Enrique Tarrio, leader of the \u201cProud Boys\u201d, was sentenced to twenty-two years in Federal Prison Tuesday. He’s convicted for his actions around the January 6th<\/sup>\u00a0Insurrection.\u00a0\u00a0Tarrio himself wasn\u2019t on Capitol Hill that day.\u00a0\u00a0He 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<\/sup>.\u00a0\u00a0But it was his organizational skills that brought the Proud Boys to the Capitol on January 6th<\/sup>. They served as the \u201cpoint of the spear\u201d in disrupting Congress.\u00a0\u00a0Tarrio is as high up \u201cthe pyramid\u201d as the investigation of the actual Insurrection has gone \u2013 so far.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The judge agreed with prosecutors that his sentence could be \u201cenhanced\u201d and defined his actions as domestic terrorism.\u00a0\u00a0And while the judge did not give Tarrio the full thirty-three year sentence recommended, he now has the longest sentence of any Insurrection participant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Twenty-two years:\u00a0\u00a0with \u201cgood time\u201d Enrique will get out of prison no sooner than 2042.\u00a0\u00a0The thirty-eight year old will be fifty-seven.\u00a0\u00a0And he\u2019ll have three more years of probation after his jail time is completed. He’ll be sixty when he finishes\u201chis time\u201d, twenty-two years from now.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n By then, many of us now so shaken by the Insurrection will be gone (maybe not me, I\u2019ll be eighty-nine).\u00a0\u00a0History will have moved on, leaving Enrique as a footnote, like Sirhan Sirhan and\u00a0\u00a0Leslie 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<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Enrique\u2019s \u201cwork\u201d lives on.\u00a0\u00a0The Proud Boys are still in the streets. Just last month they protested the Tennessee Legislature considering gun control laws in emergency session.\u00a0\u00a0And\u00a0\u00a0many of them are \u201cinfiltrating\u201d mainstream politics.\u00a0\u00a0Five held seats on the Miami, Florida, Republican Party Committee.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0And several other Proud Boys ran for local school boards in California and Florida.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some media commentators are making a big \u201cpoint\u201d that the Justice Department didn\u2019t get everything they wanted; the full thirty-three years.\u00a0\u00a0One respected former FBI official suggested that the judge was suffering from the same kind of \u201cblindness\u201d that afflicted the FBI itself prior to January 6th<\/sup>.\u00a0\u00a0The FBI couldn\u2019t envision that Trump protests could degenerate into a riot aimed at occupying the Capitol and capturing key leaders.\u00a0\u00a0They were shocked when it happened.\u00a0\u00a0The commentator said that the sentencing judge didn\u2019t \u201cget\u201d the full import of Insurrection: that it challenged American traditions and the Constitution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tarrio and Oath Keeper leader Stewart Rhodes (eighteen years) might be the leaders of the most militant Insurrectionists. But they aren\u2019t the \u201ctop of the pyramid\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0Both were in contact with Trump political advisor Roger Stone, and met with Stone in a garage the night before the Insurrection.\u00a0\u00a0Talk about chutzpah; they held the meeting in front of documentary cameras, recorded \u201cfor the ages\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stone, Trump advisor Steve Bannon, former National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and other Trump advisors organized the January 6th<\/sup> protests from a \u201cWar Room\u201d in the posh Willard Hotel. According to testimony to the January 6th<\/sup> Committee, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows frequently called in. According to Washington Post<\/em> reports, Trump himself was calling as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The current Federal indictments are focused on the \u201clegal\u201d shenanigans around disrupting the Congressional counting of electoral votes.\u00a0\u00a0But the Courts haven\u2019t gotten beyond to the direct violence on the Capitol steps and the actual Insurrection.\u00a0\u00a0What, logically, was a coordinated effort between the \u201cWar Room\u201d and the battle in the halls of Congress, has not been \u201clegally\u201d approached.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why not? First of all the folks in the \u201cWar Room\u201d were well aware of their \u201ctrespasses\u201d. Bannon, Stone, and Flynn all were veterans of the Court system, and all three had Trump \u201cget out of jail\u201d pardons in their pockets for previous offenses. Despite the documentary evidence, there is an \u201cair gap\u201d between the violence on the steps, and the network connected directly to the White House. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And second, Tarrio and Rhodes are proving to be \u201cgood soldiers\u201d. There isn\u2019t (so far) a \u201cdeal\u201d to turn state\u2019s 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 \u201cheroes\u201d of the battle to save the Nation \u2013 for Trump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And finally, there may be that same \u201cblindness\u201d 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\u2019s a mental \u201cbridge too far\u201d for prosecutors: a President leading a revolution, here in the United States. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I hope we don\u2019t have to wait for Enrique\u2019s book to find out. I\u2019m not sure how well I\u2019ll be reading at eighty-nine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Proud Boys<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The Pyramid<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Eyes Closed<\/h3>\n\n\n\n