Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio has been sentenced to 22 years in prison for orchestrating a failed plot to keep Donald Trump in power after the Republican lost the 2020 presidential election.
Tuesday’s sentencing caps one of the most significant prosecutions over the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Tarrio’s sentence is the longest so far among more than 1,100 Capitol riot cases.
Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and former Proud Boys leader Ethan Nordean both received 18 years for their Jan. 6 convictions.
Prosecutors wanted 33 years for Tarrio, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy.
The Miami resident’s lawyers deny the Proud Boys planned to attack the Capitol.
Tarrio wasn't in Washington on Jan. 6 — he was arrested two days earlier in a separate case — but prosecutors say he helped put in motion and encourage the violence that stunned the world and interrupted Congress' certification of Biden's electoral victory.
Prosecutor Conor Mulroe told the judge that the Proud Boys came dangerously close to succeeding in their plot to stop the transfer of presidential power — and noted that “it didn’t take rifles or explosives.”
“There was a very real possibility we were going to wake up on Jan. 7 in a full-blown constitutional crisis,” Mulroe said, with “300 million Americans having no idea who the next president would be or how it would be decided.”
The prosecutor urged the judge to ensure that “consequences are abundantly clear to anyone who might be unhappy with the results of 2024, 2028, 2032 or any future election for as long as this case is remembered.”
Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who was found guilty of seditious conspiracy in a separate case, was sentenced in May to 18 years in prison. Prosecutors, who had sought 25 years for Rhodes, are appealing his sentence and the punishments of other members of his antigovernment militia group.
Lawyers for the Proud Boys deny that there was any plot to attack the Capitol or stop the transfer of presidential power.
The defense asked the judge for no more than 15 years in prison, arguing that their client should not be punished as harshly as the Oath Keepers’ Rhodes, who was present on Capitol grounds on Jan. 6. Tarrio’s lawyers described him as a “keyboard ninja” who was prone to “talk trash,” but had no intentions of overthrowing the government.
“My client is no terrorist,” attorney Sabino Jauregui said. “My client is a misguided patriot.”
Police arrested Tarrio in Washington on Jan. 4, 2021, on charges that he defaced a Black Lives Matter banner during an earlier rally in the nation’s capital, but law enforcement officials later said he was arrested in part over concerns about the potential for unrest during the certification. He complied with a judge’s order to leave the city after his arrest.
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