Last week, five Proud Boys announced a $100 million lawsuit against the government over their treatment during the January 6th prosecutions. Sources:https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/70474277/tarrio-v-united-states-of-america/https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/ex-soldiers-acceptance-trump-pardon-didnt-constitute-confession-guilt-court-2021-09-23/ https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/proud-boys-leaders-sue-u-s-over-jan-6-prosecutions-90f9f4ce https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/jury-convicts-four-leaders-proud-boys-seditious-conspiracy-related-us-capitol-breach https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/05/enrique-tarrio-prison-sentencing-proud-boys-00114104 https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/proud-boys-leaders-sentenced-prison-roles-jan-6-capitol-breach https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y93jgdvqjo https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/dc-prosecutors-decline-to-charge-ex-proud-boys-leader-after-us-capitol-arrest/3872280/ https://www.salon.com/2020/12/15/how-did-a-proud-boys-leader-with-a-felony-record-get-into-the-white-house/ https://apnews.com/article/ashli-babbitt-wrongful-death-settlement-capitol-riot-9f2e60f9dce01237a1e78271cff82f6a https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/04/us/politics/trump-tarrio-proud-boys-pardon.html https://web.archive.org/web/20170423005743/http://officialproudboys.com/news/the-kids-are-alt-knights/ https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/new-fight-club-ready-street-violence/ https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/fraternal-order-alt-knights-foak/ https://www.flmd.uscourts.gov/local-rules/rule-204-discipline- https://www-media.floridabar.org/uploads/2025/05/2025_11-MAY-Chapter-3-RRTFB-5-29-2025.pdf https://www.justice.gov/pardon/frequently-asked-questionsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Call Zone Media Call Zone Media On January 20th, 2025, Donald Trump was sworn in as president.
Again.
In one of his first acts that very same day.
He signed a proclamation that commuted the sentences of 14 people who played key roles in orchestrating the January 6, 2021 riot at the United States Capitol.
Everyone else, over 1,500 people who'd been charged with crimes in connection with the events that took place that day, was pardoned.
Most of them had already served their time, but the pardons restored their rights to do things like vote, serve on juries, and buy guns.
Hundreds of defendants whose cases were still working their way through the legal system were suddenly relieved of that burden.
Their cases just went away.
And for about 200 of those 1,500 people, that pardon came while they were still in federal custody, serving sentences for the crimes they'd been found guilty of committing.
Among those 200 people, freed with the stroke of the president's pen that day, was Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio.
And I think it was a big win for America, so America's back.
Four months later, he was back in Washington, D.C. with a big announcement.
Cater!
This is our enemy.
These are the people who want to hurt you.
These are the people who want to destroy you.
These are the people who want to take away your freedom.
Loser!
You have nothing better to do than to show up.
Loser!
Cater!
*Cheering*
Oh, I'm sorry.
That's not the announcement.
That's DC neighborhood commissioner Patricia Aguino putting on a one-woman protest against the Proud Boys during that press conference.
This is Enrique Tarrio, Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rio, and Dominic D'Azola.
Versus the United States government.
That's right.
A get-out-of-jail-free card wasn't enough.
They're suing for $100 million.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
Weird Little Guys.
This isn't a typical episode.
I don't know what that actually even means anymore.
None of them really are.
But this isn't the story of one weird little guy.
It's more of a weird little situation, and one that's ongoing.
This lawsuit is very freshly filed, so there will be more to this story.
But it's a story with a lot of weird little characters.
Weird little guys whose stories you may already be familiar with.
And guys whose stories are intertwined with some we've already talked about and others yet to come.
That project I keep saying I'm working on is still on the back burner.
I'll get to it eventually.
You can probably hear in my voice that I'm a little under the weather.
I was sick as a dog all week.
I think I might've finally gotten COVID.
I mean, God only knows because those little test sticks don't really work anymore.
But I finally understand what you all have been talking about when you say you lost your sense of taste and smell.
I mean, I heard the words and I understood intellectually what you meant by them.
But it just doesn't sink in until you've got your tongue pressed onto a lemon and you feel absolutely fucking nothing.
It's weird.
So if that is what it was, I guess that makes me maybe the last person in the world to finally get it.
I was starting to think maybe I really was God's favorite, you know, somehow immune to the worldwide plague.
It's probably some kind of miracle that I managed to escape it for a full five years.
I mean, I was careful, right?
I wear my mask in court, but I got tear gassed at the insurrection in 2021.
