The NPR Politics Podcast - J6 Trial: DOJ Alleges Cop Tipped Off Proud Boys Leader

Episode Date: February 22, 2023

Members of the Proud Boys are on trial related to their alleged actions surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol. The actions of former president Donald Trump loom large over of the trial.This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, congressional correspondent Claudia Grisales, and national justice correspondent Carrie Johnson.This episode was produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. It was edited by Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Research and fact-checking by Devin Speak.Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Hannah. And Sharon. We are currently watching the Northern Lights here in the West Fjords of Iceland at 1am. This podcast was recorded at? 1242 p.m. on Wednesday, the 22nd of February. Things might have changed by the time you hear this. All right, now here's the show. That is a total bucket listing.

Same! That's what I was going to say. Yes! It's a dream. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Claudia Grisales. I cover Congress. And I'm Keri Johnson. I cover the Justice Department. And we are here with an update on a trial we first told you about a few weeks ago. Members of the Proud Boys, one of the groups that participated in the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, are on trial for seditious conspiracy in Washington, D.C.

Carrie, you have been in court following this. In fact, you are at the courthouse right now. So remind us who specifically is on trial here and what charges are they facing? These five men on trial here are allegedly leaders of the Proud Boys in one way or another. That's a far-right group that has attracted a lot of attention, certainly even before the storming of the Capitol on January 6th. Among them are Enrique Tarrio, the former chairman of the group. He may be the most well-known. Joseph Biggs, who had a sideline gig working with the conspiracy site InfoWars. And then a guy named Dominic Pezzola. People may remember him because he was pictured

busting out a window or two in the Capitol on January 6th that allowed hundreds of other people to pour through and enter the building. So it's been a few weeks since we talked about this trial. It was just starting back then. It's been going for a while now. Before we get to the substance, can you just paint a picture for us of the scene? Like, what has this trial been like? This trial has been like being in the backseat of a car driven by a teenager with their learner's permit. Every five seconds, there's an acceleration, and then there's a huge slam on the brakes. So it's been quite frustrating in terms of the pacing. And it's been quite frustrating, I'm sure, for the prosecutors, too, who have labored to really tell this jury a

story about these men and what they did or didn't do in the weeks before January 6th. Every time they try to get somewhere, one of the five or more defense lawyers in this case interrupts with lots of objections. And the judge has been allowing arguments in the morning and sometimes in the afternoon about what evidence the jury should see. So it's made this quite a choppy presentation so far. In fact, so choppy that one of the defense lawyers said a few weeks ago that this felt like being on Gilligan's Island, that old television show where you think you're going on a three-hour tour and instead you're stranded with all these people working out their interpersonal issues for some indefinite period of time. Right. This sounds very different than the Oath Keepers in

terms of how that trial went when it came to these seditious conspiracy charges. Yeah, the Oath Keepers trial was a long one, too. And of course, two of those men, Stuart Rhodes and Kelly Meggs, were ultimately convicted of seditious conspiracy. But there weren't as many stops and starts. And the judge in that case, Amit Mehta, ruled with more of an iron fist. And he didn't let some of these arguments go on for minutes and hours and days and didn't have the jurors waiting so long to hear evidence in the case. The judge in this trial, the Proud Boys trial, Tim Kelly, has taken a lighter hand both with the defense lawyers and the government in terms of allowing them to argue for a long time about what kinds of videos and chat messages the jurors should be able to see in the case. So, Carrie, how much of a presence has former President Trump been in this trial? You know, I'm thinking of after the white supremacist march in Charlottesville that turned deadly,

his description of both sides. Or there was that presidential debate where the Proud Boys were brought up. Stand back and stand by. But I'll tell you what. Is it correct that that did not go unnoticed by the folks in these groups, including the Proud Boys? They absolutely took note, Tam. In fact, the witness currently on the stand, a former Proud Boy named Jeremy Bertino, says that after President Trump said in a debate in 2020 that the Proud Boys should stand back and stand by, that they got flooded with emails and calls and requests to join the Proud Boys. It blew up exponentially. And they couldn't believe it. They were jubilant and overjoyed that the president had shouted them out in this debate. And in fact, some of the lawyers in this

