Washington — The one-time chairman of the Proud Boys is set to be sentenced Tuesday for numerous felonies, including seditious conspiracy, related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
His earlier sentencing date was delayed due to U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Kelly’s illness.
Henry “Enrique” Tarrio has been in jail since his 2021 arrest and was convicted earlier this year by a Washington, D.C. jury on multiple charges including seditious conspiracy. Like his codefendants in the case, the jurors did not convict Tarrio on every count he faced at the time.
His co-defendant Ethan Nordean was sentenced last week to 18 years in jail.
Tarrio wasn’t present at the Capitol on Jan. 6, but prosecutors in their sentencing papers described him as the “primary organizer” of the conspiracy for which he and his co-defendants were convicted. He used his outsized influence “to condone and promote violence” in others, prosecutors wrote, adding, “He was a general rather than a soldier.”
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After the 2020 presidential election, according to evidence presented at trial, Tarrio began posting on social media and in message groups about a “civil war,” later threatening, “No Trump…No peace. No Quarter.” And as Jan. 6 approached, he posted about “revolt,” prosecutors said.
His co-defendants — Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola — gathered with other Proud Boys members on the day of the riot and marched toward the Capitol, interfering with police and ultimately forcing entry into the building where Congress was attempting to certify President Biden’s victory. Pezzola was the only codefendant to not be convicted of the most severe charge of seditious conspiracy at trial, but he was found guilty of using a stolen police riot shield to break a Capitol window.
“Make no mistake, we did this,” Tarrio wrote on social media during the riot, according to trial evidence.
Throughout the monthslong trial, defense attorneys worked to separate the defendants’ rhetoric with the events of Jan. 6 and, in some cases, tried to at least in part blame then-President Donald Trump for the violence that unfolded.
Tuesday’s sentencing hearing will be the last of Kelly’s five proceedings in the last week related to the Proud Boys case during which time he imposed sentences varied, including a decade in prison for Dominic Pezzola — half of what the government had asked.
Prosecutors successfully petitioned the judge to apply a terrorism-related enhancement to the sentences, alleging the defendants retaliated against their government. Ultimately, however, Kelly did now allow such considerations to heavily affect the length of the sentences he imposed.
