Two days after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a top intelligence officer in the Washington, D.C., police department sent an encrypted message to one of his best and most unusual sources: Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the far-right group the Proud Boys.
The officer, Lt. Shane Lamond, warned Mr. Tarrio that “the feds” were locking people up because of the riot, adding that he hoped that “none of your guys were among them.” When Mr. Tarrio responded that, at least for the moment, his men seemed to be fine, the lieutenant seemed relieved.
“Of course I can’t say it officially,” Mr. Lamond wrote, “but personally I support you all and don’t want to see your group’s name or reputation dragged through the mud.”
That message, which proved to be horribly misguided, was representative of the fraught relationship between the lieutenant and the far-right leader, a complicated bond that led last year Mr. Lamond being charged with obstruction of justice and lying to federal agents about passing sensitive law enforcement information to Mr. Tarrio.
On Monday, Mr. Lamond’s criminal trial is set to begin in Federal District Court in Washington. Mr. Tarrio, who was convicted last spring of seditious conspiracy for his role in the Capitol attack, is expected to be brought to court from prison as a witness for the defense.
The trial will lean heavily on hundreds of private messages that Mr. Lamond and Mr. Tarrio exchanged over more than two years. They offer a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the chaotic “Stop the Steal” protests that rocked Washington in the months after President Donald J. Trump lost the 2020 election.
The jurors will likely get to see how Mr. Lamond was initially able to pry useful information out of Mr. Tarrio about the Proud Boys’ plans and movements surrounding two enormous pro-Trump rallies in Washington that took place in November and December 2020.
Mr. Tarrio, the messages show, often told Mr. Lamond how many members of his group were attending the rallies and the general routes they planned to take.
But jurors may also be shown how Mr. Lamond failed to capitalize fully on the bond he had built with the far-right leader when it came to the most violent of the pro-Trump events: the one on Jan. 6.
His inability to leverage his relationship with Mr. Tarrio to get any sense of what the group intended to do that day was not unlike the F.B.I.’s own failure to use the many informants that it, too, had in the Proud Boys and another far-right group — the Oath Keepers militia — to get a preview of what those organizations had planned for Jan. 6.
The government contends that Mr. Lamond crossed the line in his dealings with Mr. Tarrio by not only extracting information from him, but also by providing him with illegal tips about law enforcement activity concerning him and his compatriots.
Prosecutors say, for instance, that in December 2020 he gave Mr. Tarrio inside details about a police investigation into the Proud Boys’ role in burning a banner at a Black church in Washington after one of the Stop the Steal events. Weeks later, prosecutors say, Mr. Lamond warned Mr. Tarrio that he was going to be arrested for the act.
Mark Schamel, a lawyer for Mr. Lamond, declined to comment.
For years before Jan. 6, Mr. Tarrio and other Proud Boys leaders cultivated close ties with the police in cities where they planned to hold events. Their ostensible purpose for building those relationships, Mr. Tarrio has said, was to ensure communications with the authorities and to maintain separation on the streets from leftist counterprotesters.
But the Proud Boys have often benefited from their bonds with law enforcement, which has at times appeared to side with them, especially when they have squared off against leftists who are openly critical of the police. The trial of Mr. Lamond will serve as a sort of cautionary tale along those lines, depicting the challenges that officers face in getting close — but not too close — to the political extremists they are meant to monitor and police.
When Mr. Lamond first encountered Mr. Tarrio in July 2019 at a right-wing rally in Washington, he was an intelligence specialist who had spent more than 20 years in the Metropolitan Police Department. The two men quickly struck up what appeared to be a congenial — and mutually beneficial — relationship, their messages show.
They called each “brother” and occasionally met for drinks at one of Mr. Tarrio’s favorite watering holes near Union Station. Perhaps seeking to ingratiate himself to his source, Mr. Lamond often painted himself as a political ally, insulting the Black Lives Matter movement and calling Mr. Tarrio in early November 2020, after Mr. Trump’s electoral defeat was officially announced, to offer his condolences.
At the same time, however, he was constantly pumping Mr. Tarrio for information about the Proud Boys and their plans — especially after it was clear that Mr. Trump and his allies were going to challenge his loss not only in the courts but also on the streets.
Often fielding questions from his colleagues in the police department and from agents in the F.B.I. and Secret Service, Mr. Lamond persuaded Mr. Tarrio to keep him informed about the Proud Boys’ movements as hundreds of members of the group came to Washington for pro-Trump rallies on both Nov. 14 and Dec. 12.
It was that last event, prosecutors say, that led Mr. Lamond into trouble. After the rally ended, the Proud Boys stayed on the streets after dark and ultimately vandalized the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church.
As the police began to investigate the episode, Mr. Tarrio confessed on social media to having burned a Black Lives Matter banner hanging outside the building. Prosecutors say that Mr. Lamond illegally informed Mr. Tarrio that the act of vandalism would not be looked at as a hate crime and later tipped him off to the fact that a warrant for his arrest had been issued in early January, just days before the Capitol attack.
The bond the two men formed appears to have been viewed with a similar measure of skepticism inside their two very different organizations.
Around the time of the church attack, Mr. Lamond texted a colleague to tell her he was meeting Mr. Tarrio in person for a beer. She immediately cautioned him against it.
“Is that smart?” the colleague wrote.
A few days later, Mr. Tarrio himself took heat in one of the Proud Boys’ private group chats from a compatriot who expressed concern about his “relationship with law enforcement.”
“The rest of us,” the Proud Boy member wrote, “don’t have this level of faith and trust in the pigs.”
And yet the men remained in close contact, often texting or speaking several times a day in the weeks leading up to, and after, Jan. 6. Mr. Tarrio was not in Washington that day because the judge who handled his arrest on the vandalism charges ordered him to leave the city immediately.
But even though he was not on the ground in Washington, Mr. Tarrio was charged and eventually found guilty of seditious conspiracy with three other leaders of the Proud Boys.
Mr. Tarrio had initially planned on calling Mr. Lamond as a witness in the sedition trial in an effort to persuade the jury that he could hardly have committed sedition if he was in close touch with a high-ranking police officer on the eve of Jan. 6.
But Mr. Lamond ultimately refused to take the stand for Mr. Tarrio, largely because of concerns by his lawyers about the government’s investigation into their relationship. Now, however, he intends to call the former Proud Boy to the stand to discuss the same subject at his own trial.
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