The new interview is the first insight into the jury’s deliberations in the historic Jan. 6 trial.
Jurors who convicted four Proud Boys leaders of seditious conspiracy reviewed thousands upon thousands of text messages and private chats that the defendants sent in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, 2021 — exchanges prosecutors described as the prelude to a violent effort to keep Donald Trump in power.
But paradoxically, it may have been the absence of key messages that sealed the case for prosecutors.
Andre Mundell, one of the 12 jurors who decided the four-month trial on Thursday, told Vice News that he was convinced that the Proud Boys leaders — including former national chair Enrique Tarrio — had committed seditious conspiracy in part because of the lengths the group took to hide its activities, deleting key messages.
“The Proud Boys didn’t want everybody to know the plan, because then I guess it would have gotten out. And they didn’t want it to get out,” Mundell said in the interview, noting that the thousands of messages they reviewed — extracted from the phones of Tarrio and his co-defendants — were peppered with blank slots where exchanges had been deleted.
“And that’s why the government couldn’t present too much of the evidence that they had already deleted, because it was unrecoverable,” Mundell said. “So, they definitely didn’t want people to know.”
And that wasn’t the only absence of evidence that factored into the jury’s deliberations. Mundell said that he was persuaded by the fact that there wasn’t a single message among the Proud Boys leaders — even after their members contributed to the chaos at the Capitol — urging their allies to withdraw from the riot or stay away from the violence.
“That factored in for me. It showed an absence of evidence of standing down. No one says, ‘no, don’t do this. We’re not going to do this.’ There was none of that,” Mundell said. “And that was probably because they never said it. And the things that were affirming that they were going to be violent. They just kind of let it happen.”
Mundell’s comments are the first insight into the jury’s deliberation in the case of Tarrio and four Proud Boys who prosecutors say were the most crucial drivers of the violence that unfolded at the Capitol on Jan. 6. The Justice Department contends that Tarrio, along with leaders Ethan Nordean, Joe Biggs and Zachary Rehl, spearheaded a conspiracy to prevent Joe Biden from taking office — and were prepared to use force to get their way. A fifth defendant, Dominic Pezzola, was acquitted of seditious conspiracy but convicted of numerous felonies for his own role in the attack — which included igniting the breach of the Capitol itself when he smashed a Senate window with a riot shield.
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Proud Boys juror says group’s deleted messages weighed on jury https://t.co/Uztk22pMxl
— POLITICO (@politico) May 5, 2023
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