. 6 if it existed, Greene said Proud Boys had steadily grown angrier and angrier as the day approached and members, by December, fully and openly expected a civil war was imminent. 

When Greene traveled to D.C with defendant Dominic Pezzola in a two-car caravan (Pezzola rode in a separate car, Greene rode with New York Proud Boy William Pepe), that hadn’t changed. When things finally clicked into place in his mind, he said, was when he saw Proud Boys lead rioters over barricades for the first time on Jan. 6. 

“Oh shit, this is it,” he recalled thinking.

“I personally had an abstract feeling that Proud Boys were about to be part of something, the tip of the spear, but I never heard specifically what that could be. But as people moved closer to the Capitol, I was in the moment, putting two-and-two together and saying, well, here it is,” Greene testified on Jan. 24. 

Like Meza, Greene was not a high-ranking member of the Proud Boys. 

Greene stuck close to defendant Dominic Pezzola on Jan. 6 as they breached barriers and ascended scaffolding around the Capitol. 

At one point on the 6th, when Greene saw Pezzola clutching a police riot shield, Greene said it was then that he started to question what he was really doing there. Greene stayed close enough to Pezzola long enough to watch him have his picture taken with the riot shield, Pezzola’s hand making the “OK” hand gesture that extremist experts say is associated with the white power movement. Meza told the jury Proud Boys were instructed by the group’s leadership to use the hand signal to antagonize the media. 

Other testimony from Meza was likely just as unhelpful for the defendants.

As video footage played in court from a violent breach of the Columbus Door near the East Rotunda, police clearly struggling to keep the mob at bay, Meza testified that he was escorting two women out of the Capitol after the door was breached. He never saw it breached, he said. He was walking away and three seconds later, the door was open. He asked jurors to believe he never saw protesters stream through that same door 10 to 15 seconds later because things were “so densely populated.” 

He understood the purpose of going to D.C. on Jan. 6 was to “stop the steal,” he testified. And when McCullough asked him plainly whether he believed that the people who went inside the Capitol were “heroes”, Meza was unabashed. 

“Yes I do,” he said. 

Meza’s testimony will resume on Monday since his cross-examination did not conclude Friday. And much to the defense’s chagrin, presiding U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly has agreed to admit evidence into question that will tie the Proud Boys ever closer to the sedition charge they each face. 

The government wants to cross Meza on a series of key details around Jan. 5 at the Phoenix Park Hotel in downtown D.C. 

This was the same hotel where Tarrio would meet that night with Oath Keepers founder Elmer Stewart Rhodes, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy in November, Bianca Gracia, Joshua Macias, former Oath Keeper attorney Kellye SoRelle and others, in an underground parking garage. 

Prosecutors argue that Meza’s proximity to Gracia as well as his testimony on his stated purpose—security guard for Jan. 6 related events—should grant the government the right to question him about what he heard or what he saw happen in Gracia’s hotel room. 

Judge Kelly was not initially inclined to let this line of examination run, suggesting it was beyond the scope and that conversations in the hotel room prior to a rally were First Amendment-protected activity. But McCullough kept at it. 

“It squarely refutes the idea this is all done for First Amendment [reasons], your honor,” McCullough said. “He is in a room with the head of the Oath Keepers, with the Latino for Trump folks who have just met with Tarrio in a garage earlier that evening and now he is continuing to engage with Bianca who we have heard on direct is thick as thieves—[strike that]. They are very close is what we have heard. That is relevant. There is a connection with this individual when this is all supposed to be about Latinos for Trump and ‘we’re going to a rally from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.’.”

In a text message extracted from Proud Boy Gabriel Garcia’s phone after Jan. 6, McCullough said Meza said he told other Proud Boys things were “planned in our hotel room the night before by Oath Keepers and Three Percenters. 

In the sentence just before this in the text message, Meza writes, “I’m thrilled with what happened and don’t know why people keep saying it was antifa [or] BLM.” 

Ethan Nordean’s attorney Nick Smith argued this was exculpatory since it appeared to rest responsibility on other extremist groups. But these were Meza’s statements, Kelly found, and therefore, he now agreed with the government: they were relevant and Meza could be questioned about them because “at least,” Kelly said, it was an “implication” that Proud Boys planned to stop the certification with the other groups. 

Tarrio’s next witness is teed up for Monday after much commotion: FBI informant Jennylyn Salinas, also known as “Jenny Loh.” 

Loh’s anticipated appearance threw proceedings into disarray last week as defense attorneys claimed they had no idea Loh was an informant. Loh maintains she told her handlers nothing about her interactions with the Proud Boys and that once the government became aware that she could be called to testify in the case, her informant relationship ended completely. Prosecutors say Loh, who was associated with  Latinos for Trump, was an informant from April 2020 through this January and only received a single payment from the bureau after sharing footage with agents of people harassing her at home. Loh has said that her communications with the FBI were not about Proud Boys but the threat that antifa posed. 

Sabino Jauregui, another defense attorney representing Tarrio, told Judge Kelly on Friday that Loh would be able to testify that in at least 100 different Telegram channels or group chats with multiple Proud Boys, she never saw any chatter of plans to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6. How relevant that will be remains to be seen. There’s no indication that Loh, even if she was a member of dozens of Proud Boy channels, would be hipped to information closely guarded by leadership. 

The government has maintained that Loh never informed on Proud Boys specifically. Jauregui insisted she would often talk to her FBI handler about Biggs and Tarrio in particular. Defense attorneys claim Loh tried to convince one of the defendants to get rid of his attorney.

McCullough offered to share a 36-minute recorded interview with Judge Kelly involving Loh and her FBI handler where, the prosecutor said, it would become clear that Loh was not reporting on Proud Boys.

Kelly has been treading carefully around informant issues that continue to arise in the trial. The defense has issued subpoenas to several witnesses who they say are confidential human sources that would vindicate the Proud Boys. For example, Judge Kelly recently quashed a subpoena from the defense for  Massachusetts Proud Boy Kenny Lizardo. Lizardo attended the meeting with Tarrio and Rhodes in the parking garage at the Phoenix. 

Lizardo, Kelly found,  had a “reporting relationship” with the FBI and intended to invoke his Fifth Amendment right if called. 

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There was a moment outside of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, when Proud Boy Travis Nugent turned to Proud Boy elder and leader in the neofascist network, Ethan Nordean, and asked him: “Are we doing this?” 

Then, Nugent testified this week at the seditious conspiracy trial unfolding in Washington, D.C., Nordean said nothing. But he watched Nordean move toward the Capitol and ahead to barriers thinly held—for that moment—by a scattering of police already wildly outnumbered by the crowd. 

“You felt shocked but you still knew you were not supposed to go past the barriers?” Assistant U.S. Attorney Conor Mulroe asked Nugent, both of his hands resting on the edge of the courtroom podium as he leaned in toward the witness on Monday. 

“Correct,” Nugent replied. 

His voice was quiet, as it so often was as he testified throughout the day. 

“So you fell back on the chain of command?” Mulroe said. 

At almost a whisper though Nugent’s mouth was near the microphone in the witness box, he testified: “Fair statement.”

And then, Mulroe elicited, Nordean just looked at Nugent. Two years after that day, Nugent struggled to recall “exactly what totally came out” in that moment between the men as they stood in a thick crowd surrounding the Capitol. But he did remember Nordean looking at him, unresponsive to his question: Are we doing this?

When Mulroe asked Nugent whether he remembered asking Nordean a more specific question next— “are we going in?”—Nugent wasn’t sure. 

But he knew he didn’t need to be told to follow when Nordean moved ahead and though he agreed with the prosecution that he is the final arbiter of his own decisions, he still rested his hand on Nordean’s shoulder as they moved together toward metal fencing that would very soon be ripped from concrete and broken into pieces. 

Tensions in the crowd were high, he recalled. Nugent remembered feeling uneasy. 