I was shoulder to shoulder with America's most unvaccinated, masked and coughing in the haze.
I spent some time in jail in 2020.
I was a committed nail-biter until last year.
I had my grubby little hands in my mouth 16 times an hour during a global pandemic, and I never got it.
I did get really sick in the fall of 2020, but according to the CVS drive-thru nasal swab, that was something else.
Just some disgusting virus I got as a souvenir from an anti-vax rally where a man dressed as George Washington Fell to his knees screaming about how he was America's greatest prayer warrior.
But that's neither here nor there.
Point being, the virus comes for us all.
I'm fine now, but I spent the better part of the week blowing my nose and complaining and not getting any work done.
So here we are again.
The lawsuit we're talking about today was filed on June 6, 2025.
The plaintiffs are five Proud Boys.
All five were convicted by a jury of seditious conspiracy for their actions leading up to and during the breach of the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021.
Tarrio was not physically present in D.C. on the day of the riot, but he was central to planning the attack that ultimately transpired.
And as the leader, Taria received the longest sentence of any January 6th defendant.
22 years.
Ethan Nordean was sentenced to 18 years, Joe Biggs got 17 years, Zachary Real got 15, and Dominic Pazzola was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
All five were released after Trump's proclamation about the pardons, but of those five, only Enrique Taria was actually pardoned.
Real, Nordin, Pozzolla, and Biggs did not receive pardons.
They were on that short list of high-profile rioters who only had their sentences commuted.
And in this lawsuit, they claim their rights were violated.
Obviously.
But we'll get to that.
The suit names as its defendants the United States of America, FBI Special Agent Nicole Miller in her individual capacity, And John Doe's 1 through 10. These John Doe defendants are as yet unidentified employees of the FBI and DOJ.
It's not really unusual at this stage of a suit like this to have these John or Jane Doe defendants.
you can identify individual actors through the discovery process.
The thing about the listed parties that did catch my eye, though, is that...
Every lawsuit is different.
The facts are going to be specific to the case.
But the structure of a civil complaint is more or less always pretty much the same.
There's a pretty bog-standard structure and a lot of boilerplate language.
There's no getting around it.
You can't get fancy with it.
There's a required format.
At the top, you have your little introduction, and then you list and describe the parties, you spell out the justification for jurisdiction and venue, and then comes the statement of facts, where you tell a little story about what happened.
And that's followed by your cause of action.
Why are you suing?
Specifically, what legal theories are we operating off of here?
At the bottom, you say what kind of damages you're trying to recover, and whether or not you're asking for a jury trial, and then it's signed, dated, and filed.
There's more to it than that.
Get a lawyer if you're trying to write a lawsuit.
This isn't a crash course on the federal rules of civil procedure or anything like that, but you get the idea.
Everybody's operating off the same template.
No matter how you're filling in the blanks here, we're using the same format.
So in the section where you list the parties, we can all expect to see the parties, the people named in the lawsuit, the people or entities who are party to the case, the plaintiffs and the defendants, the people who were doing the suing and the people being sued.
And in this complaint, we...
We've got our five Proud Boy plaintiffs and the named defendants, FBI Special Agent Nicole Miller and John Doe's 1-10.
But for some reason, this section also lists a bunch of other people and organizations who are not parties to the lawsuit, like the FBI, the DOJ, former D.C. Metropolitan Police Lieutenant Shane Lamond, and a confidential informant that the suit calls Jen Lowe.
Despite readily available public information that Jen Lowe is a pseudonym used by a woman whose real name is Jenny Lynn Salinas.
And this section of the complaint also lists the Proud Boys as an organization.
And it's described like this.
The Proud Boys are an organization of patriotic political activists dedicated to preserving and promoting Western civilization in general and American society in particular.
The Proud Boys organization and its members have been subject to systemic harassment and mischaracterization by far left-wing organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, and politically biased state and federal prosecutors.
I know it sounds like I'm nitpicking, and I am, but this section of the complaint is called parties.
It's for listing the parties to the lawsuit, not editorializing about various characters in the story that you're telling.
It's sloppy and weird.
But I think I know why.
And I think it's the same reason that the complaint was filed in federal court in the Middle District of Florida.
See, at first I thought this was some kind of mistake.
It wouldn't be the first time this particular attorney was connected to a lawsuit that was accidentally filed in the wrong district.
Because Enrique Tarrio famously lives in Miami, which is not in the middle district of Florida.
But in justifying the chosen venue, the complaint notes that one of the plaintiffs does reside in the middle district of Florida.
