D.C. officer guilty for leaking to Proud Boys’ Tarrio before Jan. 6

A former D.C. police lieutenant was found guilty in federal court Monday on charges that he improperly warned Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio of his pending arrest two days before the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, then lied about it to investigators.

Shane Lamond, a 24-year department veteran, helped the far-right Proud Boys group when he leaked word to Tarrio that a warrant had been signed for his arrest for burning a Black Lives Matter flag stolen from a historic African American church during a pro-Trump rally weeks earlier, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said.

“The defendant was not using Tarrio as a source; it was the other way around,” Jackson said Monday in finding the former officer guilty on all counts. “He knew then, and he knows now, that it was wrong.”

Lamond, 48, of Stafford, Virginia, headed D.C. police’s intelligence unit at the time. He pleaded not guilty to one count of obstruction of justice and three counts of making false statements.

Jackson set sentencing for April 3. The obstruction charge is punishable by up to 30 years in prison, and the federal false statement counts are each punishable by up to five years.

Lamond’s lawyers said his contacts with Tarrio were within the bounds of how police run sources and gather intelligence, and that Lamond was “instrumental” to Tarrio’s arrest. Lamond thought he was doing his job, not committing a crime, when the officer used Tarrio as a contact “to get information about where Proud Boys were demonstrating” to help law enforcement, attorneys Mark Schamel and Ana Jara argued.

Government evidence suggested that Tarrio manipulated Lamond and that the officer allegedly crossed the line by giving out sensitive police information in trying to cultivate the then-Proud Boys chairman as an intelligence source. Meanwhile, he received disinformation in return that he allegedly shared with other law enforcement that underplayed the group’s central role in the Capitol attack.

In December 2020, when the Proud Boys had marched through the District and were being investigated for burning a Black Lives Matter banner, Lamond at least twice alerted Tarrio to developments in the probe, transcripts of their chats on Telegram showed. “Police want to talk to you about the banner,” Lamond told Tarrio on Dec. 20. Then on Dec. 25 Lamond wrote, “Just a heads up, CID had me ID you from a photo you posted on Parler kneeling down next to the BLM banner so they may be submitting an arrest warrant to U.S. attorney’s office,” according to court records.

When Lamond first asked Tarrio about rumblings of an election protest on Jan. 6, 2021, the officer asked if the Proud Boys would be there, court records showed. “If we do, it’ll be extremely small and not in colors … no night March,” Tarrio replied. In truth, a large group of Proud Boys and affiliates gathered at the Washington Monument on Jan. 6, ignoring the rally held by then-President Donald Trump. After marching to the Capitol, they were at the front of the mob that overwhelmed police and smashed their way into the building.

Meanwhile, prosecutors said, Proud Boys leaders advised each other to “Nuke chats” or delete evidence of the Jan. 6 plans. And rather than the arrest deterring Tarrio, Lamond’s communications potentially allowed for Proud Boys’s anger and planning to build ahead of the Capitol breach.

Still, it is not clear that their relationship kept law enforcement from detecting the threat. The Justice Department’s inspector general reported earlier this month that FBI field offices failed to share with the bureau’s Washington Field Office information gathered by several FBI informants about the plans of the Proud Boys and Tarrio on Jan. 6. Among them was a tip that a group communications channel told users that “we will be the heavy weight line and shield wall breakers to allow our main forces in.”

The week-long trial spotlighted D.C. police interactions with extremist groups in 2020 and 2021, when liberal groups accused police of appearing to favor right-leaning organizations.

Lamond was charged May 18, 2023, with falsely denying that he tipped off Tarrio about the progress of an investigation and about Tarrio’s impending arrest.

The flag burning punctuated outbursts of street violence in the summer and fall of 2020. Those incidents accompanied racial justice demonstrations prompted by the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd in May and marches by Donald Trump supporters including the Proud Boys following the 2020 presidential election. The marches culminated in the Capitol riot that led to at least five deaths, assaults on about 140 officers and the evacuation of Congress.

Prosecutors accused Lamond of making three false statements in an interview with two U.S. attorney’s office investigators on June 2, 2021: claiming that his communications were mostly “one-sided” from the Proud Boys leader, when Lamond knew he regularly passed on confidential law enforcement information; denying that he tipped off Tarrio about the flag-burning investigation; and denying that he informed Tarrio of his arrest warrant.

Some key evidence against Lamond was circumstantial. On Dec. 30, 2020, shortly after Tarrio’s arrest warrant for misdemeanor property destruction was signed by a judge and as plans to protest Congress’s Jan. 6 vote certification reached a fever pitch, Lamond and Tarrio spoke by phone for nearly 15 minutes. About three minutes later, Tarrio launched an “Emergency voice chat” with Proud Boys leaders, whose reactions suggested Tarrio told them he was about to be arrested.

On Jan. 4, at 12:55 p.m., Tarrio’s flight from Miami to Reagan National Airport took off, and seven minutes later Lamond set his messages to autodelete in 10 seconds, according to government evidence. At 1:30 p.m., Tarrio told Proud Boys leaders and two associates that his arrest warrant had just been signed. Tarrio was arrested as he entered the District about two hours later.

Prosecutors said no one else in contact with Tarrio on the plane knew about the warrant. Lamond’s defense countered that in both instances, there was no direct evidence of what if anything Lamond said.

Tarrio testified as a star defense witness. He is serving a 22-year prison sentence for seditiously plotting violence to stop Congress’s certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory over Trump. Tarrio said Lamond never explicitly tipped him off, was not his source in the D.C. police department, and that he never confessed his flag-burning role to Lamond, despite circumstantial evidence otherwise. Tarrio said he figured out his arrest was coming on his own.

Still, Lamond acknowledged in testifying in his own defense that he shared inside information with Tarrio about the flag-burning investigation, even as he maintained that he acted within the bounds of his job and didn’t support the Proud Boys. He vehemently objected to prosecutors’ characterization of him as a “sympathizer or double agent.”

According to prosecutors, the pair exchanged 676 texts, encrypted chats or voice messages over 18 months, from July 2019 to January 2021, and more than 100 were deleted and unrecoverable - mostly after Tarrio became a suspect. But prosecutors did not allege that Tarrio used the information to evade the flag-burning investigation.

Instead, FBI lead case agent Elizabeth Hadley testified, Lamond assisted the investigation “while at the same time undermining [it] by not providing a big chunk of information,” about his interactions with Tarrio.