Yes, he said, it was true that he asked Nordean to get on a megaphone and try to calm the crowd. Yes, he said, he even went so far as to approach a police officer on site and request to borrow that officer’s bullhorn. Yes, he agreed, if they could just get their hands on that megaphone and have a Proud Boy speak to the masses, a person the crowd would respect because this was a crowd that respected and adored Proud Boys, there might be a chance to turn the temperature down. 

But that chance didn’t come. When Nugent was interviewed by the FBI on May 5, he told them Nordean wouldn’t listen to him. 

“I don’t think that was my exact words but it was along those lines,” he told the jury Monday. 

He would go no further with Nordean and he didn’t enter the Capitol on Jan. 6. He said “correct” when asked if he understood that day that if he went ahead, he would be breaking the law. Nugent said he understood their presence interfered with police. But, he said, he didn’t know at the time what politicians were doing inside the Capitol. 

Nordean stayed after Nugent left and to his knowledge, Joseph Biggs, one of Nordean’s co-defendants in the now ten-week-long trial, stayed too. 

Nugent has not been charged with any crimes and it was the Proud Boys who called him as their witness with the aim of having the Washington state, fourth-degree Proud Boy tell the jury only of how there was no plan on Jan. 6 to stop the certification and that members of the group showed up merely to air their frustrations and support Donald Trump’s grievances, as well as their own, over a “stolen election.”

When Nugent came under direct from Nordean’s defense attorney Nick Smith, his answers were brief and amenable to those core arguments, even if, at times, it seemed any rehearsal or preparation for his testimony may have already gone stale in Nugent’s mind. 

As a member of Henry Tarrio’s specially-created Ministry of Self Defense text channel where Proud Boys frequently discussed Jan. 6, and as a member of the group’s Boots on the Ground chat just for those Proud Boys on-site on Jan. 6, Nugent was privy to communications that prosecutors have said are integral to the alleged conspiracy to stop the certification. 

When Smith questioned Nugent, he steered clear of what the witness may have seen in those communications, keeping his questions generic and short-lived. 

Nugent did tell Smith, however, that when he met with Proud Boys at the Washington Monument before heading to the Capitol on Jan, 6, he didn’t remember what was said as the group congregated. Present there were defendants Biggs, Nordean, and Zachary Rehl. 

He had partied the night before with Nordean and other Proud Boys at an AirBnB, he testified. A lot of people drank heavily. The next morning hangovers were in abundance. He told Smith he couldn’t recall what was said on the night of the 5th but there were discussions, he said, about what would happen the next day. 

The group met at the Washington Monument and by the time they had moved from the Monument to a smattering of food trucks near the Capitol to eat, Nugent told Smith the Proud Boys, and in particular, Ethan Nordean, had said repeatedly they just wanted to go back to their hotels or AirBnBs to relax for the day. A conversation ensued among Proud Boys at the food trucks too but Nugent told Smith he couldn’t recall whether it was then that a “decision was ever really made” about where to go next. 

He described it as “chaotic” and struggled to pin down particulars. The situation, he offered, “devolved” quickly. 

When Proud Boys went to the nearby Peace Circle next, Smith didn’t work to fish out specifics. 

He, like Mulroe, elicited that Nugent was “shocked” when people started going over barriers at the Peace Circle and prompted by Smith, Nugent said it felt “spontaneous.” He told the jury, he “just didn’t know it was going to happen.” People were taking pictures of them that day wherever they went and although Nugent and Nordean stayed close to each other and often conversed, Nugent couldn’t say whether Nordean brought up using force at the Capitol as they marched toward it. 

“I kind of perceived the whole thing as a photo op,” Nugent said. “A publicity stunt.” 

 He later told Smith Proud Boys were “pushed up” by the crowd into areas he knew they shouldn’t be. 

Like the cows, pigs, and chickens that Nugent raises, he said, it was a “herd mentality.” 

Then, touching on another core theory from the defense—that Proud Boys were incited not the other way around—Nugent testified that a man who introduced himself as a pastor had approached Nordean and asked Nordean to go through the barriers. Nugent recalled Nordean had “basically denied” the request but Nugent had no further particulars. 

When Smith asked him about a rowdy man in a star-spangled jacket—identified as Proud Boy Chris Quaglin of New Jersey—who appeared to be in an altercation with police, Nugent in one breath told Smith he could see Nordean grabbing the man as if to stop him but in another breath, Nugent testified that he couldn’t get a clear read on what was actually happening. It was just his perception, he said, that Nordean was trying to stop the man. Quaglin now faces multiple charges, including assault. He has pleaded not guilty. 

After the 6th, Nugent stayed in the Proud Boys text channels for a day or two. He suggested to members that the chats be deleted. He was worried, he testified, that “antifa groups” would infiltrate the chats and doxx him or others. He was “highly doxxed,”he said. 

Under the friendly glow of direct examination, Nugent, in sum, aligned himself with the defense’s narrative: Proud Boys weren’t at the Capitol on Jan. 6 to incite violence or to force their will. 

But once Mulroe began asking the questions, evidence emerged of Nugent celebrating violence and in particular, the violence exacted by the Proud Boys.

That evidence included an illustration of Proud Boys strangling people, the animated eyes of their victims bulging. This was found on Nugent’s Google drive. He admitted, there were times he also celebrated the aggressive use of force. He admitted that violent propaganda videos showing Proud Boys clashing at events or at rallies or in the streets were effective recruitment tools. And when Mulroe asked Nugent if Proud Boys, like himself, recruited people aggressively to “attack people he didn’t agree with,” Nugent affirmed. 

And key to the prosecution’s argument that Proud Boys developed a growing disdain for law enforcement in the run-up to Jan. 6 that fueled the intensity of the violence that day, Mulroe showed jurors a series of texts where Nugent urged Proud Boys less than a week after the 2020 election that they couldn’t allow cops “to become social justice warriors.” 

Most cops were “good dudes,” Nugent wrote on Nov. 9, 2020, but if they chose to “play games” then it would be “time to play.” And if necessary, Proud Boys would turn their back on police, he added. Other text messages showed Nugent discussing how Proud Boys shouldn’t “wear colors” or their traditional black and yellow, at events. He testified this could help them conceal their identities in public. 

This direction was one Tarrio had handed down to members for pro-Trump rallies in November and December 2020. And the same directions came down in the group’s “New Ministry of Self Defense” channel on Jan. 6, 2021. 

That channel was created after Tarrio was arrested on Jan. 4 for burning a Black Lives Matter banner and included many of the same participants as the original Ministry of Self Defense chat like Biggs, Nordean, and Rehl. Nugent testified on cross that he told Proud Boys the original chat should be nuked. They knew police had Tarrio’s phone and they worried, he said, that chats could potentially come into law enforcement’s hands.

With Tarrio arrested, it was Proud Boy Charles Donohoe who told the “new” ministry on Jan. 6 what to do, where to meet, and importantly, not to wear colors. Less than a week before that text from Donohoe, jurors saw messages where Nugent told Proud Boys “the big thing with this event is we need to get everyone focused on the goal of the event and not getting Proud Boys their fourth [degrees].” 

In another Ministry chat dubbed “MOSD Main 2,” Nugent worked to fill the vacuum left by Tarrio’s arrest. It wasn’t his idea, he testified, but he told the group they needed to fall under Nordean. People looked up to Nordean, he said in court this week. He was a leader. It was fair, Nugent agreed, to describe Nordean as having a “heroic” reputation among Proud Boys because of his fighting skills. Namely, for his “punch heard round the world.” (Prosecutors were unable to persuade presiding Judge Timothy Kelly to admit footage featuring the punch that made Nordean famous among the far right.)

Nugent wasn’t a hero like Nordean, he testified. He was a “nobody.” 

“I’m nobody but I’m doing what I can to help my brothers,” Nugent wrote in a text on Jan. 5 in the MOSD Main 2 chat. 

