A new week brought another increase in the number of suspected informants who interacted with defendants from the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.
Following a motion last week that asserted there were at least 40 undercover informants for the FBI and other agencies involved in the riot, a defense attorney in a high-profile Proud Boys seditious conspiracy case said in a filing on Monday the estimate has been bumped up to 50 due to new information about plain-clothes Metropolitan Police Department officers.
“And just this past weekend, the defense learned that there were at least 10 to 12 additional, previously unknown plain-clothes MPD officers among the Proud Boys,” the filing states. “This brings the total number of informants among defendants on or around Jan. 6 to 50 or more. And there are reasons to suspect the true number is higher.”
BREAKING: Another doozy of a motion filed today by a Proud Boy defense lawyer related to informants, undercover agents
Number of DC Metro undercovers keeps growing: pic.twitter.com/3vOrIUZNPT
— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) April 10, 2023
The case revolves around former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, and four other members — Zachary Rehl, Joe Biggs, Ethan Nordean, Dominic Pezzola — who were indicted in federal court for seditious conspiracy and other offenses related to January 6, 2021, the day a crowd of people entered the U.S. Capitol and disrupted lawmakers who were meeting to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory. They face up to 20 years in prison if convicted of seditious conspiracy.
Informants are used by law enforcement for various investigations, not just those related to January 6, but lawyers for the Proud Boys defendants have made them a centerpiece of their clients’ lengthy trial. An informant for the FBI, who told his handler the Proud Boys “did not do it, nor inspire” the violence, even testified for the defense last month.
Yet it is the sheer number of informants that have fueled concerns not only about intelligence failures leading up to January 6, but also suspicions about how some of them acted in the events leading up to the U.S. Capitol breach and questions about the retention of evidence.
The filing on Monday, excerpts of which were shared on Twitter by American Greatness senior writer Julie Kelly, stressed that new information obtained by the defense is “plainly exculpatory” and claimed that undercover operatives were “planted among the protesters as instigators; not just observers.”
The DOJ has said it will stick to responding to allegations raised by the defense attorneys in court. In a new court filing of its own, the DOJ insisted there is nothing “per se” — Latin for “by itself” — “exculpatory about using confidential human sources to gather” information about people suspected of planning violence.
Roughly 27 months after the chaos on January 6, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia says more than 1,020 arrests have been made in connection to January 6 and notes some 533 defendants have pleaded guilty, including four to a federal charge of seditious conspiracy.