The Justice Department won a huge case on Thursday after charging five members of the Proud Boys militia with seditious conspiracy. Each of the four leaders were found guilty, while the lower-level "soldier" was found not guilty.
According to Andrew Weissmann, former FBI general counsel and top prosecutor for special counsel Robert Mueller's team, the next step from the militia groups is to look at those organizing the conspiracy and that means former President Donald Trump.
There's a huge domestic terrorism problem in this country," Weissmann explained. "This is a really difficult and important case for DOJ to have brought and to have won. And I think that's what you're going to hear about [from Merrick Garland]. But to your point, there's been such a call-and-response relationship to groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and others with the former president that everyone is going to be thinking, 'Okay, you've gotten not just foot soldiers, not just their leaders such as the leader of the Proud Boys, but what about the actual leader of what happened on January 6th?' ... And I think for [special counsel] Jack Smith, it's not that this is evidence, it really makes it that much more important for him, if he can get the proof that they should be charging — yes. I mean, you do not, sort of, omit the leader of an organization. So he has got to be feeling that pressure now."
"A second component of that is that you don't have to be present," Weissmann continued. "You don't have to be the person pulling the trigger, going into the bank and doing the robbery. If you were the mastermind, you're just as responsible. This is just like in a mob case. The boss of the family is not collecting the money and threatening people and doing all of this leg work. Obviously, Jack Smith knows that well, but it's very useful to see that jurors have no problem with that. ... And it's not like the former president didn't want to be present on that day. There were other people, as is so often the case with him, who prevented the worst. It's bad enough, what he did, but you had other people preventing it from being worse. He was planning to be there! And leading them at the scene. But that's no reason not to be able to charge him."
After Garland's press conference about the conviction, Weissann said that folks should not assume that if there is no "connective tissue" between the Proud Boys and Trump that he can't be charged.
"I don't think that's going to happen. I think he is going to be charged," Weissmann explained.
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