The Department of Justice on Monday appealed the sentences of the five leaders of the Proud Boys convicted in the Jan 6. fedsurrection in an attempt to add even more years to their unprecedentedly high prison sentences for non-violent offenses and justify harsher penalties for all January 6 defendants.
On Sept. 5, U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Kelly, an appointee of President Donald Trump, sentenced Henry Enrique Tarrio, the only January 6 defendant who was not in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021, to 22 years in prison, the longest sentence handed to any January 6 defendant to date among hundreds of criminal cases stemming from the Capitol riot.
Showcasing to the world the demise of the First Amendment, Kelly sentenced Ethan Nordean to 18 years in prison, Joseph Biggs to 17 years in prison, Rehl to 15 years in prison and Pezzola to 10 years, bids typically handed to murderers and perpetrators of mass casualty.
But Biden’s Justice Department isn’t satisfied with shipping Tarrio and his co-defendants off to a maximum security prison for more than two decades, a bid reserved for murderers and perpetrators of mass casualty pre-the globalist coup d’état of the US government.
Judge Kelly’s application of the arbitrary sentencing guidelines is significantly shorter than what the DOJ recommended.
Prosecutors calculated that Tarrio and Biggs should have a sentencing range of 30 years to life, and recommended a term of 33 years; 30 years for Proud Boys chapter leader Zachary Rehl; 27 years in prison for Ethan Nordean.
And they’re not letting up.
The government is still aiming for life sentences for Tarrio and his co-defendants Joseph Biggs, Ethan Nordean, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola, according to court filings.
Assistant US Attorney Jason McCullough alerted the court of the Justice Department’s plan to demand more prison time, but the notice of appeal does not include any legal arguments.
On Jan. 4 2021, Tarrio was apprehended by the FBI at Washington Reagan Airport after the Proud Boy a Black Lives Matter flag on fire at the Stop the Steal rally in December. The flag was later revealed to have been removed from a church. “They treated me like I was Noriega,” the former GOP congressional candidate has said describing the airport raid. On Jan 5., Tarrio was released from police custody in Maryland and ordered to leave D.C.
On Jan. 6, Rehl, Biggs, and Pezzola were repeatedly shot with the rubber bullets police indiscriminately fired at the crowd of peaceful protesters who stood on the northwest side of the Capitol building. Law enforcement officials ignited flash grenades into the crowd as scores of protesters began choking on clouds of tear gas. After the attack, Nordean, Rehl and Biggs walked through the Capitol building for less than 15 minutes, took photographs and left the Capitol grounds.
Pezzola stood beside Joshua Black as he was shot in the cheek and profusely bled out. After the blitz, Pezzola used a police shield he found on the ground for protection before bashing the shield into an already broken window shattering a window pane. He then walked through the Capitol for approximately 12 minutes and left the premises. Pezzola’s attorneys maintain he was only tried alongside leaders of the Proud Boys, who met for the first time during trial, to “muck” the other defendants with counts of damaging federal property.
Dominic Pezzola on January 6.
In June 2022, after holding Biggs, Rehl, Nordean, and Pezzola in pretrial detention, the government trumped up the group’s trespassing misdemeanor charges with allegations of “seditious conspiracy,” a crime punishable by a 20-year prison sentence as the Biden administration and Democrat lawmakers began comparing January 6 to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor.
As the government employed the Civil War-era sedition charge to incriminate the Proud Boys for thought crimes, Judge Kelly rigged the jury, securing the DoJ’s conviction.
Assistant US Attorney Jason McCullough
The federal judge, whose wife works for Democrat DC Mayor Muriel Bowser gave each of the approximately 150 prospective jurors a litmus, asking, “Do you support Black Lives Matter?” “Do you support Antifa” “Did you attend the Women’s March.”
This reporter sat in perplexity in the courtroom, as each of the selected jurors replied in the affirmative before characterizing the Proud Boys as a group of “white supremacists.”
As TGP has reported, it remains a mystery what any of the jurors looked like underneath the masks they donned for the nearly 10 hours a day for the entire duration of the four-month trial, in a virtue signal of support for totalitarian Covid mandates.
