Enrique Tarrio, former national chair of the Proud Boys, is set to take the stand Thursday to testify in defense of a police officer accused of tipping off the right-wing extremist group leader to his imminent arrest.
Tarrio is serving a 22-year prison term for seditious conspiracy in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack. But two days before the riot, he was arrested for burning a stolen Black Lives Matter banner.
Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) Lt. Shane Lamond, who counted Tarrio as an intelligence source, is accused of warning him about an arrest warrant for the banner burning and later lying about their conversations. His trial began earlier this week, and he has pleaded not guilty.
Prosecutors say Lamond acted as a “double agent” for the Proud Boys, giving Tarrio “real-time updates” on the banner burning investigation.
The incident occurred on Dec. 12, 2020, after which Lamond and Tarrio continued to communicate. Later that month, Lamond told Tarrio he was asked to identify the Proud Boys leader and that it likely meant an arrest warrant was being prepared.
Detective Franklyn Then, the officer on MPD’s riot task force in 2020 who asked Lamond to identify Tarrio, testified Wednesday that he “wasn’t sure [Lamond] wanted to” give a positive identification. He told prosecutors that he did not know Lamond and Tarrio were in contact about the burning of the banner.
“We wanted to catch [Tarrio] basically off guard,” Then said.
Lamond’s communication with Tarrio has been sharply scrutinized throughout the trial. Prosecutors say the men communicated more than 600 times across multiple platforms across their roughly yearlong source relationship — many of those conversations took place on the encrypted chat service Telegram, where some messages were set to self-destruct upon receipt.
The police officer repeatedly warned Tarrio after the 2020 election that the Proud Boys were “attracting attention” of law enforcement and “getting people spun up.”
“Just giving you a heads up,” Lamond wrote to Tarrio in a Nov. 7, 2020, private chat on Telegram, shortly after suggesting they move their talks there. “Please keep this between you and me.”
“Always,” Tarrio replied.
The day of Tarrio’s arrest, Lamond sent him a message set to self-destruct after 10 seconds; soon after, Tarrio told several contacts that the warrant for his arrest was signed.
Jeffery Carroll, executive assistant chief of police at MPD, testified Wednesday that as soon as Tarrio became the suspect in a criminal investigation, Lamond should have passed those communications along to prosecutors and maintained his records.
“In some of the messages we saw, they don’t appear police-related,” Carroll said. “They appear to be friendly.”
Tarrio arrived at Washington’s federal courthouse Wednesday expecting to testify, joined by his attorney and two family members. However, prosecutors did not rest their case in chief until well into the afternoon.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who is overseeing Lamond’s case, indicated a “strong preference” to resume in the morning, signaling she does not wish for Tarrio’s testimony to be split over several days.
“This is your case. It’s important. I want to do it right,” she said.
Also in the courtroom were prosecutors who worked on the seditious conspiracy trials of the Proud Boys and the right-wing militia group Oath Keepers, which ended in several of the most serious convictions and sentences tied to the Capitol attack. Security presence increased in the courtroom as the government’s case dwindled to a close.
Tarrio is serving the longest sentence handed down in connection with Jan. 6, followed by a rioter with a history of political violence who received a 20-year term and Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, who received an 18-year term after he was convicted of sedition.
