Two former leaders of the far-right Proud Boys extremist group have each been sentenced to more than a decade in prison for spearheading an attack on the US Capitol to try to prevent the peaceful transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden after the 2020 presidential election.
The 17-year prison term for Joseph Biggs, a Proud Boys organizer, and 15-year sentence for Zachary Rehl, a leader of the group, were the second and third longest sentences handed down yet over the 6 January 2021 attack.
They were the first Proud Boys to be sentenced by Timothy Kelly, a US district judge who will separately preside over similar hearings of three others who were convicted by a jury in May after a four-month trial in Washington DC that laid bare far-right extremists’ embrace of lies by Trump, a Republican, that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Enrique Tarrio from Miami, who was the Proud Boys’ national chair and top leader, is scheduled to be sentenced on Tuesday. His sentencing was moved from Wednesday to next week because Kelly was sick.
Tarrio was not in Washington on 6 January. He had been arrested two days before the Capitol riot on charges that he defaced a Black Lives Matter banner during an earlier rally in the US capital, and he complied with a judge’s order to leave the city after his arrest. He picked Biggs and Ethan Nordean, a Proud Boys chapter president, to be the group’s leaders on the ground in his absence, prosecutors said.
Rehl, Biggs, Tarrio and Nordean were convicted of charges including seditious conspiracy, a rarely brought American civil war-era offence. A fifth Proud Boys member, Dominic Pezzola, was acquitted of seditious conspiracy but convicted of other serious charges.
Biggs and other Proud Boys joined the mob that broke through police lines and forced lawmakers to flee, disrupting the joint session of Congress for certifying the electoral victory by Biden, a Democrat.
Defence attorneys argued that the justice department was unfairly holding their clients responsible for the violent actions of others in the crowd of Trump supporters at the Capitol.
Biggs, of Ormond Beach, Florida, acknowledged that he “messed up” on 6 January but he blamed that on being “seduced by the crowd” of Trump supporters outside the Capitol and said he was not a violent person or “a terrorist”.
“My curiosity got the better of me, and I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life,” he said, claiming he did not have “hate in my heart” and did not want to hurt people.
During the trial, jurors saw a trove of messages that Proud Boys leaders privately exchanged in the weeks leading up to the Capitol riot, including Biggs encouraging Tarrio to “get radical and get real men” after Trump announced plans for a rally on 6 January.
That day, dozens of Proud Boys leaders, members and associates were among the first rioters to breach the Capitol. Before the first breach, Biggs used a megaphone to lead rioters in chants of “Whose Capitol? Our Capitol!”
Biggs “acted as the tip of the spear” during the attack, prosecutors said in a court filing. He tore down a fence and charged up scaffolding before entering the Capitol. He left the building but re-entered and went to the Senate chamber.
Rehl was seen on video spraying a chemical irritant at law enforcement officers outside the Capitol but he repeatedly lied about that assault while testifying at his trial, said the prosecutor Erik Kenerson. “He tried to craft a narrative to fit the evidence and he was caught,” Kenerson said.
Rehl also led at least three other men into the Capitol and into a senator’s office, where he smoked and posed for pictures while flashing the Proud Boys’ hand gesture, prosecutors said in court documents.
“Rehl led an army to attempt to stop the certification proceeding, was proud that they got as close as they did, and his only regret in the immediate aftermath was that they did not go further,” they wrote in a court filing.
Rehl sobbed as he told the judge he deeply regretted being at the Capitol that day. “I’m done with all of it, done peddling lies for other people who don’t care about me,” Rehl said. “Politicians started spreading lies about the election, and I fell for it hook, line and sinker.”
Norman Pattis, the defence attorney for Biggs and Rehl, said they were “misguided patriots”, not terrorists, and said long prison sentences would fuel division.
Rehl and others who rioted at the Capitol were following Trump’s urging, and genuinely believed something was fundamentally wrong with the election when they took to the streets, Pattis said. “What they’re guilty of is believing the president who said the election was stolen from him,” he added.
Kelly acknowledged that was a factor, but a “very modest one”.
Prosecutors have also recommended prison sentences of 33 years for Tarrio, 27 years for Nordean and 20 years for Pezzola. Nordean and Pezzola are scheduled to be sentenced on Friday.
More than 1,100 people have been charged with Capitol riot-related federal crimes. More than 600 of them have been convicted and sentenced.
The 18-year prison sentence for Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, is the harshest punishment for a Capitol rioter so far. Six members of the anti-government Oath Keepers were convicted of seditious conspiracy after a separate trial last year.