One week earlier than scores of Proud Boys helped lead a pro-Trump mob in a violent assault on the Capitol final yr, Enrique Tarrio, the chairman of the group, and a few of his prime lieutenants held a foul-mouthed video convention with a handpicked crew of members.
The assembly, on Dec. 30, 2020, marked the founding of a particular new chapter of the Proud Boys known as the Ministry of Self-Protection. The crew of a number of dozen trusted members was meant, Mr. Tarrio advised his males, to deliver a degree of order and professionalism to the group’s upcoming march in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, that had, by his personal account, been lacking at earlier Proud Boys rallies within the metropolis.
Over almost two hours, Mr. Tarrio and his management crew — lots of whom have since been charged with seditious conspiracy — gave the brand new recruits a sequence of directives: Undertake a defensive posture on Jan. 6, they had been advised. Preserve the “normies” — or the conventional protesters — away from the Proud Boys’ marching ranks. And obey police strains.
“We’re by no means going to be those to cross the police barrier or cross one thing with the intention to get to someone,” Mr. Tarrio mentioned.
There was one overriding drawback with the orders: None of them had been truly adopted when the Proud Boys stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Removed from holding again, members of the far-right group performed aggressive roles in a number of breaches on the Capitol, transferring in coordination and sometimes taking the lead in eradicating police barricades, in keeping with a visible investigation by The New York Instances of lots of of hours of video footage of the assault.
And regardless of what Mr. Tarrio mentioned about preserving away from strange protesters, members of the group repeatedly instigated folks round them in a tactic that some Proud Boys later described in non-public messages as “riling up the normies.”
Whereas the video convention has been talked about in court docket papers, it has not been broadly seen. A recording of it was seized from Mr. Tarrio’s telephone by the F.B.I. this yr, and a duplicate was just lately obtained by The Instances.
Attorneys for the Proud Boys say the recorded assembly is a key piece of exculpatory proof, contradicting claims by the federal government {that a} conspiracy to assault the Capitol was hatched a number of weeks earlier than Jan. 6.
In court docket filings, prosecutors have claimed that the Proud Boys started to plan their assault as early as Dec. 19, 2020 — the day that President Donald J. Trump posted a tweet asserting his Jan. 6 rally and saying it might be “wild.” However the video convention reveals that, only one week earlier than the occasion, when Mr. Tarrio and different Proud Boys leaders gathered their crew for a gathering, they spent most of their time discussing issues like staying away from alcohol and ladies and taking measures to make sure their very own safety.
The recorded assembly makes no point out of any planning that may have occurred within the week straight earlier than the Capitol assault. And whereas Mr. Tarrio suggests throughout the assembly that the complicated construction he created for the Ministry of Self-Protection was meant to be self-protective — not offensive — in nature, prosecutors have claimed that the group’s “command and management” design was instrumental in facilitating the Capitol assault.
Within the assembly, Mr. Tarrio laid out how the group — whose members had been chosen due to their “throttle management,” as one other Proud Boys chief put it — had a three-person management crew that sat above a bigger group of eight or so regional leaders. There was a “advertising and marketing” division too, Mr. Tarrio defined, that might craft and promote the Proud Boys’ “narrative” to the media. The group’s rank and file, he mentioned, would work in 10-man groups on Jan. 6 with medics and communications specialists.
All through the assembly, Mr. Tarrio and others used blatantly misogynistic, homophobic and antisemitic language, disparaging the Proud Boys’ feminine supporters and making references to the “J.Q.” — or the Jewish Query, a phrase that harks again to Nazi ideology. Mr. Tarrio additionally threatened individuals within the video convention with expulsion from the Ministry of Self-Protection in the event that they drank an excessive amount of on the Jan. 6 occasion, noting that too many Proud Boys had been sloppily intoxicated at earlier pro-Trump rallies.
As for the Capitol itself, it got here up solely often.
At one level, as the ground was opened for questions, numerous Proud Boys requested Mr. Tarrio in regards to the group’s targets for Jan. 6, together with how a lot they might give attention to Vice President Mike Pence’s certification of the election outcomes that day. Mr. Tarrio deflected the inquiries, saying that the small print of the Proud Boys’ mission can be mentioned in future conferences.
Nayib Hassan, Mr. Tarrio’s lawyer, declined to touch upon the video. Attorneys for Joseph Biggs and Zachary Rehl, two different Proud Boys leaders who had been on the decision and are dealing with sedition costs, additionally declined to remark.
Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 Hearings
Mr. Rehl’s lawyer, Carmen Hernandez, first talked about the video convention in court docket papers filed this month, saying that it “refutes the notion that the MOSD” — or the Ministry of Self-Protection — “was fashioned to plan a violent assault on the Capitol.”
“Nothing in that video, which lasted 1 hour and 38 minutes, helps that declare,” Ms. Hernandez wrote.
As a substitute, she famous, the video convention was held to debate how “to keep away from the chaos and violence” that occurred on the night of Dec. 12, 2020, when some Proud Boys had been stabbed in a confrontation with leftist activists that adopted a big pro-Trump rally in Washington throughout the day. Amongst these stabbed was Jeremy Bertino, a Proud Boys chief from North Carolina who helped to run the video convention.
The night Mr. Bertino was stabbed, the Proud Boys, led by Mr. Tarrio, additionally set upon a historic Black church in Washington, ripping down a Black Lives Matter flag that hung from its facade and burning it within the streets.
Mr. Tarrio was arrested for the banner assault — and for carrying two high-capacity rifle magazines — when he returned to Washington on Jan. 4, 2021, in preparation for the Jan. 6 rally. As a part of his launch circumstances, he was ordered to go away the town and was not there as his males took half within the assault on the Capitol 48 hours later.
Whereas the Proud Boys and their legal professionals have claimed that the Ministry of Self-Protection was meant to make sure that members of the group “would behave correctly and keep away from violence” on Jan. 6, the federal government, in its personal court docket filings, has identified a number of occasions when members of the group used violent language in non-public messages prematurely of the Capitol assault.
Three days earlier than Jan. 6, one member of the group posted a message in a ministry group chat saying, “Time to stack these our bodies in entrance of Capitol Hill.”
One other member of the group then requested his compatriots within the non-public chat, “What would they do if 1 million patriots stormed and took the capital constructing. Shoot into the group? I feel not.”
The recording of the convention name emerged throughout a second of rigidity within the Proud Boys investigation.
On Wednesday, Decide Timothy J. Kelly, who’s overseeing the case, moved the trial from its preliminary date in August to December as each protection legal professionals and prosecutors complained that the case had been badly affected by a parallel inquiry of the Capitol assault being led by the Home choose committee on Jan. 6.
Natalie Reneau contributed reporting.
