Two former leaders of the far-right Proud Boys extremist group were on Thursday sentenced to more than a decade each in prison for spearheading an attack on the US Capitol to try to prevent the peaceful transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden after the 2020 presidential election.
The 17-year prison term for organizer Joseph Biggs and 15-year sentence for leader Zachary Rehl were the second and third-longest sentences handed down yet in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.
They were the first Proud Boys to be sentenced by US District Judge Timothy Kelly, who is to separately preside over similar hearings of three others who were convicted by a jury in May after a four-month trial in Washington that laid bare far-right extremists’ embrace of lies by Trump, a Republican, that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Photo: AFP
Enrique Tarrio, a Miami resident who was the Proud Boys’ national chairman and top leader, is to be sentenced on Tuesday. His sentencing was moved from Wednesday because Kelly was sick.
Tarrio was not in Washington on Jan. 6. He had been arrested two days before the Capitol riot on charges that he defaced a Black Lives Matter banner during an earlier rally in the nation’s capital, and he complied with a judge’s order to leave the city after his arrest.
He picked Biggs and Proud Boys chapter president Ethan Nordean to be the group’s leaders on the ground in his absence, prosecutors said.
Rehl, Biggs, Tarrio and Nordean were convicted of charges including seditious conspiracy, a rarely brought Civil War-era offense.
A fifth Proud Boys member, Dominic Pezzola, was acquitted of seditious conspiracy, but convicted of other serious charges.
Federal prosecutors had recommended a 33-year prison sentence for Biggs, who helped lead dozens of Proud Boys members and associates in marching to the US Capitol on Jan. 6. Biggs and other Proud Boys joined the mob that broke through police lines and forced lawmakers to flee, disrupting the joint session of Congress for certifying the electoral victory by Biden, a Democrat.
Kelly said the Jan. 6 attack trampled on an “important American custom,” certifying the Electoral College vote.
“That day broke our tradition of peacefully transferring power, which is among the most precious things that we had as Americans,” the judge said, adding that he was using the past tense in light of how Jan. 6 affected the process.
Biggs, of Ormond Beach, Florida, acknowledged that he “messed up” on Jan. 6, but said he was “seduced by the crowd” of Trump supporters outside the Capitol, and is not a violent person or “a terrorist.”
“My curiosity got the better of me, and I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life,” he said, claiming he did not have “hate in my heart” and did not want to hurt people.
In related news, Trump on Thursday pleaded not guilty to charges that he led a criminal conspiracy to overturn his 2020 election loss in the southern state of Georgia.
The Republican presidential front-runner, who faces 13 felony counts including racketeering, entered his plea in a court filing waiving his right to appear at an arraignment on Wednesday next week.
Additional reporting by AFP
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