They were “working a plan,” Nugent wrote. They would meet in the morning and continue on with the plan, he added. Things had clearly “went south” after Tarrio’s arrest, Nugent wrote, “but they are continuing on with it tomorrow.” 

When Mulroe asked Nugent about his use of the word “they,” Nugent said it was a “grammar mistake.” 

Though he had told Smith he couldn’t remember much, and in particular, the meeting at the AirBnB on the eve of the attack, he told Mulroe “yes” when asked if they discussed tactics for Jan. 6, including using radios, breaking into small teams and following the command’s leadership. 

“Even if you didn’t fully understand the plan, you were supposed to follow?” Mulroe asked.

“Fair statement, yeah,” Nugent replied. 

In addition to Nugent’s testimony, jurors also heard from defense witness Michale Emanuel aka Michale Graves, a former singer from the punk band The Misfits. Graves became a Proud Boy in 2020 and traveled to D.C. for Jan. 6 though he didn’t march on the Capitol. 

The only plan Graves could speak of was a plan to play a concert at an AirBnB on Jan. 5. That concert was moved to Jan. 6 after Tarrio was arrested. On the 6th, Graves sang the National Anthem at a Latinos for Trump rally in the morning, and then, he testified, he and the Proud Boys had considered going back to the AirBnB around 3 p.m. to hang out before Graves’ nighttime performance. 

Graves told defense attorneys on direct he wanted the concert because it would “keep people off the street.” Yet, despite all testimony about the concert, he told Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason McCullough on cross, he and the Proud Boys didn’t communicate on Jan. 6, really, at all. The only text he sent to Nordean on Jan. 6 was a singular “I’m safe” long after the Capitol had been breached. 

There was no apology for missing the show and no discussion otherwise found. 

When McCullough began grilling him about his conduct on social media, Graves grew defensive. He had posted messages online saying Proud Boys were having lunch when the Capitol was breached. Graves said he may have read that in a media report. 

“And you told the public that Nordean and Biggs did nothing wrong?” McCullough asked. 

Graves said so online, but in court, he conceded that maybe they had trespassed. 

“What I know is a fact is there was not some elaborate plan to take over the Capitol on Jan. 6,” he said before acknowledging that he was never part of the Ministry of Self Defense chat nor Boots on Ground chats. 

On Tuesday, the defense’s third witness, Proud Boy photographer Eddie Block took the stand, his service dog, a St. Bernard named Donald J. Trump, at his side. 

Block told defense attorneys that Proud Boys didn’t come to Washington on Jan. 6 with plans for violence or to interfere with police or the certification. 

“No sir,” he told Nordean’s attorney Nick Smith, “we were just there to get our voices heard.” 

Proud Boys only engage in violence when they need to self-defend, he said. They only brought radios to D.C.  on Jan. 6 purely because they were worried about being able to “scout antifa out” and warn each other if “antifa” were spotted. From the stand Tuesday, Block said he believes antifa had a large presence at the Capitol on Jan. 6. This has not been supported by any credible evidence. Block told jurors it was a “gut feeling.” 

A self-proclaimed documentarian, Block filmed Proud Boys, including the defendants, marching on the Capitol on Jan. 6. He thought they would get as close as they could to the barriers but not past them, he said. Appearing to play things down further, Block said for two weeks before Congress met to certify the election, “everyone was saying you gotta storm the Capitol” on social media. “Normies” would use that phrase all the time, he added. 

Prosecutors have argued that “normies” and Proud Boys alike were tapped by the defendants on Jan. 6 as “tools” of their alleged conspiracy. In effect, prosecutors have argued Proud Boys needed more muscle and more numbers than they had available to stop the certification and knew it. 

Like Nugent, Block testified that Jan. 6 was a full day of photo opportunities for the Proud Boys. Block fawned over Joseph Biggs, calling him a hero and telling jurors on Tuesday anyone would want their picture taken with the former InfoWars contributor because he had won a Purple Heart. 

As Smith guided Block through video clips from Jan. 6, the same arguments emerged: there were mysterious men in the crowd who appeared to speak to the defendants before the breach kicked off. (Ray Epps has been pointed to indirectly and directly with zeal by defense attorneys over the course of the trial but that conspiracy theory has long been debunked.) 

There was no plan, Block said, not to stop Congress and not to interfere with police. 

Under cross-examination by Assistant U.S. Attorney Erik Kenerson, Block first said planning was non-existent and that no one prior to 9:45 a.m. on Jan. 6 invited him to film the Proud Boys. Nordean didn’t ask nor did Tarrio, he testified. They just knew he was going to be there and they knew, he said, “wherever I am, there’s cameras.”

Ultimately, he did livestream from Washington on Jan. 6. He told prosecutors he’s not made much money on his footage from that day. Unprompted, Block said he averages about $40 a month from his channel featuring Jan. 6 footage on YouTube. 

“It’s not like I’m making money on this,” he said. 

But one of the ways he could make money, Kenerson pressed, was to get his name out there.  

Agreeing easily with the prosecutor, Block replied: “That’d be correct.” 

There was nothing wrong with filmmakers or videographers trying to earn a buck for their work, Kenerson argued. Then the prosecutor shared information with jurors they might not otherwise have heard. Block drove across country from Fresno, California to Washington, D.C. to testify. He live-streamed that too and set up a fundraiser online. 

“And one of the things you said was, if you got $1,000, you would put your dog in a Donald Trump vest?’ Kenerson said. 

“Yeah,” Block said. “It’s his name. Donald J, Trump. I call him Donnie because I live in California and if I say Trump in public, someone may attack me.”

Ever the self-proclaimed adherents of self-defense, Block told jurors that Proud Boys didn’t start fights, they finished them. 

Testing that claim, Kenerson brought Block’s attention to footage from Portland, Oregon. A man with Proud Boy garb approaches a van in a parking lot. There are several men surrounding the vehicle before suddenly, a Proud Boy starts unloading a stream of chemical spray with some sort of paintball-gun-looking apparatus into the van, overwhelming the driver and forcing the person to drive off road. 

As the video played, Block testified unprompted. Again.

The van had come to the location to attack Proud Boys. The government was taking things out of context, he said.

“You’re making it look like we did something to those people. I saw the man pull in there with a can of mace,” Block said. “What were we supposed to do?” 

“You don’t start fights?” Kenerson volunteered. 

‘Right,” Block said. “We’re finishing it.” 

But at another time, it didn’t appear Proud Boys were only about “finishing” fights. Pulling up a series of text messages from Dec. 13, 2020, Kenerson asked if Block had once “concocted” a plan to lure “antifa” so Proud Boys could ambush and assault them. 

In the text chain, Block appeared livid that Proud Boy Jeremy Bertino had been stabbed the night of the Million MAGA March in D.C. just one day earlier. Bertino has since pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy and testified on behalf of the prosecution last month. 

“I don’t care. I say we let me be the sacrificial lamb next time,” Block wrote. “I’ll sneak in. Get their attention on me.” 

Block, who is disabled, had 60 operations by that point and told Proud Boys that he could “take the pain.” 

“You don’t fuck with my brothers like that,” he groused. 

But he told jurors, at first, no one ever took him up on the offer.

Then Kenerson showed him where a Proud Boy identified by the handle, “RC Proud Nate” told Block: “Be live while your scooter suddenly dies right while the exact street corner you are crossing is visible.”

Block replied: “I’ll just say, don’t worry folks, I’ll catch up like I did last night.” 

Block’s testimony will resume on Wednesday at 9 a.m. and it will be left to the defense to attempt damage control after two hard days where witness testimony has withered under the Justice Department’s scrutiny. 

Update: Exhibits from Nugent’s testimony added.

Update: Correction – an earlier version of this story stated the van video from Oregon was from years prior to Jan. 6. It was from August 2021.

 

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The winding road to a verdict in the Proud Boys seditious conspiracy trial has been rocky but after 39 grueling days featuring bitter objections, delays, and a steady stream of motions for mistrial by the defense, a crucial milestone in the historic case was finally reached after prosecutors called their last witness last week. 

