D.C. police officer convicted over leaking information to Proud Boys’ leader

WASHINGTON — A federal judge Monday found a former intelligence officer in the Washington police department guilty of obstruction of justice and lying to investigators, ruling that he had improperly concealed details about his relationship with Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the far-right group the Proud Boys.

The former officer, Lt. Shane Lamond, had drawn attention from the Justice Department for cultivating an unusually close connection with Tarrio in the months leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. That relationship, prosecutors said, crossed into inappropriate conduct after Lamond leaked details about an investigation into Tarrio over his setting fire to a Black Lives Matter banner during a protest in Washington after the 2020 election.

In her ruling, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of U.S. District Court in Washington said the hundreds of messages she reviewed between Lamond and Tarrio illustrated that Lamond had been undermining his colleagues with “entirely unauthorized” back channeling with Tarrio, conduct that she viewed as “entirely contradictory” to the police department’s interests.

During his two-week trial, Lamond’s lawyers had argued that he had reached out to Tarrio as part of his duties as an intelligence officer, and that Lamond shared periodic updates about the status of police and FBI investigations into the Proud Boys’ activities as part of building a relationship.

They said Lamond’s methods, which included tipping off Tarrio that a warrant for his arrest had been processed and that police had not been able to obtain video of him burning the banner in December 2020, did not amount to sharing sensitive information, and were part of building a rapport with a source. When he was later interviewed about the interactions by federal agents, Lamond acknowledged that the two men had been in touch, but suggested he was doing so to help build a case against Tarrio.

Jackson said she found that explanation unconvincing. She cited several instances where Lamond had volunteered unsolicited information about police activity “that he had no business providing,” and had even been “poking around,” prodding others in the police department for information about their investigation of Tarrio that he then passed along to him.

She said that although Lamond framed his interactions with Tarrio as “one-sided” when questioned by authorities, he had routinely offered up tips, “giving out a lot more than he was taking in.” And she mentioned several instances in which immediately after receiving information from Lamond, Tarrio shared the updates with others in the Proud Boys’ leadership circle, noting that they had come from a police contact.

“The defendant wasn’t using Tarrio as a source,” she said. “It was the other way around.”

In announcing her verdict, Jackson said she had plenty of reason to find Lamond guilty from his texts to Tarrio, even without considering any politically charged content of the conversations between the two men. In those conversations, Lamond often expressed support for Tarrio’s ideology and sympathized with the Proud Boys’ pro-Trump organizing after the election, even while acknowledging that many of his colleagues did not share his view.

“All of that is just noise — rhetorical icing on the government’s case,” Jackson said.

She also said her decision was not based on the chaotic and combative testimony that Tarrio gave as a defense witness earlier in the trial.

Lawyers for Lamond called Tarrio, who is serving a 22-year prison term for seditious conspiracy over his role in the Jan. 6 riot, to testify under the expectation that he would downplay the relationship between him and Lamond.

Although Tarrio testified that the two corresponded only about logistics when he and the Proud Boys expected to be in Washington for demonstrations, his testimony repeatedly veered off on tangents. He revisited the details of his own conviction, attacked the FBI and repeatedly refused to acknowledge that texts between him and Lamond presented as evidence were authentic.

Tarrio was convicted last year and has since indicated that he will seek a pardon from President-elect Donald Trump.

Jackson described Tarrio’s appearance as a “personal performance” that did little to benefit Lamond’s case, adding that she found little that he said convincing and that there was more than enough evidence to find Lamond guilty Monday.

“Enrique Tarrio was a terrible witness, one of the worst I’ve had the opportunity to sit next to during my tenure on the bench,” she said.

Lamond was convicted of three counts of making false statements to investigators and one count of obstruction of justice through a bench trial that started this month. He is scheduled to be sentenced April 3.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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