Though it misspells the word one, and it doesn't specify which one.
For what it's worth, it's Joe Biggs.
The Proud Boys owe the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in D.C. over $3 million.
And according to their most recent filings related to collecting that money, Joe Biggs lives in Volusia County.
So, that's fair.
They can file in the Middle District of Florida.
And venue shopping is normal.
They could have chosen to file this in a handful of different federal court districts.
The plaintiffs live all over the place.
It's pretty normal to choose the court you think will work out best for you, for whatever reason.
But I think they chose the Middle District of Florida because that's the only federal court district where their attorney is a member of the bar.
I'll admit it.
I was surprised when I saw who they'd gotten to represent them.
And maybe I shouldn't have been.
He's like a bad penny.
He just keeps turning up.
Because there, at the very bottom of this very weird 28-page complaint, there's the signature.
Augustus Invictus Esquire.
He's come up a handful of times on this show, but it's never really the right time to tell you about him.
A couple of weeks ago in the episode about the lawsuit filed by Unite the Right protesters against the city of Charlottesville because the police weren't nice to them during their Nazi rally, he's the one who ghostwrote that lawsuit.
Months ago in that episode about those astroturfed marches against Sharia law, he was the organizer and headline speaker of the march in Orlando.
And of course, in the episode...
It's going to be a long, strange story when the day finally comes for him to get his own episodes, but that day is not today.
He is, among other things, a practicing attorney.
On his website, he bills himself as the attorney for the damned.
That site, which is ostensibly an advertisement for his legal services, is dominated by this gigantic screenshot of a Charlotte Observer article about his own acquittal in 2022 on a domestic violence charge.
And on the site, he proudly displays his own mugshot next to a professional headshot, juxtaposing these two images to show potential clients that sure, he's a professional attorney, but He gets it.
And he won.
And you can too.
Attorney for the Damned is a mantle that's been claimed by others before him and applied to others still.
It's the title of two separate books about a different Ohio-born attorney, Clarence Darrow, who you may remember from the Scopes Monkey Trial.
Another book with the same title was written by an attorney who provides state-appointed services to those deemed criminally insane.
And it was the title of an article about death row appeals in a 1987 issue of the American Bar Association Journal.
It's a phrase that gets tossed around.
But in my mind, Augustus Invictus is the attorney for the damned in the same way Edgar Steele was.
Like Invictus, it was Steele who gave himself the nickname.
And in Steele's case, it was after he unsuccessfully defended the Aryan Nations in a lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The plaintiffs in that case were members of a family who'd been shot at by the security guards at a Nazi compound in Idaho.
Steele eventually died in prison in 2014.
He was three years into a 50-year sentence for trying to hire someone to murder his wife with a pipe bomb.
So what I mean is, Augustus Invictus is a movement lawyer.
He's not just their lawyer, he's a fellow traveler.
Back in 2017, when he was the headline speaker at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, he was also a proud boy.
Augustus Invictus was second in command of a short-lived group called the Fraternal Order of Alt Knights.
It was a group within a group.
It was a subset of Proud Boys who were especially committed to violence.
And it was fully sanctioned by Proud Boys' leadership.
Shortly after the group was formed by Kyle Chapman in the spring of 2017, Proud Boys magazine ran an article with the headline, The Kids Are Alt Knights.
And the subhead was, Based Stickman Organizes Official Military Arm of the Proud Boys.
Based Stickman was the nickname that Kyle Chapman earned after beating a counter-protester with a stick at a Trump rally in March of 2017.
He wasn't even a Proud Boy at the time, but after the video of the assault went viral, he was recruited and joined.
Proud Boy's founder Gavin McGinnis took advantage of Chapman's viral internet fame and had him on as a guest on his show several times in the weeks that followed.
McGinnis even claims that he considered making Chapman the president of the entire organization, but settled on endorsing Chapman's leadership of this new militant wing.
In May of 2017, Chapman invited Augustus Invictus to speak at a free speech rally in Boston.
Invictus, who'd already lost one run for Senate and was about to announce another one, advocated for armed revolution over political activism.
And he urged the crowd to take up arms, because the civil war had already started.
When you come to a point when political parties are ineffective, and speech and court petitions and all the rest mean nothing, you have nothing left but force of arms.
If I let myself get going down this path, we'll be stuck on this tangent for months.
But the point is, they didn't hire Augustus Invictus because he was the finest lawyer money could buy.
I'm fairly familiar with his work, and I would argue that he is very much not.
