In his attempted overthrow of the US government even illegal news.
Prosecutors are seeking whopper and well deserved 33 year prison sentences for
former head of the now, I would assume not so proud boys.
Leader of the proud boys, Enrique Tarrio and his ally Joe Biggs, who they,
in their own words, say.
Wanted to foment a revolution on January 6 to keep former president and
very obvious idiotic criminal Donald Trump in power.
The proposed jail sentences would nearly double the lengthiest Jan 6 sentence
handed down to date, 18 years for Oath Keepers leader Stuart Rhodes.
A decision prosecutors say reflects the pivotal role the Proud Boys leaders
played in stoking and exacerbating the violence at the Capitol that day.
But I don't get it.
Aren't they heroes who recently recorded a hit record with the former president
recording artist Lupe Fiasco himself?
No, they are traitors, and they knew what they were doing.
Listen to this, the defendants understood the stakes, and
they embraced their role in bringing about a revolution,
prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memo released Thursday night.
They unleashed a force on the Capitol that was calculated to exert their political
will on elected officials by force and to undo the results of a democratic election.
The foot soldiers of the right aimed to keep their leader in power.
They failed.
They are not heroes.
They are criminals.
Keep in mind, these fools have already been found guilty for the record,
both Tarrio and Biggs were convicted of seditious conspiracy in May.
By a jury who also found allies Philadelphia Proud Boy leader Zachary Rehl
and Seattle Proud Boy leader Ethan Nordean guilty of the grave offense.
Prosecutors are seeking 30 years for Rehl and 27 years for Nordean.
A fifth Proud Boy tried alongside the others, Dominic Pezzola was acquitted of
seditious conspiracy but convicted of other serious offenses.
Pezzola may be the best known of the group, however,
he shattered a Senate wing window with a stolen police riot shield,
triggering the breach of the Capitol itself.
Prosecutors are seeking a 20 year jail term for him.
Nordean, Biggs, Pezzola and Rehl have been in prison since early 2021,
and Tarrio has been in jail since his arrest in February 2022.
Good riddance.
A lot more to this story, but, Cenk,
I'd love to get your thoughts right off the top.
>> Speaker 2: Yeah.
So, look, it's one thing to say generally, hey, I'd love a revolution, and
you might mean it politically, rhetorically, etc.
It's another thing when you show up at the Capitol and
break in and threaten to harm politicians.
That is an entirely different kind of revolution.
That's the kind that is more, I think, accurately called a coup attempt.
And so the reason why the Proud Boys are getting some of this, potentially getting
some of the most stiffest sentences and why they've been convicted.
Is because 200 of them were at the very forefront of organizing this and
instigated the mob to break in in the first place, planned it ahead of time.
But I do have to say Donald Trump raised hundreds of millions of dollars for
legal defense, and he hasn't shared any of it with the Proud Boys or anyone else.
And remember when he told the Proud Boys to stand by?
Well, they listened to him.
And they did all of these actions cuz they thought that they were helping him and
that he was gonna help them.
And, everyone who has ever trusted Donald Trump, he screwed them.
And he thought they were suckers and losers and left them high and dry.
And now they're facing decades in prison cuz they believed in Donald Trump,
and Donald Trump didn't have their back at all.
So, look, Trump will be long gone, and they might still be in
prison decades from now cuz they made the mistake of trusting a con man.
>> Speaker 3: I think that at the end of the day, examples have to be made.
These people literally ran up in the heart of the nation in an attempt to overthrow
the government illegally.
They said the quiet part out loud.
There was no secret to what they were doing.
There's nothing to uncover.
And I think in a lot of ways,
we've just become used to our political process being a giant reality TV show.
But this could have went a lot worse.
It really could have went a lot worse.
And what would succeeding actually mean if they would have went further?
What would that have sparked?
What would that have led know, an actual civil war that a lot of Trump supporters
are talking about, how serious of a deal that really is, and they ain't know.
What was it the other day,
a woman in Texas got arrested because she left messages for Judge ChutKan and
Sheila Jackson Lee, and she was like, no, I ain't playing either.
If they come here, they don't have to look out.
These people aren't kidding.
And again, luckily, I guess it wasn't worse than it was.
But in other countries, people who do stuff like this literally get executed, so
you know, what are we really talking about here?
What is there to defend?
>> Speaker 2: But I wanna tell you why Trump did this in a minute,
after Ben gives you the rest of the story.
Cuz there actually was a strategic reason why he wanted to have them break into
the building that nobody ever talks about.
So I want to talk about that.
And I did have one interaction with Enrique Tarrio that I wanna also
tell you about.
But Ben, go ahead.
>> Speaker 1: Sure. And no doubt you guys are very serious,
because even when questioned by the police recently, that person specifically said.
I'm not gonna go travel to them, but if they come here, they better be careful.
So back to the actual sentencing and the case at hand and what they did.
Prosecutors spent much of the memo describing the trauma the attack caused
for members of Congress and outnumbered police officers,
many of whom were injured defending the building.
The attack, which the Justice Department says was sparked in significant ways by
the Proud Boys, left a stain on American democracy.
It was in part why prosecutors are urging the judge to deem their conduct terrorism,
a designation that would result in sharply increased sentences.
While freedom, democracy, and the constitution prevailed on Jan 6,
it was not without cost, they wrote.
Alongside the enduring legacy and bravery of bravery and
honor by those who defended our country.
A harsh reality has emerged political violence is not some foreign concept that
exists in faraway lands.
It exists here, too.
And damn straight it was terrorism.
But remind me, is that still really illegal in America?
It's really hard to know the details if you don't know them.