case, the lawyer in particular for Enrique Tarrio, the lead defendant, has basically argued to the jury all along in his opening statement, for instance, that Tarrio is being scapegoated because the Justice Department doesn't want to charge Donald Trump in connection with January 6th. And Enrique Tarrio makes a much easier target. And Trump came up yet again in recent days because a lawyer for Joe Biggs, another defendant, has said that he wants to issue a trial subpoena for former President Donald Trump. He wants Trump to testify in this case

on behalf of the defense. There's an open question about whether they're going to be actually able to get close enough to the former president, given the Secret Service presence and all of the safety and security issues to serve Trump with the subpoena. And then there's an open question about whether Trump would actually want to show up here in court and testify under oath.

But that's on the table too right now. Is the theory from the defense then that Trump is the responsible party that he was directing them or directing the insurrection? Or what are they trying to argue? You know, we haven't got to the defense case yet. All we've heard from them are opening statements and some cross-examination. But what we know from those clues is that the defense basically thinks that, or at least some of the defense lawyers think that former President Trump is at least morally responsible for what happened on January 6th, that he issued a call to arms on Twitter in December 2020, telling people to come to DC, be there, we'll be wild. And that he took a long time to tell people to go home on January 6th. And they're arguing that their clients have been caught in the legal crossfire, as it were.

Yeah, this seems to be an echo of the arguments we heard from the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th attack, which wrapped up its work last year, of Trump's role and that the Justice Department should be pursuing his exact role. And it's interesting to hear it come up in this case as well. Have there been any surprises, Carrie, that you've seen so far in the trial? You know, one of the biggest surprises has been that we just saw a rich body of evidence suggesting that a person at the Metropolitan Police Department here in Washington, the D.C. Police, in charge of intelligence, was engaged in a lot of communication with Proud Boys chairman

Enrique Tarrio before January 6th. And it looks like based on emails and texts and other things we've seen that this person tipped off Enrique Tarrio to the idea that there was a warrant out for his arrest for the burning of a banner in Washington, D.C. in December 2020. And there was a lot of communication that prosecutors portrayed as really inappropriate communication that a D.C. police officer has been on leave. His defense lawyer argues he did nothing wrong and was just gathering intelligence. But boy, that was a very unsavory series of hours when we heard more about that. We're going to take a quick break right now, but more from Carrie about this trial when we get back. And we're back. And Carrie, the name The Proud Boys stands out. It's something that has entered the bloodstream, if you will. But is the prosecution making a case about who they are and what they are up to?

Yeah, you know, the jurors are hearing that the Proud Boys may have started as a drinking club, or as it called itself, a Western chauvinist organization. But there was a divide within the group between the guys who just wanted to party all the time, literally, and the ones who were more fired up and were eager to go to rallies and commit violent acts. And right now we've got Jeremy Bertino, who was a North Carolina leader of the Proud Boys on the witness stand. He actually wasn't in D.C. on January 6th because he was stabbed and suffered really serious injuries in December, weeks before the storming of the Capitol. But Bertino was talking about text messages and chats he engaged in with other members of the Proud Boys before January 6, and to some extent on the day of, where people were

encouraging each other to basically go all the way, and it sounds like, kind of commit revolution against a government and a police force that they thought had abandoned them and sided with Antifa and people on the left. So, obviously, this trial is a big, high-profile, seditious conspiracy trial, but it is part of this massive web of investigation of other charges against lower level people who were involved in January 6th. Where, Carrie, does that Justice Department, that the federal courts and others that it may have a thousand more cases to bring. Some of those, of course, are people who entered the Capitol and may have defaced property, and others face more serious charges like beating up police officers. But, you know, the open question is, we know new special counsel Jack Smith has been pretty aggressive about hauling people into the grand jury who had big jobs in the Trump White House, including some of the lawyers in the White House counsel's office and others. And the open