Starting Monday, the defense is expected to take the reins and it will be left to them to attempt an unraveling of weeks of evidence and testimony from nearly two dozen government witnesses including former Proud Boy, Jeremy Bertino, who pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy already and had intimate ties to the ringleader of the neofascist network now on trial, Henry “Enrique” Tarrio. 

Soon, it is expected that Tarrio will take the stand and offer his take on the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. His co-defendant, the one-time Infowars contributor Joseph Biggs—who seemingly never met a microphone he didn’t want to get in front of—is also expected to testify. Whether their alleged seditious cohorts Ethan Nordean, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola will risk joining them, is unclear for now. 

In a trial that has been anything but a one-two punch for the Justice Department, it will be the next (estimated) two to three weeks of proceedings that could ultimately make or break the historic case for prosecutors. 

When the Proud Boys trial opened on January 12,  assistant U.S. Attorney Jason McCullough presented the thrust of the government’s argument to jurors. On its face, the premise was simple enough: Tarrio, Biggs, Nordean, Rehl, and Pezzola coordinated unflinchingly to stop the certification of the 2020 election by sheer force. 

Motivated by Donald Trump’s lie of a “stolen” election and fueled by the fear of a societal collapse triggered by any number of perceived boogeymen (namely, leftists, antifa, communists, and Joe Biden to name a few), McCullough argued the defendants planned to stop the certification by recruiting scores of people—some Proud Boys, some not—to aid them in their coming revolution so when the time for Congress to certify the results of the election finally arrived on Jan. 6, they were ready to strike. 

Witting and unwitting midwives of their revolt alike were the “tools” that Proud Boys needed to help them physically breach police lines, push past barriers, and get inside the Capitol, the prosecution has argued. Some of those “tools” of the conspiracy were members of the organization and others, as government witness and former Proud Boy Jeremy Bertino testified, were “normies” or just anyone who supported Trump and showed up at the Capitol willing to let loose.

From Tarrio, who allegedly oversaw the storming of the U.S. Capitol from afar while cheering it on in private and public alike; to Biggs, Nordean, and Rehl, who whipped people into a frenzy as they stalked to, around, and in the Capitol; and to Pezzola, who prosecutors say smashed apart a window that ultimately allowed a stream of rioters to flow inside the building; the government alleges each defendant played their specific role in leading or executing the greater attempt to upend democracy. 

The Proud Boys as an organization is not on trial and the government has been adamant in defending this point in the last ten weeks of proceedings, always leaving a wide berth for the First Amendment to protect the group’s virulent expression of its “western chauvinist” me-first, America-first, men-first, “fuck-your-feelings” philosophy.

Much energy has been expended by the defense on claims that Tarrio and his co-defendants only stand trial because they are the convenient “scapegoats” of a politically corrupt judicial system that has found them an all-too-easy target when holding the main culprit of Jan. 6 to account, former president Donald Trump, is too challenging.

A week after the second anniversary of the Capitol attack, Tarrio’s attorney Sabino Jauregui introduced himself to the jury for the first time with a concession and then a question: “Jan. 6 was horrible, we agree. But was Enrique responsible?” he said.

The defendants are not on trial for their internal communications, unsavory or steeped in racist misogyny they may be. Nor are they facing charges for the overheated and often paranoid nature of their engagements leading up to and on Jan. 6. And indeed, Donald Trump is not on trial in this case though at one point defense attorney Norm Pattis, for Biggs, did launch a stalled attempt to subpoena Trump for testimony. 

Responsibility. Time and place. Motive. Intent. These have been the prosecution’s focus for its case in chief and through the testimony of Capitol police officers, FBI agents, forensic analysts, and two former Proud Boys themselves. it has been a sweeping case for the government to lay out amid a battery of objections from its multi-defendant opponent. The defense has often spent time twisting itself into knots litigating and re-litigating the admissibility of certain pieces of evidence with little fruit to bear. The central theme to the objections, regardless of the defense attorney, is that the government’s case is overblown and unfounded. For others, like Pezzola’s attorney Roger Roots, or Tarrio’s attorneys, Sabino Jauregui and Nayib Hassan, there have been more regular winks, nods, or at times, outright assertions, during questioning that the FBI has cooked up a sort of deep-state plot against innocent if now rowdy protesters like the Proud Boys. 

Drawn-out fights over evidence have often prompted trial days to begin with jurors forced to enter or reenter the courtroom late or after waiting for a long period of time. 

One recent snarl midday was triggered by what had surfaced in a Proud Boys elder chat known as “Skull and Bones.” It showed chat members referencing Nazi propaganda or users with handles featuring Nazi-affiliated phrasing. Tarrio’s attorney jumped on a motion for mistrial when a text chain appeared to show a “tool” of the conspiracy “Chris Cannon PB” sharing that Nazi propaganda video with Tarrio on Jan. 6. It featured World War II footage of Adolph Hitler saluting victorious Nazi soldiers, among other images from the period. Though jurors saw the video and the surrounding conversation, the defense managed to convince presiding U.S. District Judge Tim Kelly to strike it from the record and instruct jurors to ignore it. 

Nonetheless, the jury saw shades of the world Tarrio operated in and the people he engaged with. That message was sent to Tarrio after the first breach on Jan. 6 and after he had already sent out the message: “make no mistake…we did this.” 

In that same private elders chat, Cannon asked Tarrio: “Are we a militia yet?”

“Yup,” Tarrio replied in a voice note.

Where early weeks of the trial were aimed at establishing the Proud Boys patterns of behavior that trended towards violence at political rallies before the 6th or tracking things like the group’s internal rancor as Trump’s bid to stay in power failed in the courts, more recently, it has been the prosecution’s “tools” theory that has dominated the jury’s attention. 

One of those many alleged “tools” utilized by the Proud Boys on Jan. 6 was former police officer and Proud Boy Nathaniel Tuck of Florida. Tuck appeared in a video after the breach, taking what seems to be a celebratory group photo outside of the Capitol. He appears with defendants Biggs and Nordean and other Proud Boys who marched from the Washington Monument that morning to the Capitol that afternoon, per a previous discussion had among members of the Proud Boys Ministry of Self Defense. 

Tuck makes what appears to be a Nazi “heil” gesture in the footage

The prosecution, as it turned out, didn’t focus on that gesture, letting the images speak for themselves. Instead, the jury’s attention was brought to Tuck’s greater alleged conduct and his association with the defendants on trial as one of many “tools.” 

The defense has rejected this legal theory vehemently, arguing, in short, that it is a roundabout way of achieving a conviction when evidence of a hard and fast plan to stop the certification is too attenuated. But as other sedition trials of Jan. 6 have shown, like the first Oath Keepers case with that ringleader Elmer Stewart Rhodes, the evidence of an explicit plan is not necessarily needed for a jury to convict on seditious conspiracy. 

The government’s argument that Proud Boys incited the mob to join their revolt may be sufficient. On Monday, when witness Travis Nugent is expected to testify for the defense, he is largely expected to tell the jury that Proud Boys had no plan at all. 

Persuasive evidence of a concrete plan or not, the prosecution has continually pointed to the disruptive element that Proud Boys brought to each site they marched through on Jan. 6. Police testified on at least two occasions in the last several weeks that before Proud Boys showed up, people were calm. It was the Proud Boys who got edgy. It was the Proud Boys who were ready for a fight and had been for months, the government contends. 

To that end, when Tarrio and “Chris Cannon PB” were texting about the deteriorating scene at the Capitol in the Proud Boys elder chat and Tarrio appeared to take credit for it, prosecutors showed jurors simultaneous surveillance video footage that shows defendant Joe Biggs, with  “tools” like Nate Tuck or others like Arthur Jackman and Eddie George. Prosecutors also presented footage of Biggs reaching the Senate chamber with some of these same men in tow. Jurors saw evidence of how Biggs was part of a breach on both the east and west sides of the Capitol, and how he entered the building twice that day. Other evidence, like call logs extracted from the defendants’ phones, showed Tarrio’s phone connecting to Biggs for just under a minute moments before the national ringleader posted “1776” on Parler. It was also around this time that some of the worst violence of the day by rioters against police would explode. 

