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- Mar 6, 2017
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Jubilation.
“Jubilation” was the word that FBI Special Agent Peter Dubrowski used in court Wednesday to describe how Proud Boys reacted in their private communications when former President Donald Trump told them to “stand back and stand by” during a presidential debate in 2020.
The upswell of joy, Dubrowski told prosecutors, came fast, and it was Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, the ringleader of the extremist group, who echoed Trump’s messaging to members in a Telegram chat that September.
“Guys...” Tarrio wrote. “Standby.”
Tarrio and fellow Proud Boys now on trial for seditious conspiracy, including Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Dominic Pezzola, and Zachary Rehl, have so far escaped the jury’s closer inspection of their communications leading up to and on the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
This week, after a stretch of lengthy expository and technical testimony delivered by an FBI digital forensic examiner, the time had finally come for the messages to start surfacing in earnest.
Dubrowski, a former criminal defense attorney who has been with the FBI for three years and specializes in counterintelligence and criminal conspiracies, analyzed a massive trove of Proud Boys messages that were obtained via search warrant. There were threads and chat groups set up by the hundreds across a variety of messaging apps like Signal, Facetime, and Zoom.
All told, Dubrowski said, the FBI reviewed more than a half million individual messages, throwing aside the mundane or irrelevant from those communications key to the investigation of the alleged conspiracy to stop the certification of the 2020 election by force.
In the fall of 2020, two chat groups started to overflow with discussions of a “stolen” election. There was the “Official Presidential Chat,” a group designated just for Proud Boy chapter presidents, which Dubrowski said contained roughly 60 participants. Talk there varied; there were chapter business discussions as often as there were discussions about family life or politics.
“It ran the scope,” Dubrowski testified.
The other chat was the “Skull and Bones” chat, a much smaller group that was focused expressly on “Proud Boys business,” the agent said, and membership there was only for “elders” of the self-proclaimed “Western chauvinist” group.
In September 2020, Proud Boys in the Official Presidents Chat, which included Tarrio, Nordean, Rehl, and other members like John Charles Stewart of Pennsylvania—who has pleaded guilty to charges already—reacted to the debate. Stewart, who went by the handle “Johnny Blackbeard” on Telegram, said the debate was a “bloodbath” and “cringe as fuck.”
Yet once Trump failed to condemn white supremacy when pressed by debate moderator Chris Wallace and then urged Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” after then-presidential candidate Joe Biden pressed him to condemn the group specifically, the defendants erupted in glee.
It was an “immediate” reaction, Dubrowski told the jury.
“Jubilation,” he said.
Proud Boy Johnny Stewart gushed that an “impact has been made.”
“If your enemy is calling for you to stand down by name, there is a reason,” Stewart wrote.
(full article online)
“Jubilation” was the word that FBI Special Agent Peter Dubrowski used in court Wednesday to describe how Proud Boys reacted in their private communications when former President Donald Trump told them to “stand back and stand by” during a presidential debate in 2020.
The upswell of joy, Dubrowski told prosecutors, came fast, and it was Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, the ringleader of the extremist group, who echoed Trump’s messaging to members in a Telegram chat that September.
“Guys...” Tarrio wrote. “Standby.”
Tarrio and fellow Proud Boys now on trial for seditious conspiracy, including Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Dominic Pezzola, and Zachary Rehl, have so far escaped the jury’s closer inspection of their communications leading up to and on the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
This week, after a stretch of lengthy expository and technical testimony delivered by an FBI digital forensic examiner, the time had finally come for the messages to start surfacing in earnest.
Dubrowski, a former criminal defense attorney who has been with the FBI for three years and specializes in counterintelligence and criminal conspiracies, analyzed a massive trove of Proud Boys messages that were obtained via search warrant. There were threads and chat groups set up by the hundreds across a variety of messaging apps like Signal, Facetime, and Zoom.
All told, Dubrowski said, the FBI reviewed more than a half million individual messages, throwing aside the mundane or irrelevant from those communications key to the investigation of the alleged conspiracy to stop the certification of the 2020 election by force.
In the fall of 2020, two chat groups started to overflow with discussions of a “stolen” election. There was the “Official Presidential Chat,” a group designated just for Proud Boy chapter presidents, which Dubrowski said contained roughly 60 participants. Talk there varied; there were chapter business discussions as often as there were discussions about family life or politics.
“It ran the scope,” Dubrowski testified.
The other chat was the “Skull and Bones” chat, a much smaller group that was focused expressly on “Proud Boys business,” the agent said, and membership there was only for “elders” of the self-proclaimed “Western chauvinist” group.
In September 2020, Proud Boys in the Official Presidents Chat, which included Tarrio, Nordean, Rehl, and other members like John Charles Stewart of Pennsylvania—who has pleaded guilty to charges already—reacted to the debate. Stewart, who went by the handle “Johnny Blackbeard” on Telegram, said the debate was a “bloodbath” and “cringe as fuck.”
Yet once Trump failed to condemn white supremacy when pressed by debate moderator Chris Wallace and then urged Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” after then-presidential candidate Joe Biden pressed him to condemn the group specifically, the defendants erupted in glee.
It was an “immediate” reaction, Dubrowski told the jury.
“Jubilation,” he said.
Proud Boy Johnny Stewart gushed that an “impact has been made.”
“If your enemy is calling for you to stand down by name, there is a reason,” Stewart wrote.
(full article online)