They hired him because they have a history, and they share a belief system.
And he was very available.
He's been struggling to make ends meet for the last few years, I think in part because people are hesitant to hire an attorney who might not make it to their court date.
He is, at this very moment, out on bond.
He was convicted in October of 2024 on the felony charge of burning an object with the intent to intimidate for his participation in that Nazi torch march at the University of Virginia back in 2017.
In January of this year, a judge imposed a sentence of nine months in jail, but the execution of that sentence is currently on hold, pending his appeal.
It's not ideal for an attorney to be convicted of a crime.
It can have serious consequences for their license.
Now, the rules vary from court to court.
In the state of Florida, the rules are actually extremely clear.
Attorneys must self-report any felony conviction to the state bar within 10 days of the conviction order being entered.
They're then automatically suspended from the bar.
And the rules very specifically say that this suspension does remain in effect during any appeals process for the criminal conviction.
An attorney convicted of a felony can challenge their suspension from the bar, but it is, by order of the Florida Supreme Court, automatic.
Those are the rules.
They're pretty clear.
But they don't seem to have been applied here.
I have no explanation for this.
At a bond hearing earlier this year, Invictus' criminal defense attorney offered a vague assertion that his client had self-reported the conviction to the Florida State Bar as required, but says they told him that they wouldn't make any determination about suspending his license or disbarring him until after the appeal had concluded.
That's what his attorney said, that's all I can tell you.
That's not consistent with the rules as they're written, and there's no documentation I can find about this either way.
But if you take them at their word, that the Florida bar said it's okay for him to keep practicing law in a Florida state court, I can accept that.
Florida's a weird place.
But every jurisdiction where an attorney practices law has its own rules.
And I did look up the local rules in the Middle District of Florida.
That's the only federal court, aside from the U.S. Supreme Court, where Invictus is a member of the bar.
And in the Middle District of Florida, Local Rule 2.04b states that any attorney admitted to practice in the district must report any felony conviction within 14 days.
Suspension from the bar is automatic.
Attorneys in this position can file a petition to stay the automatic suspension, and that petition has to be heard by a judge.
I think if it came before a judge, I would be able to find evidence that this happened, and I can't.
Absence of proof isn't proof of absence, I get that, it's possible that it happened, but I can't find anything.
And I don't know why he would be allowed to continue to practice law under these conditions.
It's not clear to me if the Proud Boys lawyer is even going to be allowed to appear in court on this case.
It's even more unclear what anyone's plan is if their lawyer is unexpectedly required to report to jail.
His current situation is fluid.
The judge who granted him his appeal bond could decide at any time that he's changed his mind.
And he's going to impose the sentence next week.
When Enrique Tarrio spoke to a reporter from the Wall Street Journal about this lawsuit, he said that they'd had no trouble at all finding an attorney to take the case, saying, quote, we were able to shop.
And he claims he spoke to more than a dozen law firms, adding, I believe attorneys are going to do backflips trying to get J6ers on board with a lot of lawsuits.
And if this suit proves successful, that may be true down the line.
But I'm not sure it's been true in his experience.
Because if he had the pick of the litter, I don't think he would have picked Augustus Invictus.
And the press conference he held to announce filing this suit last week wasn't actually the first one.
Back in February of this year, four months before the suit was actually filed, Tario held a press conference outside the Capitol building.
Let me be clear.
I'm not talking about violent retribution.
I'm talking about something much more powerful.
Accountability and the rule of law.
That is why today we are announcing a lawsuit against the DOJ.
And at that press conference back in February, Tario said they'd already raised tons of money for their legal defense, all in cryptocurrency, believe it or not.
And he also said they already had a lawyer lined up.
Everything was ready to go, and they were about to file.
There's one question yet.
Who exactly is suing?
Who are the plagists?
Do you already have a lawyer?
We do have a lawyer.
We'll be announcing that in the coming weeks.
But right now, it's the five of us that are going to be suing the DOJ.
Just a few minutes after that press conference ended, Enrique Tarrio was arrested for simple assault after striking the outstretched arm of a woman holding up her cell phone to take a video of him.
But prosecutors ultimately declined to pursue the case.
And the lawsuit still didn't materialize.
And then, last month, on May 3rd, 2025, Enrique Tarrio took his mom out to dinner.
If you know anything about Enrique Tarrio, you know he's fiercely loyal to his mother, Zuni Duarte.
He's kind of a mama's boy.
And normally I would leave a guy's mom out of this.
