The leader of the Proud Boys pleaded guilty Monday to destruction of property after admitting months ago that he’d burned a historically Black church’s Black Lives Matter banner in Washington, D.C., the Justice Department announced.
Tarrio also pleaded guilty to one count of attempted possession of a large-capacity ammunition feeding device — a charge that stemmed from Tarrio’s arrest on the first charge, when police discovered that he possessed two Proud Boys-branded rifle magazines.
He was apprehended for the banner burning in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 4, two days before the attack on Congress. Because of the incident, he was ordered to stay out of the city the day before the attack, and was not present at the insurrection. Several Proud Boys allegedly participated in the attack, and the group has been in shambles since, particularly after Reuters revealed that Tarrio had been a “prolific” cooperator in several law enforcement investigations years ago.
Sentencing is set for Aug. 23, the Justice Department said.
The details of the Black Lives Matter banner case were fairly straightforward: On Dec. 12, after another pro-Trump rally in D.C., a group of Proud Boys stole a Black Lives Matter banner from the Asbury United Methodist Church and then burned the banner. Tarrio then claimed credit for the act.
“Against the wishes of my attorney I am here today to admit that I am the person responsible for the burning of this sign,” Tarrio wrote on Parler a few days after the incident.
(A few days after that, an affidavit in Tarrio’s case noted, law enforcement reached out to Tarrio to ask to speak to the attorney he mentioned — only to learn from Tarrio that “I haven’t retained my attorney in this situation yet.”)
The guilty plea from Tarrio in the Washington, D.C. criminal case is separate against him from a lawsuit from Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, which alleged that Tarrio and several Proud Boys destroyed its Black Lives Matter banner in a separate incident the same night, and another suit from several members of Congress that names Tarrio as a defendant.
Motherfucker has flipped and is singing like a bird. Just another snowflake, but I’ll bet all the OTHER snowflakes with whom he co-conspired are sweating…
Then there’s this
Yeppers.
That’s the tell, how you know he’s flipped; it translates as, “Don’t even think about backing up on your story, you little bitch, or we’ll reactive all those Jan 6 conspiracy charges you’re hoping to plea-bargain away.”
A small shoe drops…there’s going to be more, it’s obvious that DoJ is really focused on the ringleaders of what happened, and still working to make sure everyone else is caught and punished. Sure, the “tourist” insurrectionists, the ones who just wandered through without being violent or causing damage, are getting light sentences, but they are getting sentences, and odds are the DoJ is focusing on the real conspiracists who planned or acted out violence on Jan 6th.
And, that probably means we’ll see big charges and requests for long visits to prison…I wonder how that will go down with Trump and those who are claiming all of these people were flower children and completely innocent, and that all the injured officers are some weird coincidence.
It’s time they start summarily jailing these guys. Let the Boys be Proud in a cell where they belong.