Mulroe emphasized that the Proud Boys’ arrival turned a relatively placid crowd into a rabid one. Rather than attend Trump’s long-planned speech nearby, Nordean marched the group to the Capitol, arriving just before 1 p.m., while Trump was still speaking. So on the day of the attack, Nordean assembled hundreds of Proud Boys at the Washington Monument early in the morning. Just two days earlier, Tarrio was arrested for burning a Black Lives Matter flag during the December pro-Trump rally in Washington - an arrest he saw coming due to a longstanding relationship with a D.C. Much of the government’s closing argument reconstructed the Proud Boys’ descent on the Capitol on Jan. “They clearly believed their club was so much better off with Donald Trump in the White House,” Mulroe said. 6, the Proud Boys saw it as a call to arms that they were prepared to answer. And when Trump called for a “wild” protest on Jan. Prosecutors showed how Trump’s debate-stage call in September 2020 for the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” became a slogan for the group and fueled recruitment efforts in the months before Jan. “The Ministry of Self-Defense was a violent gang that came together to use force against its enemies."Īt the heart of the case is the group’s symbiotic relationship with Trump. "You want to call this a drinking club? You want to call this a men’s fraternal organization? Let’s call this what it is,” Mulroe said. That decision by Tarrio belies the defense’s claim, Mulroe argued, that the Proud Boys were merely a glorified men’s club, where members goaded each other and used overheated language but did little more than drink and talk. Prosecutors say this group, which grew to several hundred members nationwide, became the “fighting force” that was the backbone of the Proud Boys’ presence on Jan. So he formed a new Proud Boys chapter that he dubbed the “Ministry of Self-Defense,” featuring only handpicked members whom leaders could trust to follow orders. Attorney Matthew Graves and Criminal Division Chief John Crabb, among other high-ranking DOJ officials, were on hand for the closing arguments, underscoring the significance of the case to the government. More than 1,000 people have been charged for their behavior that day, but prosecutors say the Proud Boys played the most critical, galvanizing role in assembling and leading the mob to the Capitol - and then breaching police lines and the building itself.
Proud boys trump trial#
Mulroe made the Justice Department’s closing pitch Monday in the most significant trial to emerge from the Jan. Attorney Conor Mulroe said Monday in federal court in Washington, D.C. “These defendants saw themselves as Donald Trump’s army, fighting to keep their preferred leader in power no matter what the law or the courts had to say about it,” Assistant U.S. Leaders of the far-right Proud Boys, fearful about their place in a post-Trump America, instead tried to prevent it from happening at all - even if it meant a violent assault on the U.S.
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