question is whether the Justice Department is going to get farther up the ladder from these extremist groups, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, and to reach people who may have actually funded and organized the storming of the building, and people who basically were, as Jamie Raskin calls it, masterminds. And so we don't have charges against somebody at that level yet. And I think there's a hunger from Democrats in Congress and some people all over the country to see if and when the Justice Department is going to be able to get there now or two years after the assault on the Capitol. And Claudia, Kerry mentioned Jamie Raskin, who is one of the key Democrats who was involved in the January 6th committee doing the investigation. Of course,

there's a new Congress now and the House is controlled by Republicans. So where do things stand now? I know that there has been quite a bit of pressure on leadership to, you know, investigate the real story of January 6th, pressure from the base and some of the more far right members of the of the caucus. Right. Yes. Kerry talks about the hunger of looking into these getting a better sense of these probes by the special counsel. There's also a hunger by Republicans. They will be stymied, of course, because there are these special counsels looking into different areas of interest, especially January 6. That said, Republicans are doing what they can.

For example, we saw reporting by Axios that was matched by a number of outlets that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has allowed Fox News host Tucker Carlson access to hours and hours of U.S. Capitol surveillance footage. And of course, there are large concerns here that Fox and Carlson have spread misinformation related to January 6th. So there's a lot of worries on how this footage is going to be used. I talked to the former chairman of the January 6th Select Committee. Of course, they disbanded at the end of last year, but he was telling me he will be briefing the Democratic caucus over their concerns of how this footage will be handled, how it could be framed through Carlson's program, for example, going forward. There's a lot of worries here in terms of security risks. And he was telling me about the very delicate process

that the committee had in terms of accessing this footage. They had to go to a special terminal. They had to get special clearance from Capitol Police on what clips they could share. And a lot of it has been shared through the committee's work and through other congressional committees. But that said, there's worries that this is going to present a new risk and new waves of disinformation related to January 6th. So that is something that remains to be seen. Could releasing that footage, Carrie, have any effect on the ongoing prosecutions and investigations on the Justice Department side? That is a really good question, Tim. That came up, that exact issue came up in court this morning in the Proud Boys trial. But one of the defense lawyers pointed out that the Justice Department has already given a lot of the CCTV footage to these defense lawyers. It may be that what Kevin McCarthy has released to Tucker Carlson may include even more hours of footage. But by and large, defense lawyers were already drowning in evidence to sift through. And I don't think it's likely that there's anything on this new footage that would influence this trial in

particular. Well, in terms of that trial, where do things go from here? Oh, I wish I could tell you. Earlier this week, one of the defense attorneys... Where is this wild minivan taking you with a student driver? I don't know if it is a minivan, but yeah, it may be a minivan. That actually could be perfect. Earlier this week, one of the defense lawyers and one of the prosecutors said they were going to get together and try to craft some language for the jury because it's their view the jury needs to be told that this case is going to be a lot longer than they were informed when they signed up to do this public service. And so it's not yet clear how much longer this case is going to run. Some people think the defense may start around St.

Patrick's Day and it could go through all of March. But I'm unwilling to predict because this thing has been so slow and so many stops and starts. One of the questions I have is whether we have a third trial of members of the Oath Keepers ongoing now in this courthouse down the hall from the Proud Boys case. That trial may be over to a verdict before this one ends, even though it started later. So there will be an end. I don't know when it will happen. But until then, I will keep eating the courthouse cafeteria food

and reporting here for duty almost every day. All right. Be careful of sodium. Oh, God. Yes. If I didn't eat sodium, I wouldn't eat anything. All right. Well, we are going to leave it there for today. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Claudia DeSantis. I cover Congress.

And I'm Carrie Johnson, national justice correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.