As for Ethan Nordean, the government relied on extensive frame-by-frame footage from the very front lines of the mob where Nordean so often appeared with Biggs. Nordean was also seen often striking a defiant posture toward police that morning. Before noon, as he marched toward the Capitol he used a bullhorn and told anyone within earshot how police had “just took our boy in” and that police “gotta prove your shit to us now” or the people would “do your goddamn job for you.”

“Our boy” was Tarrio. Tarrio had been arrested two days before for the burning of a Black Lives Matter banner at a historic church in the district in December. 

Nordean’s rantings whipped people up, FBI agent Nicole Miller explained during testimony. Jeremy Bertino had said too that the “normies” looked at Proud Boys like “superheroes” and would follow wherever they went if they led the way. 

By the time Nordean, Biggs, and Rehl got to the Capitol on Jan. 6, Nordean had already told those gathered around him “We represent 1776” and urged people to support and defend the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic. 

“Let us remind those who have forgotten what that means,” Nordean said. 

On the way to the Capitol, Nordean at one point brought the marching group to a halt and was overheard in footage saying they needed to wait so they could “link up with Alex Jones.” Roughly 15 minutes later and moments before reaching the Capital, Nordean was overheard in another recording saying, “we have a plan. They can adjust.” 

Prosecutors used video from the initial breaches to show Nordean and Biggs standing along metal inaugural fencing in a thick crowd. Both men were touching the fencing, at the very least, in the moments before the fencing was rocked back and forth and ripped up from its embedded posts in the concrete.

Other surveillance footage played for jurors has depicted defendant Zachary Rehl, a Proud Boy chapter president, entering through the same door Biggs had come in at one point. At an earlier point, when he is outside, he is in proximity to Dominic Pezzola and it was around this time that Pezzola was, prosecutors allege, forcefully stealing a police riot shield away from a clearly outnumbered officer. 

Pezzola would use that shield to smash open a window to the senate wing hallway. CCTV footage shows Pezzola later standing on the other side of that window, appearing to look through it for several moments while using what prosecutors and one FBI agent said appeared to be a radio. Pezzola’s defense attorney described his client repeatedly as a “lost puppy dog.” An FBI case agent testified that Pezzola looked like he was searching for someone or something before taking off toward the Capitol crypt. The same agent testified that Rehl would eventually go to the crypt too followed by “tools” of the conspiracy like Proud Boy Isaiah Giddings and others. The same agent said it was Rehl’s voice she was able to identify saying “fuck it, storm the Capitol” in a video from earlier that morning filmed at the Peace Circle just moments before a crowd surged past police barricades there. 

Many of the alleged “tools” tapped by the Proud Boys are awaiting trials all their own. Tuck, for example, has pleaded not guilty to a number of charges including obstruction. A motion hearing for Tuck and several alleged “tools” including Arthur Jackman, Paul Rae, Edward George, and Tuck’s own father, fellow Florida police officer, Kevin Tuck was continued from February to May 5. 

The Proud Boys have, by and large, defended themselves as a fraternity-style drinking club with unserious political aims or interests. They have worked to paint themselves as rough-and-tumble “patriots” akin to the Hells Angels who seek out brotherhood and camaraderie where they can mutually defend America ideologically and peacefully from an increasingly hostile woke population. 

But when the insurrection at the Capitol was over, the prosecution argued text messages showed the group’s real intent. Nordean, for one, was livid with Trump after he released a statement a week after the insurrection saying there was “never a justification for violence.” Where once Proud Boys had been jubilant, Nordean was now in the elders chat with Tarrio, expressing his fury. 

“Fucking disgusting, I’m so pissed,” Nordean wrote in one message.

“What a load of shit that whole thing has been. All Trump did was get us to reveal ourselves to the enemy. Basically butt naked and unarmed against this new regime…. Fuck Trump… Fuck that cocksucker,” he added. 

The defendants may likely present a case to the jury in the days ahead that largely relies on varied claims of victimization of one kind or another by Donald Trump, or assertions that the Proud Boys were good old-fashioned protesters made unwilling pawns of the “deep state” and its legion of spooks. 

From emptywheel: Please help support Brandi’s important coverage with a donation to the site.

The Proud Boys seditious conspiracy trial started this week with prosecutors rolling out meticulous frame-by-frame video footage from Jan. 6 that, for the first time in more than a month of proceedings, painted the clearest picture yet of the extremist’s groups alleged coordinated efforts to stop the U.S. Congress from certifying the 2020 election.

But as soon as presentations of that compelling—and often damning—evidence and testimony had concluded, the already-slow-going trial was abruptly halted by revelations over a “spill” of potentially classified FBI communications inadvertently disclosed to the defense.

The materials first bubbled to the surface when Nick Smith, the defense counsel representing Proud Boy Ethan Nordean, began cross-examination of FBI Special Agent Nicole Miller, a lead case agent on the Proud Boys probe. Nordean is a former chapter leader of the neofascist network who is now facing seditious conspiracy charges alongside the group’s onetime ringleader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio and their self-proclaimed “western chauvinist” cohorts Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola.

Miller had for two days testified to her painstaking review of police bodycam footage, closed-circuit surveillance video, and other media broadcasts from Jan. 6 as she and assistant U.S. Attorney Erik Kenerson neatly buttoned up some of the last pieces of evidence expected from the prosecution as they edge toward the end of their case-in-chief.

But once Smith began to cross-examine Miller with the aim of impeaching her credibility and potentially striking the gut punches of testimony and evidence she delivered this week, the attorney revealed that the prosecution had, in preparation for trial, turned over an Excel spreadsheet to the defense containing Miller’s communications with fellow FBI agents.

While by itself such production is standard for a criminal trial, that spreadsheet, Smith said, also happened to feature more than 1,000 “hidden” rows of Miller’s internal FBI messages, some related to the case, some not.

Crucially, some of those messages, Smith alleged, indicated that agents had improperly reviewed privileged attorney-client conversations between Nordean’s co-defendant, Zachary Rehl, and Rehl’s former attorney, the recently suspended Jonathan Moseley, while Rehl was in detention. One of the messages appeared to show an FBI agent telling Miller that Rehl, the former president of the Proud Boys Philadelphia chapter, was ready to fight looming charges at trial.

“Don’t freak out Jason and Luke yet,” the agent identified as T.J. Wang wrote to Miller.

“Jason” is believed to be assistant U.S. Attorney Jason McCullough, one of several attorneys working the Proud Boys seditious conspiracy case. “Luke” is believed to be Luke Matthews Jones, another attorney initially assigned to the investigation.

Another message that was sent to Miller and revealed in court read, “You need to go into that CHS [confidential human source] report you just put and edit out that I was present.”

Smith seized too onto a message sent to Miller by another agent assigned to a different case. The other agent recounted a directive that they had received from a higher-up about “destroy[ing] 338 items of evidence.”

Smith’s line of inquiry triggered objections from prosecutors immediately and on Wednesday, presiding U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly abruptly stopped the cross-examination and dismissed jurors early so the parties could discuss the evidence. Once outside their presence, Kelly went back and forth over the messages’ relevance and scope. Rehl’s defense attorney, Carmen Hernandez, quickly raised the alarm about potential Sixth Amendment violations citing the alleged FBI review of Rehl’s jailhouse communications with his former attorney.

In short order, a chorus of motions for mistrial by the defense rang out.

Kelly was not immediately convinced the communications fell within the narrow scope of Miller’s testimony in court, since most if not all of her testimony revolved around the Proud Boy defendants’ movements on Jan. 6 and their communications. With three months of trial in earnest long underway, Kelly cautioned both parties to slow down and assess the path forward after returning to their “war camps or peace camps” for the night, he said.

