Monthly Archives: November 2022

The document is so dowdy and formal it resembles the annual minutes of a society of tax accountants. Its index lists sections on objectives and rules of engagement and carries an addendum that provides recommendations for hotels and parking.

On the cover, two words give a clue to the notoriety of the group that produced it: MAGA and WARNING. That and the date: 5 January 2021, the day before the US Capitol attack.

What goes unsaid on the cover and is barely mentioned throughout the 23 pages is that this is the work of one of the most violent political gangs in America, the far-right street fighters told by Donald Trump to stand back and stand by: the Proud Boys.

The document, published by the Guardian for the first time, gives a very rare insight into the meticulous planning that goes into events staged by the far-right club.

The document was obtained from a Proud Boys member by the extremism reporter Andy Campbell as he researched his new book, We Are Proud Boys: How a Right-Wing Street Gang Ushered in a New Era of American Extremism. The book will be published on Tuesday. Campbell shared the document with the Guardian.

The Proud Boys have been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and are alleged to have acted as key organizers of the violent assault on the Capitol.

In the wake of January 6, which has been linked to the deaths of nine people, the New York march featured in the document was called off and the strategy so fastidiously laid out was never implemented. But the document remains sharply revealing.

It shows the lengths to which the Proud Boys go to prepare for potentially violent encounters and then to cover their tracks something prosecutors have stressed but that has never been seen in the groups own words. It exposes the militaristic structure and language the Proud Boys have adopted, and their aspiration to become the frontline vigilante force in a Trump-led America.

It also provides clues as to how the group continues to spread its tentacles throughout the US despite the fact that many of its top leaders, including its national chairman, Enrique Tarrio, are behind bars awaiting trial on charges of seditious conspiracy.

The purpose of the document is to provide a strategic security plan and call to action, summoning Proud Boys members to a pro-Trump Maga march that was scheduled for New York City on 10 January 2021. That was four days after Congress was to certify Joe Bidens victory in the 2020 presidential election the occasion that would be targeted by the fatal insurrection.

The author of the document is Randy Ireland, who as president of the groups New York branch, the Hells Gate Bridge Chapter, is one of the most prominent Proud Boys in the US north-east. The paper was circulated through Telegram, the encrypted chat app widely used by the Proud Boys as an organizing tool, to at least nine other chapters in New York and beyond.

Campbell told the Guardian the decentralized structure of the group, into what it claims are 157 active chapters in all but three states, is one of the Proud Boys greatest strengths, as reflected in the autonomous nature of the New York planning.

Chapter leaders like Randy can create their own events, run independently of each other, Campbell said. Enrique Tarrio and other leaders are in prison, but these guys are going to continue what they are doing.

The language in the planning paper is overtly militaristic. Ireland designates himself General of Security Detail, while his underlings in the chain of command are VPs of Recruiting, Scout Security and Team Leads.

The plan is for 60 or so Proud Boys at the 10 January event in Manhattan to be corralled into seven tactical teams of five to eight men each (they are all men, as one of the overriding values of the group is misogyny). Members are told to bring protective gear, including knife/stab protection, helmets, gloves, boots etc and to make use of radio channels, walkie-talkies or Telegram to communicate with each other.

They are to stick together in groups and under no circumstances allow Normies ordinary Trump supporters who are not Proud Boys or Females into their ranks.

Their presence will jeopardise the health and safety of all those involved with Security, and simply cannot be allowed to happen! Ireland writes.

Maps reproduced at the back of the document show positions scouts and tactical teams should adopt at key points along the route of the march, which was planned to start at Columbus Circle and pass Trump Tower.

That spot is understood in a very public way to hold special meaning for us, the paper says, referring to Trumps home on Fifth Avenue. WE WILL NOT DISAPPOINT!

Campbell, who has been reporting on the Proud Boys since they started turning up at Trump rallies in early 2017, describes them as Americas most notorious political fight club. In the planning paper, he sees equal parts fantasy and danger.

These guys see themselves as super soldiers, like some sort of military outfit, he said. On one level its funny, as nothing is in fact going to pan out the way they say it will. But on another level, its alarming because it shows how much thought they put into this stuff.

