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Post by Admin on Jan 5, 2021 21:08:10 GMT
The leader of the far-right Proud Boys group has been arrested in Washington DC on suspicion of burning a Black Lives Matter flag last month. Enrique Tarrio faces misdemeanour destruction of property charges, police say. He has reportedly admitted torching a banner taken from a black church during a rally in December in the city. President Donald Trump has been urging supporters to gather in the capital this week for another demonstration. On Wednesday, members of Congress are due to certify Democratic President-elect Joe Biden's election victory before he takes office on 20 January. Mr Tarrio has said on the social media app Parler that the Proud Boys will "turn out in record numbers on Jan 6th", referring to his members as "the most notorious group of extraordinary gentlemen". Who are Proud Boys and antifa? The National Guard has been deployed by Washington DC's mayor to assist local authorities. Officials say the troops will not be armed and will be there to assist with crowd management and traffic control. A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police Department, Dustin Sternbeck, told the Washington Post on Monday that Mr Tarrio had been stopped in a vehicle shortly after it entered the district. The 36-year-old was also found during his arrest to be in unlawful possession of two devices that allow guns to hold additional bullets, a source told CBS News. The destruction of property charge relates to a protest in Washington DC on 12 December in support of the outgoing Republican president's unsubstantiated claims of systemic election fraud. The mostly peaceful demonstration ended in isolated scuffles as confrontations with counter-protesters broke out. Police said more than three dozen people were arrested and four churches were vandalised. Mr Tarrio - who lives in Miami, where he also reportedly runs a grassroots organisation called Latinos for Trump - told the Washington Post at the time that he had burned the Black Lives Matter flag.
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Post by Admin on Jan 6, 2021 5:17:25 GMT
Washington police banned the leader of a far-right group from the city and made two arrests on Tuesday as protesters supporting President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the election gathered in the city. Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, who was arrested on Monday for destruction of property and possession of a firearm magazine, was released on bail Tuesday and ordered to stay away from the city, according to a police affidavit. Protests against President-elect Joe Biden’s November election win, which Congress will certify on Wednesday, started across the U.S. capital on Tuesday and were expected to swell on Wednesday to thousands of people. The outgoing president, who lost the election by 7 million votes, was expected to speak to protesters on Wednesday morning at the Ellipse, a public park south of the White House, he said in a post on Twitter on Tuesday evening. “BIG CROWDS!” he predicted in the post. “Washington is being inundated with people who don’t want to see an election victory stolen by emboldened Radical Left Democrats,” Trump tweeted earlier on Tuesday, as well as “See you in D.C.!,” with a link to “WinRed,” a fundraising site with his photo on it. Separately, a man from North Carolina was arrested and charged with carrying a pistol without a license, carrying a rifle or a shotgun outside a home or business, possession of a large-capacity ammunition feeding device, unregistered ammunition, an unregistered firearm, and possession of fireworks, a police spokesman said. Police also arrested a man from North Carolina for driving an unauthorized van without a permit. Several hundred Trump supporters took part in rallies on Tuesday, including Bob Kowell, 67, a retired Boeing Co electrical engineer, who traveled from Murrieta, California. Trump has alleged without evidence that the election was rigged. Dozens of court decisions, state election officials and the U.S. Department of Justice refute this claim. “There is a lot of evidence,” Kowell said. “You just haven’t looked at it. There is just too much evidence out there.”