But Tarrio's mother has been deeply involved in her son's political activities for years.
It's her name on the incorporation paperwork for the business that has processed online payments for Proud Boys merchandise for years.
And since the events of January 6th, she's been a vocal supporter of her son and his co-defendants.
So last month, they're out to dinner.
And they're out to dinner at a rather particular restaurant.
They were invited to dine at Mar-a-Lago by some unnamed member of the club.
And during dinner that evening, this unnamed friend of theirs introduced them to the President of the United States.
As he was crossing the patio where they were eating.
That night, Tario tweeted, Zuni Tario and I just had a great conversation with POTUS.
He called me and my mother over while we were at dinner and said he was sorry for what Joe Biden did to all J6ers.
He knew the hardships me and my family faced for three long years.
He knew how many times they moved me.
And he said he's working on making things right.
I thanked him for giving me my life back.
He replied with, I love you guys.
To all the J6ers, he wanted me to send y 'all a message.
He said, thank you.
Thank you.
Working to make things right.
What could that possibly mean?
Tario's already been pardoned.
Trump pardoned him.
He's free.
His conviction is wiped away.
He's technically still a convicted felon for a 2013 conviction for his role in a scheme to resell a million dollars worth of stolen diabetic test strips, but that's not what Trump meant.
I mean, technically, Trump could pardon him for that, too.
It was a federal crime, but that's not it.
That's not what he means.
This Saturday night meeting on the patio at Mar-a-Lago was just a day after the announcement that the administration was prepared to settle the wrongful death lawsuit filed by the estate of Ashley Babbitt.
Ashley Babbitt was the January 6th rioter who was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer as she was attempting to climb through a broken window during the assault on the Capitol building.
In a sane world, one with normal rules, I don't think that lawsuit had legs.
I mean, maybe, maybe they could have gotten it in front of a jury, but I don't think that jury would have awarded her family any money.
Settling it was a choice.
It was a message.
It was, perhaps in the minds of those who think the rioters did nothing wrong, an attempt to make it right.
The government is going to pay out nearly $5 million to Babbitt's family.
Her death is...
You may not think so.
But I'll never be happy to see someone get shot and killed by a police officer.
But let's be so honest.
It wasn't a wrongful death.
I hate to see a cop fire his gun.
and I never wanna see that.
But if it's gonna happen, I think this is one of those moments where you kind of have to admit it made sense in the moment.
The lawsuit was never a winner.
But they settled.
And then, suddenly, here's a cavalcade of insurrectionists at the court's doorstep with their hands held out for $100 million.
And for what?
According to the complaint, their rights were violated.
Specifically, their Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment rights.
They're also bringing a claim of malicious prosecution.
We'll take these one at a time, briefly.
The first count is the Fourth Amendment violations.
That's the one that protects you from unreasonable searches and seizures, the one that means a cop has to get a warrant to search your stuff.
Good amendment.
I'm a big fan.
This one's a little all over the place.
There is a rather serious allegation here that the government violated attorney-client privilege by illegally listening in on phone calls and reading text messages between the criminal defendants and their attorneys during the course of the investigation and trial.
If that happened, that's very serious.
I'm not going to weigh in on whether it did happen in this case, but it's something that can and does happen, and it would absolutely be a gross violation of their rights if the government was listening in when they were having privileged conversations with their lawyers about their criminal case.
If there's evidence that that happened, that should get aired out in court and heard by a jury.
The other claims made here are...
The opening allegation under this count reads, First, the defendants had no probable cause to investigate or prosecute the plaintiffs.
The defendants were aware that no evidence supported the allegations and had to use underhanded and unconstitutional methods in order to convict the plaintiffs.
Oh.
No probable cause at all?
Like, there was not any reason to suspect that maybe any one of them had potentially committed some kind of crime.
Like, for example, what if there was video footage of one of them ripping a riot shield out of a police officer's hands and then using that riot shield to break a window, then becoming the first rioter to physically breach the United States Capitol building?
I don't know.
What if there was something like that?
No probable cause.
Some of the other alleged Fourth Amendment violations here are, quote, I'm not sure that has anything to do with the Fourth Amendment.
I mean, you could argue that the text messages themselves were improperly obtained.
That's a Fourth Amendment issue.
But the way a prosecutor characterizes the evidence when it's being presented, It doesn't really implicate the Fourth Amendment.
I mean, I don't know.
I'm not a lawyer.
The second count is a Fifth Amendment violation.
They claim they were denied their right to due process under the law, because the law as it was applied here was so vague that a reasonable person would have no way of knowing they were breaking it.
