The Proud Boys have been set up to take the fall for Donald Trump as the instigator of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, a lawyer told jurors at the trial of members of the extremist group.
“It was Donald Trump’s words. It was his motivation. It was his anger that caused what occurred on January 6th in your amazing and beautiful city,” said Nayib Hassan, a lawyer for the Proud Boy’s national chair Enrique Tarrio during closing arguments in the trial Tuesday, according to Politico.
“It was not Enrique Tarrio. They want to use Enrique Tarrio as a scapegoat for Donald Trump and those in power.”
Tarrio, along with four other Proud Boys leaders, is accused of masterminding the attack on the Capitol in 2021. Prosecutors say they feared a post-Trump America and devised the insurrection in an attempt to keep him in power.
But Hassan said it was Trump who incited the crowd at a rally on Jan. 6, requesting Proud Boy members to “stand back and stand by” during a debate with Biden in September 2020, and telling attendees at a Jan. 6 rally in Washington D.C. to “fight like hell” just minutes before they stormed the building.
Tarrio, meanwhile, was in a Baltimore hotel room during the attack, Hassan said – though prosecutors say he was communicating with rioters via social media and through chat.
“Make no mistake,” prosecutors say Tarrio told a group of Proud Boys in a private chat. “We did this.”
