Enrique Tarrio, the former national chairman of the Proud Boys, was arrested by U.S. Capitol Police on Friday following a press conference with other Proud Boys members and Oath Keepers’ founder Stewart Rhodes.
A spokesperson for USCP said Tarrio was arrested for simple assault, after a counter protester put a cell phone close to his face and he struck her phone and arm in response.
The counter protester said she wanted to file charges, so Tarrio was arrested. The incident took place between the U.S. Capitol and Washington’s Union Station.
“This is absolutely insane,” Proud Boy Joe Biggs told The Hill in a text, claiming local police let “agitators” into their path. “Tarrio did nothing wrong. This is a set-up.”
Shortly before his arrest, Tarrio gathered with other Proud Boys member and Rhodes to announce their intent to file lawsuits over their prosecutions tied to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.
They announced the legal actions outside the Capitol, which members of both groups stormed four years ago as Congress certified the election win of President Trump’s Democratic opponent in the 2020 presidential race, former President Biden.
“I’m not talking about violent retribution,” Tarrio said, flanked by the Proud Boys and supporters of Jan. 6 defendants. “I’m talking about something much more powerful: accountability and the rule of law.”
Tarrio said that he and four other Proud Boys tried alongside him for sedition would sue the Justice Department for “about $150 million” within the next few weeks over “their murders, their lies and the endless suffering they have put us through.” The Proud Boy declined to detail specific claims.
Biggs told The Hill they planned to file suit in the Southern District of Florida.
Rhodes, founder of the right-wing militia group Oath Keepers, told The Hill he also planned to file suit but could not detail any specifics.
Both Tarrio and Rhodes were convicted of seditious conspiracy, a rare Civil War-era charge, for plotting to forcibly halt the peaceful transfer of power from Trump to Biden.
Tarrio was not in Washington on Jan. 6, after being barred from the city following an unrelated arrest, but prosecutors said he organized other Proud Boys to descend on the Capitol that day.
Prosecutors said Rhodes, who was at the Capitol but did not enter the building nor assault law enforcement, acted “like a general overlooking a battlefield while his troops stormed inside.”
Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years in prison, and Tarrio received a prison term of 22 years — the longest sentence handed down in connection with the riot.
But those sentences were wiped away with the stroke of Trump’s pen on his first day back in the White House. Tarrio was granted a full pardon and Rhodes’s sentence was commuted to time served.
The clemency marked a sharp rebuke of the Justice Department’s sweeping Jan. 6 probe. Its sedition convictions of the extremist group leaders were the crown jewels of a prosecution hailed as one of the “largest, most complex, and most resource-intensive investigations” in the agency’s history.
Trump vowed on the campaign trail to relieve Jan. 6 defendants, whom he described as “political prisoners,” but the scope of the president’s clemency action — which granted full pardons for nearly all rioters, including those who attacked law enforcement — came as a surprise to some.
Prosecutors said the Oath Keepers plotted for weeks ahead of the Capitol attack, establishing an armed “quick reaction force” — a cache of weapons stored across the Potomac River — in case their plan went south. That day, several members ascended the Capitol steps in what prosecutors described as a military-style “stack” formation before breaching the building.
The Proud Boys saw themselves as the political right’s “foot soldiers,” prosecutors said, prepared to go to war to keep Trump in power.
The four Proud Boys tried alongside Tarrio — Biggs, Ethan Nordean, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola — also attended the press conference.
Nordean, Biggs and Rehl were convicted of sedition. Pezzola, who used a stolen police riot shield to smash open a Capitol window, letting in the first members of the mob, was acquitted of sedition but convicted of other serious felonies. Trump commuted their sentences to time served.
Ivan Raiklin, a Trump supporter who has deemed himself “Secretary of Retribution,” was present for the announcement, as well.
Since his return to power, Trump’s own retribution against the justice system has been swift.
Approximately two dozen prosecutors who worked on the more than 1,500 Jan. 6 cases were fired, and Trump’s Justice Department asked FBI leadership to turn over a list of agents who worked Jan. 6 cases, putting at risk some 2,400 agents who participated in the massive prosecutorial undertaking. That directive has been challenged in court.
Prosecutors and agents who previously worked on Trump’s two federal criminal cases were also terminated.
