- In a rare agreement, the DOJ and
Proud Boys leaders successfully asked for a delay in their trial. - Both sides blamed the hearings over January 6, 2021, for making the trial far more complicated.
A federal judge agreed Wednesday to delay the trial of five current and former members of the Proud Boys, including the far-right group's former leader
During a brief court hearing, Judge Timothy Kelly said he would "reluctantly" push the trial from August to December but raised the prospect of delaying the criminal proceeding even further. All five members of the far-right group face charges of seditious conspiracy, in one of the Justice Department's signature prosecutions stemming from the attack on the Capitol.
The trial had been scheduled to begin August 8 and was expected to last more than a month, which raised the possibility that the proceeding would overlap with the House select committee's planned final hearing and public report in September. Ahead of Wednesday's court hearing, federal prosecutors found themselves in rare agreement with defense lawyers for some of the Proud Boys members over the timing of the trial.
One of the defense lawyers, John Hull, wrote in a court filing that the House hearings were tainting the jury pool of "lovably dorky, wonky, media-attentive Washingtonians." Prosecutors, meanwhile, said the additional time would help them review information from the House select committee that could be "relevant to defendants' guilt (or innocence)."
Without a delay, federal prosecutors wrote, "the parties in this case could find themselves in the unprecedented position of litigating a criminal trial simultaneous to the release of a Congressional report that is likely to include robust descriptions of the criminal conduct of the defendants."
Tarrio alone had opposed moving the original August 8 trial date.
"Our position is that it doesn't matter when this case gets set for trial, whether it's August, December," Sabino Jauregui, Tarrio's attorney, told the judge.
"We won't get an impartial jury in Washington, DC," Jauregui said. "We're ready for trial August 8."
The judge appeared to brush Tarrio's position aside, responding: "Even meting all of that out, I'm going to enter an order later today that reluctantly grants the motion."
After the hearing, Jauregui told Insider that Tarrio would not persist in seeking to be tried before December 12 but would continue to seek to be tried separately from at least some of his codefendants.
"Mr. Tarrio is looking forward to his day in trial and showing a complete picture of all the pieces of evidence the government intends to present at trial," Jauregui said.
The judge rebuffed federal prosecutors' suggestion that opening statements be scheduled for the week of January 2 after the holidays — three weeks after the December 12 start of jury selection.
"We're not going to have that many weeks from the time we start picking a jury until an opening statement," he said.
"The parties should be prepared to open that week," he added.
"We're not going to have these folks sit around from December until January waiting for an opening statement," the judge said. "I just don't see a world where that is appropriate. We'll get a running start, and we should be prepared to pick them. At the end of the day, it's not rocket science."
The hearing in Washington, DC, federal court unfolded at a time of rising tensions between the Justice Department and the House select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol and President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
In a June 15 letter to the House committee, the Justice Department said the congressional panel's "failure" to turn over interview transcripts was complicating investigations and prosecutions arising out of the January 6 attack.
The letter did not identify Tarrio or other Proud Boys members by name. But the Justice Department appeared to allude to Tarrio in a reference to video footage that the House committee played of interviews conducted of "individuals who have been charged" in connection with January 6.
At the House committee's first hearing, the panel played footage of interviews in which Proud Boys members said they felt emboldened by Trump telling the extremist group to "stand back and stand by" during a debate in September 2020. In one interview clip, Tarrio said he regretted not selling T-shirts emblazoned with Trump's debate-stage words.
"One of the vendors on my page actually beat me to it, but I wish I would've made a 'stand back stand by' T-shirt," Tarrio said in his interview with the House committee.