Quote, because you can be convicted for conspiracy with people over whom you have no authority and to whom you gave no orders.
Rather mere statements of approval, agreement, and enthusiasm are apparently enough to form a criminal conspiracy, provided the points of view are offensive enough to the employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice, no matter how attenuated from criminal action they may have been.
If I ever do get a whole series of episodes out about Augustus Invictus, there will probably be An hour-long rant about his steadfast refusal to accept the legal definition of conspiracy.
I feel like I've been through this in his work several times, so I'm just going to let it go for now.
I didn't bother to dig into the specifics of the prosecution's theory of this case, but one of the real stumbling blocks in having this conversation with anyone is that most people don't really understand.
What it means to be part of a criminal conspiracy.
You don't have to go to a special meeting where every single person involved gets together and discusses a specific plan and then everyone agrees to specifically carry out that plan.
It's way more nebulous than that.
In a way that is actually kind of scary.
But at its most basic, it just means that two or more people Agreed to do something unlawful.
They don't have to even succeed at doing it.
They just have to make some concrete action in that direction.
And not everyone involved needs to know everyone else.
And not everyone involved needs to know the whole plan.
So if this core group of conspirators plan to, I don't know, do something like...
And then they took some kind of concrete steps towards making that happen, like flying to D.C. and then assembling in a group and then marching towards the Capitol and then breaking into it.
That's a conspiracy.
But when Dominic Pozzola and Ethan Nordean crawled through that broken window and breached the Capitol building, And encourage the crowd behind them to come with them.
That could be too.
The planning doesn't have to take place at a second location a week beforehand.
It can take place right there.
And the thing about a conspiracy is that once it's in motion, you're on the hook for more than just your own actions.
And more than just the actions you think you agreed to ahead of time.
So there's a lot of nitty-gritty here about what exactly is alleged by the government, what was argued at trial, but my guess is this claim in the lawsuit rests squarely on a personal disagreement with what is really just the legal definition of a criminal conspiracy.
The third claim is that the government violated their Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial.
It mostly just copies and pastes those same allegations that the government illegally monitored privileged attorney-client communication, but it also claims that the government intimidated a key defense witness and frightened him out of testifying at trial.
The witness in question is former D.C. Police Lieutenant Shane Lamond.
He's a former police lieutenant.
Because he was sentenced last week to 18 months in prison for obstruction of justice and making false statements.
Charges that arose out of his close friendship with Enrique Tarrio in the months leading up to January 6th.
He'd been illegally leaking information to Tarrio about the police investigation into him.
In the weeks before January 6th, the D.C. police were investigating an incident that took place at a Proud Boy march in D.C. in December of 2020.
The group tore a Black Lives Matter banner off of a black church and then burned it in the street.
That church now owns the Proud Boys' trademark, and the Proud Boys owe the church $3 million.
Patario's lawsuit alleges that the FBI threatened LeMond with obstruction charges if he were to go through with his plan to testify for the defense in Patario's seditious conspiracy trial.
And the suit alleges that this caused Lamont to change his mind about testifying.
I don't actually have any doubt that the FBI had a conversation with Shane Lamont.
They were investigating him.
And he was charged and convicted of that crime.
It wasn't a threat.
yet they were conducting an investigation.
Whether or not that conversation also functioned to some degree as an intentional witness intimidation tactic is That's not the most likely explanation.
It would be very hard to prove.
And it's just not interesting to me.
The fourth and final count in the complaint is malicious prosecution.
And this threw me for a loop.
Quote, The defendants prosecuted the plaintiffs despite knowing that the plaintiffs neither participated in the events of January 6th nor organized and coordinated them.
Indeed, they had to invent a whole new legal theory, stack the jury, breach attorney-client communications, and embed a paid government informant in order to convict them.
I'm sorry, back up for a second?
What did that say?
That the government They didn't even participate.
It's not just that they didn't plan or organize it and it wasn't seditious conspiracy.
They didn't even participate?
That's remarkable.
It goes on, The defendants made, influenced, and or participated in the decision to prosecute the plaintiffs, for which prosecution there was no probable cause.
and which caused the plaintiff to suffer a deprivation of liberty.
The defendant's misconduct directly resulted in the unlawful prosecution and continued deprivation of the plaintiff's liberty in violation of their constitutional rights.
No probable cause.
None at all.
The problem with this theory is, it can't be malicious prosecution if you're guilty.
It straight up can't.
