Proud Boys
(continued from Page 3) “The Oath Keepers had their rifles. The Proud Boys had their ‘real men,’” prosecutor Conor Mulroe has said.
Mulroe was referring to text messages that Proud Boys organizer Joseph Biggs sent to Tarrio weeks before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol. In a Dec. 19 text, Biggs told Tarrio that the Proud Boys have been recruiting “losers who wanna drink.” “Let’s get radical and get real men,” Biggs added. Randall Eliason, an adjunct professor at George Washington University Law School and former federal prosecutor, described prosecutors’ tools theory as “unusual but not remarkable.”
“It’s not something that comes up a lot, but there’s nothing controversial about the idea,” he said. “And the word ‘tools’ is kind of the perfect way to describe it. In other words, whether you use a battering ram to break down the door of the Capitol or whether you enlist a bunch of other people to help you break down the door to the Capitol, they’re all tools, right?”
Prosecutors this week publicly identified nearly two dozen Proud Boys members and associates they say served as “tools.” All but one of the 23 people named as “tools” have been publicly and separately charged with Capitol riotrelated crimes.
An FBI agent narrated videos for jurors that show Proud Boys’ “tools” marching from the Washington Monument to the Capitol and clashing with police officers who were trying to hold off the mob of Trump supporters.
“Let’s go! This is what we came for!” Proud Boys member William Pepe shouted before taking down a police barricade. Prosecutors argue the “tools” didn’t have to know the ultimate goal of the Proud Boys’ conspiracy to be part of it. Mulroe compared the concept to human “mules” unwittingly transporting drugs or money.
“The case is about the concerted efforts of a group of people, this group that the defendants called real men. And our position is that they weaponized these people,” the prosecutor said. Before the trial started in January, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly ruled that prosecutors could present evidence to support their “tools” theory.
The judge acknowledged it’s an “unusual” theory but said the actions of rioters who followed Proud Boys leaders to the Capitol can be relevant under certain circumstances.
Norman Pattis, an attorney for Biggs, said comparing Oath Keepers’ guns to Proud Boys followers is a “clumsy analogy.” Pattis also said he doesn’t know of any case in which prosecutors have been allowed to argue that “acts of third parties are the legal responsibility of criminal defendants absent some nexus other than mere proximity and shared political views.” “There is nothing but rank and dangerous speculation supporting this theory,” he wrote in court papers, urging the judge to “reject such evidence as little more than an effort to make hindsight do the work of proof.”