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Post by Admin on Jan 10, 2021 22:16:04 GMT
The right-wing riot at the United States Capitol on Wednesday – and President Donald Trump’s acknowledgement, after weeks of disputing November’s presidential election results, that a transfer of power would occur – has been seen by some analysts as the end of Trump’s right-wing era. The group of rioters that breached the building in support of Trump and his false allegation that the presidential contest was stolen through voter fraud was met with widespread condemnation. But one expert says far-right groups and white nationalists in the US view the takeover of the Capitol as a new beginning to be celebrated. “White nationalists and other far-right groups are celebrating what happened at the Capitol,” Cassie Miller, a senior research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) who tracks the far right, told Al Jazeera in an email. “They are already using images of insurrectionists in the chambers as propaganda and insisting that we’re watching the start of a revolution,” Miller said. The far right previously saw Trump’s election in 2016 as the beginning of a revolution. Trump claimed victory to cheers from a resurgent white nationalist movement redubbed the “alt-right”, led in part by Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute. Spencer frequently argued publicly for white nationalism in 2017. He was sometimes joined by white nationalist Tim Gionet, known as “Baked Alaska” online, who was present at the Capitol riot. Spencer and other groups, including the Proud Boys, were instrumental in organising the “Unite the Right” rally in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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Post by Admin on Jan 11, 2021 1:13:48 GMT
The deadly events caused a backlash, leading to cancelled speaking events for Spencer and other far-right figures, as well as an increasingly active “Antifa” counterprotest movement. By 2018, the Proud Boys, who describe themselves as “Western chauvinists” who support Western culture but are considered a hate group by the SPLC, were organising protests that often turned violent across the country. Arrests The Proud Boys promised to be at the pro-Trump January 6 rally in the US capital “in record numbers”, according to social media posts from the group’s leader, Henry “Enrique” Tarrio. Tarrio was arrested prior to the pro-Trump rally by local police and charged with a misdemeanour for burning a Black Lives Matter banner during a pro-Trump demonstration in December demonstration. He was also charged with two felony counts of Possession of a Large Capacity Ammunition Feeding Device and ordered to leave the city ahead of the protest. Meanwhile, other far-right figures were arrested in relation to the US Capitol riot, including the founder of “Proud Boys Hawaii”, Nick Ochs, who was arrested for breaching the Capitol after he returned to Hawaii, Forbes reported. QAnon One of the most striking images from the Capitol riot is of Jake Angeli, the shirtless, horn-wearing “Q Shaman”. Angeli has been seen since 2019 at the Arizona Capitol building, where he espouses ideas disseminated in the belief set of QAnon, a conspiracy theory that claims Trump was selected to defeat a “Deep State” cabal of liberals who harvest children’s blood. On Saturday, the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia said Angeli, who is also known as Jacob Anthony Chansley, was arrested and charged with knowingly entering or remaining in a restricted building or grounds without lawful authority. He was also charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds. The QAnon conspiracy theory gained popularity after it emerged on the fringes of the internet in 2017. People wearing QAnon clothing and bearing placards showing their support for the conspiracy were first seen at Trump campaign events in 2018.
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Post by Admin on Jan 27, 2021 19:48:03 GMT
Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys extremist group, has a past as an informer for federal and local law enforcement, repeatedly working undercover for investigators after he was arrested in 2012, according to a former prosecutor and a transcript of a 2014 federal court proceeding obtained by Reuters. In the Miami hearing, a federal prosecutor, a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent and Tarrio’s own lawyer described his undercover work and said he had helped authorities prosecute more than a dozen people in various cases involving drugs, gambling and human smuggling. Tarrio, in an interview with Reuters on Tuesday, denied working undercover or cooperating in cases against others. “I don’t know any of this,’” he said, when asked about the transcript. “I don’t recall any of this.” Law enforcement officials and the court transcript contradict Tarrio’s denial. In a statement to Reuters, the former federal prosecutor in Tarrio’s case, Vanessa Singh Johannes, confirmed that “he cooperated with local and federal law enforcement, to aid in the prosecution of those running other, separate criminal enterprises, ranging from running marijuana grow houses in Miami to operating pharmaceutical fraud schemes”. Tarrio, 36, is a high-profile figure who organizes and leads the rightwing Proud Boys in their confrontations with those they believe to be antifa, short for “anti-fascism”, an amorphous leftist movement. The Proud Boys were involved in the deadly insurrection at the Capitol on 6 January. The records uncovered by Reuters are startling because they show that a leader of a far-right group now under intense scrutiny by law enforcement was previously an active collaborator with criminal investigators. Washington police arrested Tarrio in early January when he arrived in the city two days before the Capitol Hill riot. He was charged with possessing two high-capacity rifle magazines, and burning a Black Lives Matter banner during a December demonstration by supporters of Donald Trump. The DC superior court ordered him to leave the city pending a court date in June. Though Tarrio did not take part in the Capitol insurrection, at least five Proud Boys members have been charged in the riot. The FBI previously said Tarrio’s earlier arrest was an effort to pre-empt the events of 6 January. The transcript from 2014 shines a new light on Tarrio’s past connections to law enforcement. During the hearing, the prosecutor and Tarrio’s defense attorney asked a judge to reduce the prison sentence of Tarrio and two co-defendants. They had pleaded guilty in a fraud case related to the relabeling and sale of stolen diabetes test kits. The prosecutor said Tarrio’s information had led to the prosecution of 13 people on federal charges in two separate cases, and had helped local authorities investigate a gambling ring.
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