It's not.
Gray, there's no but, there's no exception.
That's not how it works.
It's not malicious prosecution if you were guilty of the crime.
And they know that.
They even put the definition right in there.
Quote, To make out a claim for malicious prosecution, a plaintiff generally must show three things.
One, That the criminal proceeding was initiated or continued by the defendant without probable cause.
Two, that the defendant instituted the proceeding maliciously.
And three, that the proceedings have terminated in favor of the accused.
So if, for example, some politically motivated prosecutor charged you with a totally fake, made-up crime that you didn't do, Just to punish you because he didn't like you.
But the jury saw through it, and they acquitted you.
You could sue for malicious prosecution.
What he did was malicious, unfounded, and the proceedings terminated in your favor, meaning you were not convicted.
But that's not what happened here.
They were lawfully, legally convicted by a jury.
This isn't a criminal appeal, right?
They're not appealing the conviction on the basis of improprieties at trial.
This is a civil lawsuit.
I think they're choosing to interpret terminated in favor of the accused to mean the pardon.
That the pardon was exonerative and that the pardon was part of the criminal process, thus ending it in their favor.
I'd always had the general impression that accepting a pardon required admitting guilt.
And I think that is a common belief.
But it might not be true.
A 1915 Supreme Court case is generally understood to imply that, but not everyone agrees.
And the most recent test of that theory was a 2019 case in the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals that held that a convicted war criminal Wasn't admitting he did it when he accepted President Trump's pardon.
So, it may be a gray area.
I'm thinking about doing a mini-sode on those two cases, but don't hold me to it.
And I didn't have time this week, but I do have a plan to get a real lawyer on the phone to answer some of our burning questions about this particular legal quagmire.
So, I'm not a lawyer, but for what it's worth, The current version of the frequently asked questions on the Department of Justice's webpage for the Office of the Pardon Attorney says this.
A pardon is an expression of the President's forgiveness and can be granted in recognition of the applicant's acceptance of responsibility for the crime and established good conduct for a significant period of time after a conviction or completion of sentence.
It does not signify innocence.
So when the president pardons you, it just wipes out the negative effects of the conviction, right?
So you're no longer convicted of that crime.
You can vote again.
You can get guns again.
You can serve on a jury again.
You're no longer a convicted felon.
If you're still in jail, you come out of jail.
If you still owe restitution, You don't owe any more restitution, but you can't claw back restitution you already paid.
And it doesn't mean the president is saying, this crime never happened.
It just means you no longer have consequences for this crime.
But like I said, there are varying interpretations of whether or not the act of accepting the pardon means that you are admitting guilt.
I don't think anyone interprets pardons to be exonerations, but I don't know.
I guess there's something for everyone out there.
And I was really going down the rabbit hole here, reading legal journal articles about the particulars on the issue, when I realized it doesn't even matter.
It doesn't matter if a pardon means you're innocent or you're guilty because of the five plaintiffs in this lawsuit.
Only one of them was pardoned.
Enrique Tarrio received a full presidential pardon for his January 6 convictions, but the other four didn't.
They only had their sentences commuted.
So even if we're on board for this legal theory that the pardon made Enrique Tarrio innocent and thus enables him to sue for malicious prosecution, the other four can't.
They're still guilty.
Their convictions still stand.
They haven't been pardoned.
And I guess that fatal flaw in the plan must have occurred to their lawyer, too.
Because shortly before filing the lawsuit, those four plaintiffs, Biggs, Nordean, Pizzola, and Reel, all filed applications for full pardons.
Those applications, which the lawsuit claims are currently being considered, are inexplicably attached as an exhibit to the complaint.
In full.
Unredacted.
It has addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, names of family members, including ex-wives and minor children.
It has their goddamn social security numbers.
It's a genuinely shocking and dangerous act of negligence on the part of their attorney.
But aside from accidentally exposing four of his clients to identity theft...
One of the pages of the application asks the applicant to briefly describe the offense they were convicted of.
And under that, it asks, And to that question, Ethan Nordean wrote, It would be untrue for me to accept responsibility for what I did not do, and really not possible.
Dominic Pozzolla conceded that he may be guilty of trespassing.
But when it comes to the felonies, I feel as though the prosecution of the felony charges were 100% politically motivated.
Zachary Real wrote, I never denied that I thought the election was stolen.
I still believe that the election was stolen, but I am happy to see President Trump is back in office and looking forward to being a productive member of society again.
This pardon will help with that.
That was one sentence.