In We Are Proud Boys, Campbell traces the group from its birth in 2015-16 through to its central role on January 6 when a member, Dominic Pezzola, became the first person to breach the US Capitol. At least 30 Proud Boys have been charged in relation to the insurrection, including Tarrio and four others accused of seditious conspiracy among the most serious indictments yet handed down.

The group was invented by the British-born founder of Vice magazine, Gavin McInnes, who branded himself a western chauvinist and peddled in bigotry. McInnes floated the Proud Boys name on his online chatshow in May 2016, introducing them as a gang and inventing a uniform, a black Fred Perry polo shirt with yellow trim.

McInnes was careful to brand his creation as harmless fun, a satirical male-only patriotic drinking club that later attached itself to all things Trump. But Campbell argues that from the outset political violence was baked in.

A Proud Boy was an organizer of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, during which an anti-fascist protester was murdered. The group has held violent gatherings in Portland, Oregon. Outside a Republican event in New York in 2018, several members were arrested and charged with felonious assault.

Proud Boys membership is structured into four ranks, known as degrees, the fourth granted once you get arrested or get in a serious violent fight for the cause, as McInnes himself explained. In an interview with Campbell for the book, McInnes denied promoting violence and insisted the Proud Boys were never proactively aggressive, only reacting to leftwing attacks.

That official line is reiterated in the document published by the Guardian. Ireland is careful to portray the Proud Boys as a defensive group.

He writes: If any violence does spout off, all Proud Boys are expected to respond immediately only so far as to eliminate and end that threat to them or others. VERY IMPORTANT: Once the threat has been neutralized, WE STOP!

But there is a glaring contradiction: Ireland presents his chapter as a non-violent organization yet it goes out seeking violence. He assigns the group, uninvited, the role of a vigilante police force.

We are there as the first line of defense for all event attendees, he writes, then contradicts himself by saying the only role of the Proud Boys is to play a back-up role to law enforcement and to force them to do their jobs.

That speaks volumes. It carries the implication that if the police will not assail anti-fascist protesters, Proud Boys will.

Ive reported at Proud Boys events where they stood back and relaxed as police lobbed teargas and other munitions into the crowd of counter-protesters, Campbell said. Then the Proud Boys didnt have to do what Randy Ireland is hinting at here step in and do the fighting themselves.

For Campbell, the most disturbing aspect of the document is that, with its soft-lensed double-talk and contradictory meanings, it falls into arguably the main ambition of the Proud Boys: the normalization of political violence. Despite having so many leaders behind bars, the group is prospering.

As new chapters pop up, Americans are increasingly inured to the idea of heavily armed gangs in public settings. Proud Boys have posed as security details at anti-abortion rallies, anti-vaccination demonstrations, pro-gun protests and of course Trump rallies.

The street-level violence the Proud Boys helped to create is now being carried out by regular people, Campbell said. You saw it on January 6, you see it at Planned Parenthood and LGBTQ+ events where people are harassed and attacked by everyday Americans.

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Proud Boys memo reveals meticulous planning for street-level violence ...

The F.B.I. had as many as eight informants inside the far-right Proud Boys in the months surrounding the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, recent court papers indicate, raising questions about how much federal investigators were able to learn from them about the violent mob attack both before and after it took place.

The existence of the informants came to light over the past few days in a flurry of veiled court filings by defense lawyers for five members of the Proud Boys who are set to go on trial next month on seditious conspiracy charges connected to the Capitol attack.

In the papers, some of which were heavily redacted, the lawyers claimed that some of the information the confidential sources had provided to the government was favorable to their efforts to defend their clients against sedition charges and was improperly withheld by prosecutors until several days ago.

In a sealed filing quoted by the defense, prosecutors argued that hundreds of pages of documents related to the F.B.I. informants were neither suppressed by the government nor directly relevant to the case of the Proud Boys facing sedition charges: Enrique Tarrio, the groups former leader; Joseph Biggs; Ethan Nordean; Zachary Rehl; and Dominic Pezzola.

