After a news conference with other Proud Boys members and Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, Enrique Tarrio, the former national chairman of the Proud Boys, was reportedly taken into custody by U.S. Capitol Police on Friday.
Tarrio was detained for simple assault, according to a USCP representative, after a counterprotester held a cell phone near his face and he retaliated by hitting her arm and phone.
Tarrio was arrested when the counter-protester stated that she want to press charges. The incident happened between Union Station in Washington and the US Capitol.
Tarrio met with Rhodes and other members of the Proud Boys just prior to his detention to declare their intention to sue for their charges related to the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021.
Outside the Capitol, which lawmakers of both parties stormed four years ago when Congress validated the election victory of former President Biden, President Trump’s Democratic opponent in the 2020 presidential contest, they announced the legal steps.
Tarrio and Rhodes were found guilty of seditious conspiracy, a rare crime from the Civil War, for conspiring to stop the peaceful transition of power from Trump to Biden by force.
Prosecutors claim that Tarrio organized other Proud Boys to descend on the Capitol on January 6, despite the fact that he was not in the city due to a separate arrest.
Rhodes was at the Capitol, but prosecutors said he behaved like a general overlooking a battlefield while his troops stormed inside. Rhodes did not enter the building or attack law enforcement.
Rhodes was given an 18-year prison sentence, while Tarrio was given the heaviest sentence ever imposed in relation to the riot: 22 years.
However, on his first day back in the White House, Trump erased those sentences with a single stroke of his pen. Rhodes’s sentence was reduced to time served, and Tarrio received a complete pardon.
The President’s pardons were widely seen as a major rebuke of the Justice Department’s bias, far-left investigation.
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