Proud Boy leader Joseph Biggs sentenced to 17 years for Jan. 6 crimes

A former leader in the far-right Proud Boys group was sentenced Thursday to 17 years in prison, just shy of the longest punishment imposed on a participant in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capito

By Rachel Weiner and Tom Jackman

A former leader in the far-right Proud Boys group was sentenced Thursday to 17 years in prison, just shy of the longest punishment imposed on a participant in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

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“That day broke our tradition of peaceful transfer of power,” said U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly as he sentenced Joseph Biggs, 39, of Florida. “We don’t have it anymore.”

Biggs was one of four Proud Boys found guilty at trial earlier this year of engaging in a seditious conspiracy to keep Donald Trump in power by force, along with obstructing Congress and other crimes.

Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, found guilty of a separate seditious conspiracy involving his extremist group, was sentenced earlier this year to 18 years in prison. In both cases, judges applied enhancements for terrorism that pushed the sentencing range they must consider higher. But Kelly told Biggs, “It’s not my job to label you a terrorist, and my sentence today won’t do that. That’s for other people to argue about.”

The Justice Department made that argument, saying Biggs is as responsible as former Proud Boys chairman Henry “Enrique” Tarrio for the group’s involvement in the Capitol attack and that both men engaged in terrorism.

“They aimed to intimidate and terrify” not just lawmakers but “the rest of the country that they didn’t agree with and make them yield to their political point of view,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason McCullough said in court. “That’s no different than the act of a spectacular bombing of a building.”

He invoked the example of a parent afraid to take a child to a polling place or a couple worried about violence at a presidential inauguration.

“That is what they set out to do,” McCullough said. “They pushed us to the edge of a constitutional crisis.”

He said deterrence was necessary precisely because the Proud Boys were able to create that fear without any weapons of mass destruction. “It’s almost seductive,” McCullough said. “It just takes slick propaganda in an environment where you encourage people to basically say, ‘It’s us against them.’”

Biggs said in a tearful statement to the judge that he was not a leader but one of the “seduced.”

“I know that I messed up that day, but I’m not a terrorist,” Biggs said. “My curiosity got the better of me, and I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life.” He said he had been planning for Jan. 6 to be his last outing with the Proud Boys, and that his violent statements were a way to vent his anger over being injured in combat and learning that a young family member had been abused. “I used that rhetoric … to cope and to not take violent action,” he said.

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