Because all of the material remains under a highly restrictive protective order, it is not possible to know what the informants told the government about the Proud Boys role in the Capitol attack or how that information might affect the outcome of the trial.

A closed court hearing was held on Monday to discuss the informants in Federal District Court in Washington. Lawyers for the Proud Boys have asked Judge Timothy J. Kelly, who is overseeing the case, to dismiss the indictment or at least delay the trial to give them more time to investigate the newly revealed informants.

Judge Kelly made no decision at the hearing, according to a notice placed on the docket after the proceeding ended. Because it was sealed, journalists were not allowed in the courtroom.

The dispute about the informants in the Proud Boys came on the heels of revelations that the F.B.I. also had a well-placed source in the inner circle of Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, another far-right group that took part in the Capitol attack.

Last week, lawyers for Mr. Rhodes and four other Oath Keepers who are being tried on sedition charges planned to call the informant Greg McWhirter, the groups former vice president as a defense witness, believing that his testimony would bolster their case. But on the eve of his planned appearance, Mr. McWhirter suffered a heart attack and the defense put other witnesses in his place.

Questions about informants reporting to the government from inside extremist groups have been raised repeatedly throughout the Justice Departments sprawling investigation of the Capitol attack. They have included concerns about why the informants were not able to give the government advanced warning about plans to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6 or seemingly to corroborate accusations after the fact that the groups conspired in plotting the attack.

Former F.B.I. officials say there might have been gaps in what bureau intelligence analysts had told agents to ask their informants. Analysts at the bureau are supposed to help agents connect the intelligence dots to provide a clearer picture of threat activity. The F.B.I.s intelligence directorate was created after Sept. 11 to help thwart terrorism and other threats.

It remains unclear what sorts of questions the F.B.I. was asking its informants in the Proud Boys and how focused the bureau was on the groups activities to undermine the results of the elections as Jan. 6 drew near. Previous court papers have suggested that some Proud Boys including Mr. Biggs were recruited by the F.B.I. before the election to provide information about their adversaries in the leftist movement known as antifa.

Last year, The New York Times revealed the existence of an informant in the Kansas City chapter of the Proud Boys who took part in the storming of the Capitol with a group of his compatriots. After the attack, the informant told his handlers in interviews that he was not aware of a premeditated plan to break into the building on Jan. 6, although as a relatively low-level member of the group it is possible that he was simply not privy to the making of such plans.

Right-wing media figures and Republican politicians have often sought to use the issue of F.B.I. informants in extremist groups to suggest that the bureau had a hand in guiding or encouraging the attack on the Capitol in a way that entrapped other rioters. No evidence has surfaced suggesting that the F.B.I. played any role in the attack.

But the lawyers for the Proud Boys have made entirely different claims, arguing that the information the confidential sources provided to prosecutors appears to be exculpatory and could contradict the governments chief allegation in the case: that their clients went to Washington on Jan. 6 with a plan in place to storm the Capitol and disrupt the transfer of power from President Donald J. Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The newly disclosed material called into question whether a Proud Boy conspiracy plan to obstruct the Biden-Harris vote certification or to commit sedition ever existed or could have existed, J. Daniel Hull, Mr. Biggss lawyer, wrote in papers filed on Monday.

The notion of whether there was a predetermined plan to attack the Capitol or whether the violence that erupted there on Jan. 6 was more spontaneous will be one of the key disputes when the Proud Boys trial now scheduled to start on Dec. 12 goes in front of a jury. To prove seditious conspiracy, prosecutors will have to show that the defendants knowingly entered into an agreement to use force to stop the lawful transfer of power after the 2020 election.

If the information provided by the informants is indeed exculpatory, the lawyers for the Proud Boys could in theory call some of them to testify at the trial and rebut the governments charges.

A similar dynamic has been playing out in recent days in the Oath Keepers sedition trial, which could go to the jury as early as this week. A central part of the defenses strategy in the case has been to introduce evidence that the Oath Keepers had no explicit plan to attack the Capitol.

The post F.B.I. Had Informants in Proud Boys, Court Papers Suggest appeared first on New York Times.

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F.B.I. Had Informants in Proud Boys, Court Papers Suggest