Some more details prosecutors cast the group's actions as significantly
more calculated and sinister.
They described the group as launching an assault on the Capitol that
started at 10:00 a.m.
When a group of 200 carefully selected members of the Proud Boys amassed
at the Washington Monument.
They marched down the mall, away from the site of Trump's rally and
to the lightly defended Capitol grounds.
Where they whipped up the crowd into a frenzy before rioters stormed
the barricades.
Videos show Nordean, Biggs and Rehl at the front of the crowd at pivotal moments,
with pockets of other Proud Boys joining skirmishes.
Removing metal bike racks that police were using to keep the crowd at bay and
facilitating the larger mobs access to Capitol grounds.
Several members of the Proud Boys would ignite a brawl near the Senate wing of
the building just before Pezzola barreled through with a riot shield to break into
the building.
Where he would smoke a cigar and film himself reciting a Proud Boys slogan.
Prosecutors also recounted evidence that Tarrio had received from
a girlfriend a few days before Jan 6.
A document titled 1776 Returns that outlined a plan for
occupying government buildings in order to derail the transfer of power.
Funny, exactly what they then tried to do a few days later.
How confusing and strange.
Wow, the Proud Boys arc as a group was a central element of the lengthy trial.
They gained prominence during the Trump administration for their street clashes
with liberal protesters, but their recruitment went into overdrive.
As Cenk reminded us,
trump mentioned the proud boys during a September 2020 debate against Biden.
During a debate, when asked by moderator Chris Wallace he would condemn
the group's violent tactics, he said, stand back and stand by.
That bears repeating just cuz, as a minor side note,
it was a president giving orders to a hate group live on television, and
he's still the leading candidate for reelection.
Wake the f up, America.
Evidence at the trial showed the Proud Boys took his words as a rallying cry,
and their ranks quickly swelled.
The group, led by Tarrio,
quickly rallied to Trump's defense after his apparent defeat in the 2020 election.
Echoing his bogus claims of fraud and taking to the streets in November and
December for marchers in Washington that would turn violent.
But it was when Trump called supporters to Washington on Jan 6 in a tweet that
urged them to, quote, be there will be wild,
that the group started planning for a much larger effort, prosecutors said.
Is there any justice or rule of law or
even just plain common sense left in this country?
Let's see what sentences get handed down.
>> Speaker 2: All right, well, so these guys were prosecuted immediately.
That's what we're already moving on to the sentencing part now, but
I wanna note they waited two and a half years to prosecute Donald Trump.
So that drives me crazy cuz Trump is the guy who organized this in the first place.
And my sense is that if he had gone away and not run for reelection,
they wouldn't even prosecute him because he's one of the elites.
So now why did Trump want these guys to break into the building in the first
place?
It wasn't random and it wasn't that they were gonna take the building and keep it,
and then they were gonna somehow execute a coup, a physical, violent coup that day.
No, there was a specific strategic purpose get in there and
disrupt the certification of the vote.
Because what we wanna do is we wanna have a controversy around whether
it should be certified.
And what happens if there's a controversy?
It goes back to the state legislatures.
But in some of the states that Biden won, they have Republican legislatures.
So then the Republican legislators bring in the Trump fake electors, send that to
congress, and at that point they go to the house and go, well, there's a controversy.
There's the real electors and the fake electors.
And of course, they're not gonna call them the fake electors.
They're gonna say, they were the Trump electors, and
the election never got certified.
So now the house has to decide.
And they vote based on the number of states in the house,
not who had more seats overall, and
the Republicans hold more states than the Democrats do in the House.
And in that way, they actually could have pulled off the coup.
And that is why this violence was necessary.
That is why Donald Trump did not call off the Proud Boys or any of the rioters for
3 to 4 hours while his entire administration,
even his own administration, was screaming at him, what are you doing?
They're threatening to murder Mike Pence and let alone Nancy Pelosi, etc.
Why don't you go out there and tell him to withdraw?
Cuz he didn't want them to withdraw.
He wanted to make sure that they couldn't certify the election so
they could do their plot to steal this election.
That's who Donald Trump is.
And Ben is right.
It is a terrible indictment of the Republican party that he is now leading
in their race by 40 points, this criminal that tried to end our democracy.
So I think Enrico Tarrio facing 33 years makes perfect sense.
You have to set a precedent saying if you're gonna take violent actions to
try to overturn elections, you're gonna sit in prison for decades,
cuz this is America, and we don't allow coups here.
But that same justice should also be delivered to Donald J Trump.
And they're always slower when it comes to the elites and the powerful.
But I will tell you my experience with Enrico Tarrio.
I only met him once.
I was doing a hit on newsmax, and he was there too.
And people have asked me for pictures hundreds of times.
I've never said no, except to Enrique Tarrio, and
that was well before January 6.
I'm glad I said no to him.
And now I guess we won't get to take a picture together cuz he'll be in prison
for the next several decades.
>> Speaker 3: It looks like your instincts paid off in that situation there,
for sure.
And at the end of the day, like I said before,
there's no rock to turn over to see what's going on.
Not only did all this happen, a great explanation in terms of why they ran into
the building and what the strategy was behind that.
But then we have Donald Trump on tape saying, find me one more vote than I need.
Just one more.
Exactly one more.
And instance after instance.
There's absolutely nothing to argue here.
But perhaps luckily for us, from now until the general election next year in
November, he's probably gonna get three or four more indictments.
And get in trouble, likely for financial issues, because, as you pointed out,
he's taking all this money from people for lawyer fees and stuff like that.
And then he does and spend it.
So we're probably gonna see him get in quite a bit more trouble over the next
year, I think.