By Thursday morning, assistant U.S. attorney Jocelyn Ballantine, who is overseeing the case against the Proud Boys, told Judge Kelly that the prosecution had not fully appreciated the complexity of the inadvertent exposure.

“It appears [some of our] Jencks production may include a spill of classified information,” Ballantine said before requesting the Justice Department receive a single day to complete a classification review of Miller’s materials and claw back any contents for national security purposes before the trial resumed.

Defense attorney Norm Pattis, who represents Joseph Biggs along with defense attorney Dan Hull, was adamant that the government’s oversight should rightfully be to their benefit. Without a court order, Pattis told Judge Kelly, he would not return any documents already in evidence and further, he would use them to vigorously defend his client. At the same time he made these pronouncements however, Pattis also conceded that as far as anyone knows, the messages at issues might be wholly unrelated to the Proud Boys case anyway. That included, he said, the communications about the destruction of evidence.

Nevertheless, Pattis still asked the judge to appoint an independent party or special master to conduct a classification review. His request was matched by Rehl’s attorney Carmen Hernandez though Hernandez insisted that much of the material appeared innocuous to her eye. As Hernandez began to read portions she deemed unclassified aloud in court—prompting all of the color to drain from Judge Kelly’s face—Ballantine stepped in.

Since Miller had already testified as a witness for the government on direct examination, the prosecution was now precluded from speaking to her about the case any further in private. By having Miller testify openly in court, Ballantine argued this would establish how Miller conducted her review without adding further delay to the trial or more overt exposure of sensitive information.

Returning to the stand but outside the view of the jury, Miller testified Thursday that she was ordered by FBI headquarters to go through a collection of her internal communications pulled from the FBI’s in-house messaging program known as Lync. She was to review messages from the period of Jan. 6, 2021, to Nov. 1, 2022, just before the originally anticipated start date of the Proud Boys trial. That final compilation was then to go to prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney’s Office who could pore over it before passing it off to the defense for discovery.

The special agent said she pulled somewhere between 12,000 to 15,000 lines of information. That would make up thousands of rows, but what she remitted to prosecutors ultimately included 25 to 26 rows. The rest of the rows, it would seem, were hidden through what prosecutors initially described as a possible glitch in the spreadsheet but the exact reason was not made clear in court this week. As a result, Ballantine was equally uncertain about whether Miller had conducted the review of only her messages in the dataset or if  Miller had conducted a review of all the messages—including those rows now hotly in the defendant’s possession.

The distinction was key, and Ballantine, unfortunately for the Justice Department, elicited that Miller had not reviewed those messages for classification purposes.

“The FBI needs to conduct that review and this information will allow us to conduct [it]. I understand it would appear to counsel that some of these Lync messages appear not to be classified and that is correct, but the FBI needs to conduct, consistent with its national security obligations, that review,” she said. “I would ask that counsel be instructed by the court not to further review the spreadsheets, and not to send them to anyone else while the FBI conducts a classification review of messages sent by other people in that spreadsheet.”

Judge Kelly agreed, orally issued the order, and left the evidence in the defense’s hands. The matter will be picked up on Monday.

This interruption to the pace of the trial is but the latest in a long series of fits and starts that have pockmarked proceedings from the beginning. The trial was meant to begin last August but openings were delayed by the judge in light of the Jan. 6 committee’s release of its final report and transcripts at the end of last summer. The start date was then moved to December and jury selection alone took almost two weeks as parties questioned a pool of 150 prospects before the group was whittled down to 16 jurors including alternates.

More than a dozen requests were filed by the Proud Boys to change venues and before finally beginning the historic trial, defense counselors Nick Smith and Carmen Hernandez both threatened to withdraw from the case altogether when dissatisfied with some of Judge Kelly’s early evidentiary rulings. Biggs’ attorney Norm Pattis was nearly thrown off the case completely when he was suspended from practicing law for six months after his botched handling of sensitive documents for client Alex Jones in Jones’ Sandy Hook defamation case. Pattis appealed and his suspension was postponed. Given the months of delays up to that point, Kelly allowed Pattis to represent Biggs, recognizing the hardship of bringing a new attorney into the fold at such a late hour. Not helping matters any further was a potential conflict of interest that arose with Biggs’ only other attorney at the time, Dan Hull. Just days before the trial was to finally begin in January, Hull informed the court that he had contacted Proud Boy Jeremy Bertino—who ultimately flipped on Tarrio and pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy —long before the trial began. Hull had talked to Bertino about possibly representing him. As a result, only Pattis was able to cross Bertino. Roger Roots, the defense attorney for defendant Dominic Pezzola, only signed onto the case a day before opening statements.

Once finally underway, evidence from the prosecution trickled out at a snail’s pace with testimony from key witnesses often stilted by a steady barrage of objections from the defense about the admissibility of evidence including evidence both parties had already agreed to admit pretrial. Crosstalk and bickering among attorneys or with Judge Kelly has often led the judge to call for lengthy sidebars, sometimes forcing him to excuse jurors from the courtroom as matters are resolved. There have been several days where jurors were not admitted inside the courtroom for more than an hour as infighting over evidence or witness testimony was aired out at the top of a trial day.

As of February 28^th, there had been no less than a dozen calls for mistrial by the defense.

So common was this practice that last month, with his tone dripping in incredulity, Judge Kelly remarked to attorneys “it wouldn’t be a day in this trial without a mistrial motion.”

Two former Proud Boys who pled guilty and agreed to cooperate with the government, Jeremy Bertino and Matthew Greene, had already testified long before Agent Miller took the stand this week and the classification issue exploded.

They, and in particular, Bertino, were considered star witnesses for the prosecution and it is very likely that their testimony failed to leave the defendants altogether unscathed in the eyes of the jury.

Bertino said after Trump namedropped Proud Boys at the 2020 presidential debates and told them to ‘stand back and stand by,’ the extremist group’s recruitment efforts surged. The Proud Boys and a new world of prospective members were whipped into a frenzy, he said. Proud Boys were regularly hanging on Trump’s every word as he launched one failed legal bid after another to declare the 2020 election results fraudulent. Once the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Trump’s forays, desperation among Proud Boys grew, Bertino said and members and leaders alike, including Tarrio, became singularly focused on the necessity of an “all-out revolution.”

What followed was the creation of the group’s Ministry of Self-Defense, a channel, Bertino said, where members would discuss operations for Jan. 6 in code. Prior to that, Greene, who traveled to D.C. on Jan. 5 with Proud Boy William Pepe—Dominic Pezzola traveled with Greene and Pepe too but rode in another vehicle—told jurors that on the eve of the insurrection, he was added to a chat called “Boots on Ground.”

“I was led to believe it was some sort of coordination group for Proud Boys in D.C. for the 6th,” he said.

Greene revealed that he wasn’t privy to specific plans but was instructed to program handheld radios for any Proud Boys who might want them the night before the attack. And when the moment finally arrived and Greene found himself standing before the first barrier that was breached at the Capitol, he told jurors he thought to himself: “Oh shit, this is it.”

“I personally had an abstract feeling that Proud Boys were about to be a part of something,” Greene said before calling the group the “tip of the spear” on Jan. 6.

But, he added, “I never heard specifically what that could be. But as people moved closer to the Capitol, I was in the moment, putting two and two together and saying [to myself] ‘well, here it is,” Greene testified on Jan. 24.

Before Miller testified, Bertino and Greene’s testimony allowed prosecutors to introduce some of the raw and wildly anti-democratic, pro-authoritarian discourse among Proud Boys. Their testimony also exposed evidence of the group’s reliance on frequent communication by way of Telegram, Parler, or teleconference meetings and they helped demonstrate to jurors how Proud Boys were siloed by leadership status or divvied up on a need-to-know basis.

