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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Justice Department seeks to dismiss lawsuit filed by Proud Boys over
January 6 prosecutions
By Mary Kay Mallonee, CNN
Updated:
7:05 PM EDT, Tue August 26, 2025
Source: CNN
The Justice Department is asking a a lawsuit brought against it by
members of the Proud Boys who claim their convictions related to the
January 6, 2021, Capitol attack were the result of “political
prosecution.”
In a court filing Monday, the Justice Department argued the lawsuit
should be tossed out for reasons including that “the malicious
prosecution claim lacks merit; and the United States is not liable for
punitive damages.”
DOJ’s defense of the prosecutions, however, appears to go against
what Republicans and President Donald Trump’s allies have long
argued: that the hundreds of cases brought against people who
participated in the January 6 attack often amounted to political
persecution from Joe Biden’s Justice Department because they targeted
Trump supporters.
Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, Joseph Biggs,
Ethan Nordean, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola , claiming their
prosecutions amounted to an “egregious and systemic abuse of the
legal system and the United States Constitution to punish and oppress
political allies of President Trump, by any and all means necessary,
legal, or illegal.”
The lawsuit came months after Trump pardoned Tarrio and commuted the
sentences of the other four men. The president has also personally
defended pardoning people who assaulted police officers on January 6.
Shortly after his inauguration, to more than 1,000 people charged in
the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. He dropped charges for
those with prosecutions still pending in courts and commuted the
sentences of 14 people, including the high-profile leaders of the
far-right Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who were convicted for their
roles in the attack.
The president that those who were pardoned for their roles “have
already served years in prison, and they’ve served them viciously.
It’s a disgusting prison. It’s been horrible. It’s inhumane.”
Tarrio welcomed the pardon at the time and praised Trump for giving him
his “life back,” while also claiming the justice system was
weaponized against January 6 defendants.
“The people who did this, they need to feel the heat. They need to be
put behind bars and they need to be prosecuted,” Tarrio with the
right-wing host Alex Jones at the time.
In its Monday court filing, however, the Justice Department said the
men’s lawsuit “should be dismissed in its entirety,” because they
presented no evidence that law enforcement or the prosecutors “relied
on knowingly false or fabricated evidence to initiate” their
prosecution.
“It defies ‘judicial experience and common sense’ to believe that
Plaintiffs cannot make more specific allegations at this stage about
what evidence was false, fabricated, or wrongfully withheld as part of
their prosecution,” Justice Department attorneys wrote.
Thomas Ranieri, attorney for the Proud Boys members who filed the
lawsuit, told CNN in a statement, “I am not surprised that the DOJ
and [FBI agent Nicole] Miller would want to fight this before we have
the opportunity to do discovery and depositions, because that might
become truly embarrassing for them.”
Miller was a lead agent on the cases against the Proud Boys, and she is
named in the lawsuit.
Ranieri added, “This is not the first time (nor is it likely to be
the last) that the DOJ and the FBI have used underhanded tactics to
secure a conviction that was politically expedient.”
The DOJ attorneys also pointed to the fact that a federal court
reviewed the cases against the men at their detention hearings and
“concluded that the ‘weight of the evidence is strong.’”
The Justice Department pointed to several specific pieces of evidence
including that the district court “relied on photo evidence of
Pezzola robbing a police officer of his riot shield and using it to
break a window into the Capitol.”
It added that there is “incontrovertible photo evidence of Nordean,
Biggs, and Rehl inside the Capitol building,” which was used “to
support their arrests and detentions.”
“And while Tarrio was not at the Capitol on that day and the district
court found there was no ‘smoking gun,’ the court considered
Tarrio’s contrary arguments and still found the evidence of his
involvement in a seditious conspiracy to be ‘very strong.’”
It will now be up to a judge to decide whether to toss the Proud
Boys’ lawsuit. CNN has reached out to the Department of Justice and
the plaintiffs’ lawyers about the case.
CNN’s Shania Shelton contributed to this report.
This story has been updated with additional details.
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