According to Politico, during the seditious conspiracy trial of Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys national chair, his lawyer Nayib Hassan made a bold claim, stating that Tarrio was merely a scapegoat for the real culprit: former President Donald Trump. Hassan heavily emphasized the role Trump played in riling up the crowd at his rally on January 6th, just minutes before rioters began breaching police barricades at the Capitol.
Hassan pointed out that Trump had urged his supporters to “fight like hell” just 36 minutes before the first wave of the mob charged at police. According to Hassan, it was Trump’s words, motivation, and anger that caused what occurred on January 6th, not Tarrio.
Trump has been looming in the background of Tarrio’s trial, the most significant to emerge from the Jan. 6 assault on Congress. He is charged alongside four other Proud Boys leaders, Ethan Nordean, Joe Biggs, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola, with orchestrating a violent effort to derail the transfer of power from Trump to Joe Biden.
Prosecutors argue that the Proud Boys leaders, loyal to Trump and fearful of the Proud Boys’ survival in a post-Trump America, devised plans to keep Trump in office. Throughout the trial, the Justice Department has repeatedly emphasized how Tarrio and the Proud Boys keyed off and drew energy from Trump’s own bid to subvert the 2020 election. The group’s plan went into overdrive after Trump’s December 19, 2020 tweet calling on supporters to descend on Washington on January 6, 2021, to challenge the election results.
In tandem with their effort to support Trump, the Proud Boys also soured on their once-close relationship with law enforcement, prosecutors say, becoming enraged at cops—particularly in Washington—after they failed to apprehend a man who stabbed four Proud Boys outside a bar on December 12, 2020. That anger at police carried over into the Proud Boys’ posture toward law enforcement on Jan. 6, they say.
Despite the overwhelming evidence presented by the prosecution, Hassan and Joe Biggs’ lawyer, Norm Pattis, pointed fingers at Trump and his cadre of lawyers, stating that they stoked the “stop the steal” fervor among millions of supporters. Pattis also mentioned that “the leader of the free world sold this narrative, and many members of the Proud Boys believed it.”
Hassan noted that Trump’s invocation of the Proud Boys and urging members to “stand back and stand by” during a televised debate against Biden in September 2020 led to a surge in Proud Boys recruitment, harming the group’s vetting process and leading to undisciplined members provoking violence and street clashes in Washington in November and December 2020.
Tarrio, realizing that the surge in recruitment had led to an undisciplined group, formed a new Proud Boys chapter called the “Ministry of Self Defense,” which only selected Proud Boys who could be trusted to follow rules and obey orders. This chapter grew to hundreds nationwide and became the core of the group that Tarrio helped assemble in Washington on January 6th.
Prosecutors allege that the Ministry of Self Defense (MOSD) was really a “fighting force” that Tarrio mobilized to attack the seat of government in service of keeping Trump in power. Hundreds of members joined Proud Boys leaders in Washington and were prominent parts of the crowd that breached the barricades in the first wave of the riot. In numerous cases, Proud Boys in this group were among those who helped topple barricades or tussled with police in ways that helped clear a path for the riot to advance closer to the Capitol.