And underpinning all of this was evidence supporting the government’s core legal theory about the Proud Boy defendants and Jan. 6: They didn’t act alone in order to stop the certification by force, they relied not just on themselves but on what the government has dubbed “the tools of the conspiracy.” 

The theory, in sum, suggests the following: to pull off a stop to the certification and potentially keep Donald Trump in the White House despite his defeat, defendants relied not just on individuals who were part of the alleged conspiracy but they would rely on inciting and rallying people unconnected to the organization, too. Bertino and others, chats in evidence have shown, referred to these potential allies as “normies.”

“Normies,” Bertino told jurors, were anyone who supported Trump or considered themselves “right of center” politically. They were “everyday people,” Bertino testified on Feb. 27, who would get behind Proud Boys because they shared the same beliefs about the “stolen” election and the perilous future America faced.

Early in the morning on Jan. 6, in the “New Ministry of Self Defense” chat as Bertino spoke to two Proud Boys, Aaron Wolkind and John Stewart about the day ahead in Washington, Wolkind said he wanted to see “thousands of normies burn that city to ash today.”

Stewart prayed, “God let it happen” before lamenting that “normiecons have no adrenaline control” and were like a “pack of wild dogs.”

Bertino replied: “Fuck it let them loose.”

Charles Donohoe, who would later plead guilty to conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and assaulting police, told Wolkind, Stewart, and Bertino right around the same time in that same chat that he was already “hoofing it” to the Washington Monument with a crew of 15. They weren’t wearing their recognizable Proud Boy black and yellow colors, either, Donohoe said.

Tarrio, prosecutors showed jurors, had instructed them not to days before.

Despite the intimate nature of the testimony delivered by Bertino and Greene, it arguably was not until Kenerson elicited Agent Miller’s testimony this week that the full punch of the prosecution’s “tools” theory was delivered.

With Miller as a guide, for two consecutive days, video footage was shown to jurors, often frame by frame or motion by motion, of the tinder keg that Proud Boys tapped on Jan. 6.

Using aerial surveillance footage from the Capitol, Miller used her finger to circle on a screen shared with jurors precisely where Proud Boys positioned themselves on Jan. 6.

The crowd, standing shoulder to shoulder, is on the precipice of making history whether they know it or not. And there, at the very front of the horde of Trump’s supporters, Miller drew nine circles, each representing multiple individuals, including Proud Boys, grouped together. Four of the nine group circles were situated as close as possible to a police barricade line. The others stood just behind them. The groups were evenly spaced and evenly numbered. It was just about 1 p.m. Then-Vice President Mike Pence was still minutes away from making his announcement that he would not decertify slates unilaterally.

Miller, and other witnesses for the government, including Bertino, have testified that Proud Boys never even bothered to listen to Trump’s speech on the morning of the 6th.

They gathered at predetermined meeting points, like at the Washington Monument, and marched down to the Capitol picking up speed and allies—the ‘tools’ they needed for blunt force—as they went.

Miller reviewed video footage in court this week showing Joseph Biggs, for example, pointing a group of Proud Boys including Donohoe, Gilbert Fonticoba, and Eddie Block, away from the area where Trump was speaking at the Ellipse and toward the Capitol.

“Come up over here and then roll through,” Biggs’ is heard saying in one video clip, Miller testified.

Biggs riled up the crowd as he marched on the Capitol, Miller said, chanting “fuck antifa” or “we love Trump” or “1776.”

Miller showed jurors footage too of the moment when Ryan Samsel, who is not a Proud Boy, approached an already keyed-up Biggs and wrapped his arm around him. Biggs didn’t throw Samsel’s arm off. They would speak briefly and within moments, Samsel, Miller said, could be seen removing his jacket as if to fight police. As barriers first begin to fall, Agent Miller testified that she was able to identify defendant Zachary Rehl screaming “Fuck them! Storm the Capitol!”

The agent testified that it wasn’t until Proud Boys showed up at the Peace Monument, located just in front of the Capitol, that the crowd’s tenor had changed. Footage showed they were “relatively peaceful,” until then, Miller testified.

When Nordean arrived at the Peace Monument, he grabbed a bullhorn and told a gathering crowd: “We represent the spirit of 1776.” He promised, “real men are here,” and discussed Constitutional oaths against enemies foreign and domestic. 

“Let us remind those who have forgotten what that means,” Nordean said.

In other footage, members like Daniel “Milkshake” Lyons Scott were spotted meeting with Proud Boys at the Monument before later separating and then rejoining each other at police lines.

“Milkshake” was standing alongside key members of the conspiracy like Charles Donohoe, as the men prepared to storm the Capitol. Never far from them, Miller added, were Dominic Pezzola, Matthew Greene, William Pepe, and others. Seconds after the mob began ascending stairs to the Capitol’s interior, Agent Miller said it was Biggs, Fonticoba, and a handful of others, like Shannon Rusch and Trevor McDonald who joined him.

In one clip shown to the jury, as Proud Boys make hand signals affiliated with the white power movement to each other as they lay siege, Christopher Worrell, a Proud Boy with ties to Roger Stone, appears on screen and shouts: “Yeah! Taking the Capitol!”

Nordean, Miller said, had gathered “tools” of the conspiracy like Paul Rae and Arthur Jackman and others as they advanced past barriers or up the Capitol stairs and balustrades toward the interior.

It was Jackman and another member from the marching group, the FBI agent testified, who used turned-over bike rack barriers as makeshift ladders to help scale the walls. Biggs would scale the “ladder” with Fonticoba and Rae.

When the men reached the upper west plaza, where some of the worst violence would occur, Miller testified that it wouldn’t be long before Pezzola was striding into the same location with a stolen police riot shield in tow. Jurors watched footage frame by frame of Pezzola smashing open a window. When one pane wouldn’t break, he tried the one next to it and successfully “unattached” the window from its frame completely, Miller said.

Pezzola was the fifth or sixth person inside after that. He let other rioters stream through first. Minutes later, Biggs, Rae, and Fonticoba would come through a busted door in the same hallway that Pezzola entered. Jurors watched Pezzola stalk that hallway and as Miller testified,  Pezzola would later appear to hold a radio up to his head to talk to someone before taking off down a hallway to the Capitol crypt.

Rehl, meanwhile, she said, had made his way to the upper west terrace and was joined by Rae and others like Isaiah Giddings, Brian Healion, and Freedom Vy. Tarrio wasn’t on Capitol grounds on Jan. 6 but he was attuned to what was happening at the Capitol anyway.

“I’m enjoying the show,” Tarrio wrote on Parler around 2:35 p.m. “Do what must be done. #WeThePeople.”

Three minutes later, as the surge was in full swing, Tarrio would bark on Parler: “Don’t fucking leave” and “Proud of my boys and my country.”

Tarrio and Bertino were texting privately at the same time, Miller said.

When Bertino, flushed with pride, told Tarrio, “Brother, you know we made this happen,” Tarrio responded with two words: “I know.”

When talking to fellow Proud Boy Chris Cannon over text that afternoon, Tarrio agreed when Cannon asked if the Proud Boys were a militia now.

“Yup,” Tarrio wrote.

“Make no mistake, we did this,” he added.

Cannon then sent a short video to Tarrio in the elders-only Skull and Bones chat.  The video featured, among other things, footage from World War II including marching Nazis and victorious Nazis being saluted by Hitler. There were no objections made by the defense when the video was first played for the jury this week. It was also not the first time jurors would see Proud Boys reference Nazis.

During a chat with Biggs and other Proud Boys days before the Capitol attack, as Tarrio discussed how to avoid detection by wearing colors other than their traditional black and yellow garb, the national leader of the fascist organization seemed to outright tickle himself at one point.

“Did I just Goebbels this thing?” Tarrio said, referencing Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda.

Defense attorneys claimed this week that the impact of the prosecution sharing the video Tarrio received from Cannon was too burdensome to bear. Smith said it was “designed to poison the well” against the defendants and that this case had “nothing to do with marching Nazis and brownshirts.”