Defense attorneys pled with Judge Kelly to relocate the trial to a jurisdiction that does not have a 92 percent voting rate for Joe Biden to no avail.
No scheme devised by the Proud Boys to take over the government with their bare hands was ever uncovered or presented by the government during the trial. However, the defense exposed the FBI’s creation of the 1776 Returns, a plan for January 6 that was created by the bureau and disseminated amongst the Proud Boys. The government’s key witness former Proud Boys member Jeremy Bertino who took a lucrative plea deal revealed during testimony he thought Tarrio created the document outlining an actual “plan.”
Judge Kelly added multiple terror enhancements to Tarrio, Biggs, Nordean, Rehl and Pezzola’s sentences for speaking to the media including The Gateway Pundit. Kelly slapped Tarrio with a terror enhancement for joking in text exchanges, comparing Pezzola to George Washington on January 6. The federal judge scolded each of the defendants for “[having] no remorse” for plotting an insurrection and assured the precedent he set in their cases would act as a deterrent for others who dare protest a stolen election.
The government appeal of the Proud Boys sentences is the second bizarre attempt by prosecutors to challenge punishments handed down to J6 defendants who were convicted of seditious conspiracy.
Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes.
In July, the DOJ appealed the sentences handed down to members of the Oath Keepers.
Prosecutors sought 25 years in prison for Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta sentenced him to 18 years, equaled to the second-longest term given to Nordean, and added terror enhancements to Rhode’s sentence for maintaining the 2020 election was rigged in interviews with Infowars subsequent to his arrest.
US District Federal Judge Amit Mehta
A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office for Washington, D.C., said the filing in the Oath Keepers cases “merely preserves our ability to appeal. ”
As The Gateway Pundit has reported, Rhodes never entered the Capitol building on January 6; he never instructed anyone to go inside the US Capitol; he was unarmed as were all of his Oath Keepers associates that day; the group left their firearms in their hotel rooms Virginia when they traveled to DC.
Rhodes is currently 57. If Biden’s banana republic convictions stand, Rhodes will be 75 when he is released. Under Merrick Garland’s leadership, the DOJ wants Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes to die in prison to score political points.
While the Justice Department has achieved a one hundred percent conviction rate in January 6 jury trials, the Washington Post assures, “In nearly 60 percent of the Jan. 6 felony cases, the D.C. judges have gone below their own calculated guideline range, and below the prosecution’s sentencing recommendations in 80 percent of al cases, according to a Washington Post database. Sentencing guidelines are not used in most misdemeanor cases.”
“Judges are not required to explain why they deviate from the guidelines, as they were when the guidelines were mandatory. The Supreme Court made the guidelines advisory in 2005,” the state-run media notes.
Rhodes’ attorney Ed Tarpley is astounded the government is attempting to add even more time to his client’s sentence.
“It’s a head-scratcher. The sentences were already very, very harsh. This is highly unusual and had to come from high up in the Department of Justice,” he told TGP. “It almost seems like they want to continue to use this as a means of keeping this in the public eye.”
Attorney Norman Pattis, who represented Rehl and Biggs issued a statement after the notice was filed warning, “Merrick Garland is unhinged. Period. Call him the Inspector Javert of the DOJ. He should take up bungee jumping. This is no longer my government.”
“Thesentencesfor the ProudBoysarealreadythelongestsentencesinAmericanhistoryforparticipatinginapoliticaldemonstration,” Roger Roots, the defense attorney representing Pezzola, warned after the government filed its appeal for more prison time.
“We are back to the dark days when the prevailing party imposed laws on the books that were designed to punish their political opponents,” Roots told TGP in an exclusive interview. “The government was rounding people up in the 1790s with the claim that those people who criticized President George Washington or John Adams were somehow traitors and plotted to overthrow the United States.
“A series of judges heroically struck down those prosecutors and ultimately tried to restore the First Amendment. Then the Sedition laws that we are now seeing imposed on the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers were developed during the Civil War. But all of the convicts found guilty of seditious conspiracy had killed someone or many.”
