Investigators concerned within the Capitol assault have additionally centered their consideration on the chairman of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio. Mr. Tarrio, who lives in Miami, was scheduled to attend the march in Washington however was thrown out of the town by a choose the day earlier than it occurred. When he was arrested on Jan. 4 in reference to the burning of a Black Lives Matter banner that had been torn from a historic Black church throughout a special spherical of violent protests final month, cops discovered he was carrying two high-capacity rifle magazines emblazoned with the Proud Boys’ hen brand.
Prosecutors have famous in paperwork hooked up to Mr. Biggs’s case that Mr. Tarrio first started encouraging the Proud Boys to go to Washington for the “Cease the Steal” march in late December, when he posted a message on the social media app Parler saying that members of the group would “prove in document numbers.”
Within the run-up to the rally, Mr. Tarrio additionally used Parler to induce his members to keep away from sporting their conventional black-and-yellow polo shirts however as an alternative to go “incognito” and transfer concerning the metropolis in “smaller groups,” prosecutors say.
In an interview with The New York Instances one week after the siege, Mr. Tarrio, who took over the Proud Boys from its founder Gavin McInnes, mentioned that the assault on the Capitol was misguided and that anybody who broke home windows or took half within the almost 140 assaults on cops ought to be prosecuted.
He tried to attenuate the function that the Proud Boys performed within the assault — although, among the many 150 individuals charged up to now, prosecutors have introduced fees towards Nicholas Ochs, the chief of the group’s Hawaii chapter, and Nicholas DeCarlo, certainly one of its high media figures. Dominic Pezzola, a Proud Boy from Rochester, N.Y., was within the first wave of rioters to breach the Capitol, prosecutors say, and stands accused of shattering a window with a plastic police riot protect.
“Clearly, they didn’t assist our trigger,” Mr. Tarrio mentioned.
Investigators are persevering with to sift via on-line posts and messages by Mr. Tarrio and Mr. Biggs in an effort to find out in the event that they confirmed any try at coordination or planning, the federal legislation enforcement official mentioned.
On the day of the assault, Mr. Tarrio took to Parler, calling members of the Proud Boys who took half in it “revolutionaries” and urging them to not depart. “For now, I’m having fun with the present,” he wrote, including, “Do what have to be executed.”