Attorneys for all of the defendants insisted the prosecution unfairly included the clip and it should have been something the defense was alerted to in advance. Calls for mistrial by the defense began to billow from every corner but Judge Kelly denied them all.

“Let’s have a rule going forward that if it involves Nazis, you will tell me in advance,” the judge said.

He would agree to strike the video from the record and later instructed jurors that the footage depicting Nazis was not sent by Tarrio or any other defendant in the case.

Proceedings resume on Monday and the prosecution is expected to bring out just a few more witnesses before the defense takes over. It is expected that Tarrio and Biggs will testify on their own behalf.

 

From emptywheel: Please help support Brandi’s important coverage with a donation to the site.

Hello, I’m Brandi Buchman and I am a reporter covering the aftermath of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. I have covered the events of Jan. 6 since their inception and I have covered the Proud Boys seditious conspiracy trial since its start as well as the first Oath Keepers seditious conspiracy trial gavel-to-gavel.

It is the 32^nd day (and eighth week) of the Proud Boys seditious conspiracy trial involving ringleader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio and his cohorts Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola. After a break for jurors on Monday—a lengthy motion hearing was held outside of their presence—they will return on Tuesday to hear more evidence from the prosecution as the historic trial trudges toward its expected end this April.

Monday’s motion hearing focused exclusively on the admissibility of certain evidence presented under a key legal argument advanced by the prosecution known as the “tools” theory. In short, prosecutors argue that roughly two dozen associates and/or members of the Proud Boys were utilized as blunt “tools” by the defendants on Jan. 6 to pull off the plot to forcibly stop the certification of the 2020 election.

It was Tarrio and his fellow chapter leaders, the Justice Department contends, who handpicked the “tools” of the conspiracy, and of those individuals identified, most were not charged alongside Tarrio, Nordean, Biggs, Rehl, or Pezzola. The defense has balked over whether some of the tools were truly members of Proud Boys and has suggested this “catch-all” approach by the prosecution is improper.

Presiding U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly has for weeks accepted the government’s “tools” theory as viable, so the fight during Monday’s motion hearing largely revolved around the admissibility of specific video footage featuring roughly two-dozen so-called “tools” of the conspiracy.

Here’s a bit of background for the “tools” listed by prosecutors:

William Pepe, a former Proud Boy of New York, was seen near Pezzola in footage from Jan. 6 and he was originally charged in the same indictment. Pepe was also a member of Boots on the Ground, a Proud Boys chat set up specifically for Jan. 6, 2021. He was not, however, a member of the Ministry of Self-Defense chat where operations for the Capitol assault were allegedly hashed out among a core group of Proud Boy leaders including the defendants.

Barton Shively, a former aspiring Proud Boy of Pennsylvania—allegedly—is seen on footage from Jan. 6 where he’s near the Washington Monument on the morning of the 6^th. This was a designated meet-up location for the defendants, prosecutors argue. Shivley has already pleaded guilty to assaulting police.

Christopher Worrell, a Proud Boy of Florida who used a chemical spray on officers and was a member of Boots on the Ground chat, is seen in video clips from Jan. 6 where he’s very close to fellow Proud Boys who breached barriers.

Dan “Milkshake” Scott, a Proud Boy of Florida, breached police lines after marching with Proud Boys. Defense attorneys on Monday vehemently denied Scott’s membership with the organization.

Barry Ramey, an alleged Proud Boy of Florida, was in Scott’s proximity on Jan. 6 as they marched on the Capitol. Ramey has been charged with assaulting police with chemical spray and defense attorneys for Tarrio have argued he is not an official member of the extremist group.

Marc Bru, a Proud Boy from Washington state, is seen on video footage leading a group of people toward the Capitol, according to prosecutors.

Trevor McDonald, who entered the Capitol with defendant Joseph Biggs, has been brought forward as a tool of the conspiracy by prosecutors but evidence of his direct connection to the Proud Boys struck Judge Kelly as thin. McDonald came to Washington on Jan. 6 with his father, Shannon Rusch. In video clips, McDonald is seen near Biggs, Nordean, and Rehl as well as other Proud Boys like Gilbert Fonticoba, Arthur Jackman, and Paul Rae.

Ronald Loehrke, an alleged Proud Boy of Washington state, received a text from defendant Ethan Nordean leading up to the Capitol attack where Nordean suggested bringing him to the front lines. Loehrke promised in return that he would bring “bad motherfuckers” to the Capitol.

James Haffner of Washington state appears in Jan. 6 footage wielding chemical irritants, and prosecutors say evidence shows Haffner standing close to Biggs before helping tear apart barricades at the Capitol.

Nicholas Ochs, a Proud Boy chapter leader from Hawaii and onetime elder of the extremist group, made it into the Capitol on Jan. 6 and recorded another Proud Boy, Nicholas DeCarlo, writing “Murder the Media” onto a door. Once inside, prosecutors say Ochs interacted with Nordean.

Gilbert Fonticoba, a member and alleged “captain” of the Proud Boys Ministry of Self Defense group, Fonticoba participated in the Proud Boys Boots on the Ground chat where operations for Jan. 6 were siloed. Prosecutors say Tarrio invited Fonticoba into the Ministry group chat but defense attorneys have denied this connection. Other evidence shows Fonticoba reported his location back to Proud Boy Aaron Wolkind during some of the thickest rioting and after Wolkind told Proud Boys he was “storming the Capitol” several times.

Paul Rae made it inside of the Capitol on Jan. 6 and prosecutors argue they heard Rae on footage telling members to “find” former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Arthur Jackman met up with Proud Boys at the Washington Monument on the morning of Jan. 6 and is an alleged member of the group.

Eddie George Jr. of Florida, a member of the Ministry of Self-Defense chat, appeared in a selfie with Biggs and Nordean on Jan. 6 and faces multiple charges including obstruction, disorderly conduct, and civil disorder.

Nate and Kevin Tuck, are a father-son duo from Florida. Kevin Tuck was a police officer and Nate Tuck was a former police officer who resigned in 2020. Kevin Tuck resigned after his arrest in July 2021.

Alan AJ Fisher III was a member of both the Ministry of Self Defense and Boots on the Ground chat who joined Nordean and Joseph Biggs at an AirBnB in D.C. on the eve of the insurrection. Footage shows Fisher at the lower west terrace tunnel archway of the Capitol on Jan. 6, close to where some of the worst violence of the day occurred.

Brian Boele ends up at the lower west terrace tunnel archway and may have been a direct part of the violent push inside the tunnel.

Dion Rajewski ends up at the lower west terrace tunnel archway with Fisher III and Zach Johnson and others.

Zach Johnson, a member of Boots on the Ground chat appeared in a selfie with defendant Biggs, at the lower west tunnel archway. He also appears in video footage from the west plaza where Biggs, Nordean, and others are spotted near him. Also appearing in the video from this time and place are Rae, Boele, Fonticoba, and Fisher.

James Brett IV was at the lower west tunnel archway and was later seen inside of the Capitol.

Other individuals like Robert Gieswein and William Chrestman were initially featured on the government’s list of “tools” of the conspiracy. But on Monday, neither Gieswein nor Chrestman made the cut.

Though he was short on details on Tuesday morning once court was underway, Judge Kelly said he would exclude evidence from Barry Ramey and Barton Shivley.

“The constellation of information we knew about these two people didn’t get over the hump as far as evidence being sufficiently relevant,” Kelly said.

Video evidence identifying Dion Rajewski, Brian Boele, and James Brett will be excluded in part for now but videos showing AJ Fischer and Zach Johnson in this group can be included. Kelly said footage involving AJ Fisher and Zach Johnson can come in because they are seen marching with defendants on the national mall.

To save the jury time this morning, Judge Kelly said he would explain his decisions at length about the “tools” of the conspiracy in writing later.