There's just the one period at the end of that for Zachary Real, and both president and member are spelled wrong.
You know, no hate to the man if he can't spell, but this is a pretty important document.
Maybe get somebody to help you.
Joe Biggs' essay questions were apparently written on a separate sheet of paper, which is not included.
I do hope they remembered to include the attachments when they sent that to the pardon attorney.
That would be so sloppy.
On his application, Zachary Real notes that he's currently living off of his savings, and he really hopes he's not going to have to sell his truth social stock to make ends meet.
This case was only just filed on Friday, June 6th, so as I'm writing and recording this, no real time has passed for any work to have been done on the case.
The government hasn't filed anything in response, and there's been no public comment from anyone involved aside from Tarrio himself.
We'll just have to wait and see what happens.
I talked a little bit about my own experiences on January 6th on an episode a few months ago, the episode about Matthew Huddle, the January 6th defendant who was shot and killed during a traffic stop just days after receiving his pardon.
But surprisingly, Writing this episode didn't really call to mind my own memories of that day.
It did remind me of another day, though.
It was a lifetime ago.
But do you remember September 29th, 2020?
I do.
The days run together when you work from home, but I remember the whole day that day.
Because I had a very weird day.
I had to get up early.
And drive an hour to Richmond to go to court.
I'd been arrested earlier in the summer while covering the protests against police brutality.
It was a bullshit charge, and they knew it, but that doesn't really matter.
We don't have to get into it.
And when I got to court that morning, they told me that they were going to drop my charge.
And they handed me something to sign, you know, just standard procedure, sign this, we'll dismiss your case.
Never sign anything you haven't read.
Because I read the form.
And it said that by signing it, I was admitting that I was guilty of a crime.
And they're still dismissing the charge.
I wasn't going to be convicted of it.
But I was putting on paper that I did it.
Which, I didn't.
So, I balked.
They backed down.
I didn't sign it.
My charge got dropped.
Everything ended happily.
It took another few months to regain full use and sensation of my left hand, because they'd left me handcuffed in a folding chair in the jail parking garage for so long back in July, but that's not the point of the story.
No, because my clearest memory of September 29th, 2020, was later that evening.
I was sitting on a friend's couch watching TV, and I nearly choked to death on my seltzer when I heard this.
Are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia groups and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities, as we saw in Kenosha and as we've seen in Portland?
Are you prepared to specifically do it?
I would say almost everything I see is from the left wing, not from the right wing.
So what are you saying?
I'm willing to do anything.
I want to see peace.
Then do it, sir.
Say it.
Do it.
Say it.
Do you want to call them?
What do you want to call them?
Give me a name.
Give me a name.
Who would you like me to condemn?
Proud Boys.
Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.
But I'll tell you what.
I'll tell you what.
Somebody's got to do something about Antifa and the left.
Stand back and stand by.
Somebody's got to do something about the left.
Won't someone rid me of these troublesome anti-fascists, right?
I would love to know what the President of the United States and the leader of the fascist street gang that tried to steal an election for him talked about for ten minutes on the patio of the President's private club last month.
I really would.
I don't think we ever will.
But just a few weeks after that conversation, There's Enrique Tarrio, boldly asking for $100 million from the United States government.
I don't think he'll get $100 million, but I do believe he's going to get a payout.
I'm not the only one who sees that on the horizon.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse tweeted a news story about the lawsuit, adding, Expect a fixed, sue-and-settle outcome with MAGA-DOJ.
Taxpayer resources to political allies is their specialty.
Now this is pure speculation.
This is my own personal opinion.
It's not an assertion of fact.
I'm not basing this on anything concrete, and it is, let me be clear, my opinion.
I don't think this is a real lawsuit.
I mean, it's filed in a real court.
It mostly conforms to the federal rules of civil procedure.
It looks like a lawsuit.
It quacks like a duck, you know?
But it kind of feels like everyone involved knows that this doesn't need to hold up.
It doesn't have to have a strong legal foundation.
It doesn't matter that the guy they hired has never won a case and might be in jail by the time anyone's trying to argue a motion.
It doesn't need to convince a jury.
It's not really a lawsuit.
It's an invitation.
It's an outstretched hand waiting to be warmly clasped to close a handshake deal.
It opens the door for Trump to make good on his promise to make things right.
They can just settle and write everybody a big fat check.
The Proud Boys are standing back and standing by.
and they might be about to get very, very rich.
Music Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's research written and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gakin.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at weirdlittleguyspodcast at gmail.com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
