22 = 19
Enrique Tarrio, leader of the “Proud Boys”, was sentenced to twenty-two years in Federal Prison Tuesday. He’s convicted for his actions around the January 6th Insurrection. Tarrio himself wasn’t on Capitol Hill that day. He was in Baltimore, already banned from Washington DC for tearing a Black Lives Matter banner down from a neighborhood church and burning it on December 12th. But it was his organizational skills that brought the Proud Boys to the Capitol on January 6th. They served as the “point of the spear” in disrupting Congress. Tarrio is as high up “the pyramid” as the investigation of the actual Insurrection has gone – so far.
The judge agreed with prosecutors that his sentence could be “enhanced” and defined his actions as domestic terrorism. And while the judge did not give Tarrio the full thirty-three year sentence recommended, he now has the longest sentence of any Insurrection participant.
Twenty-two years: with “good time” Enrique will get out of prison no sooner than 2042. The thirty-eight year old will be fifty-seven. And he’ll have three more years of probation after his jail time is completed. He’ll be sixty when he finishes“his time”, twenty-two years from now.
By then, many of us now so shaken by the Insurrection will be gone (maybe not me, I’ll be eighty-nine). History will have moved on, leaving Enrique as a footnote, like Sirhan Sirhan and Leslie Van Houten are now. (Sirhan assassin of Bobby Kennedy, is still in custody. Van Houten was part of the Manson Family and just released after fifty-four years).
Proud Boys
But Enrique’s “work” lives on. The Proud Boys are still in the streets. Just last month they protested the Tennessee Legislature considering gun control laws in emergency session. And many of them are “infiltrating” mainstream politics. Five held seats on the Miami, Florida, Republican Party Committee. And several other Proud Boys ran for local school boards in California and Florida.
Some media commentators are making a big “point” that the Justice Department didn’t get everything they wanted; the full thirty-three years. One respected former FBI official suggested that the judge was suffering from the same kind of “blindness” that afflicted the FBI itself prior to January 6th. The FBI couldn’t envision that Trump protests could degenerate into a riot aimed at occupying the Capitol and capturing key leaders. They were shocked when it happened. The commentator said that the sentencing judge didn’t “get” the full import of Insurrection: that it challenged American traditions and the Constitution.
Look, twenty-two years in Federal prison is no joke. Unlike a state twenty-two year sentence, which might add up to ten actual years behind bars, a twenty-two year Federal sentence will last 18.7 years at the minimum. Tarrio received the longest sentence of any convicted Insurrectionist so far.
The Pyramid
Tarrio and Oath Keeper leader Stewart Rhodes (eighteen years) might be the leaders of the most militant Insurrectionists. But they aren’t the “top of the pyramid”. Both were in contact with Trump political advisor Roger Stone, and met with Stone in a garage the night before the Insurrection. Talk about chutzpah; they held the meeting in front of documentary cameras, recorded “for the ages”.
Stone, Trump advisor Steve Bannon, former National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and other Trump advisors organized the January 6th protests from a “War Room” in the posh Willard Hotel. According to testimony to the January 6th Committee, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows frequently called in. According to Washington Post reports, Trump himself was calling as well.
The current Federal indictments are focused on the “legal” shenanigans around disrupting the Congressional counting of electoral votes. But the Courts haven’t gotten beyond to the direct violence on the Capitol steps and the actual Insurrection. What, logically, was a coordinated effort between the “War Room” and the battle in the halls of Congress, has not been “legally” approached.
Eyes Closed
Why not? First of all the folks in the “War Room” were well aware of their “trespasses”. Bannon, Stone, and Flynn all were veterans of the Court system, and all three had Trump “get out of jail” pardons in their pockets for previous offenses. Despite the documentary evidence, there is an “air gap” between the violence on the steps, and the network connected directly to the White House.
And second, Tarrio and Rhodes are proving to be “good soldiers”. There isn’t (so far) a “deal” to turn state’s evidence. They, like Stone, must look back at the Watergate Era and G. Gordon Liddy, who served five years rather than betray the Watergate conspiracy. In their minds, they must be the fallen “heroes” of the battle to save the Nation – for Trump.
And finally, there may be that same “blindness” that struck the FBI. To connect the line from the Capitol steps to the Willard Hotel, is to connect the violence and threats of bodily harm to Pence, Pelosi, Schumer and the rest directly to the White House. Maybe that’s a mental “bridge too far” for prosecutors: a President leading a revolution, here in the United States.
I hope we don’t have to wait for Enrique’s book to find out. I’m not sure how well I’ll be reading at eighty-nine.
