Down goes Enrique Tarrio – and it’s time for Roger Stone to panic
Just before Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio’s sentencing came down today, I joked that I couldn’t wait for him to be sentenced to X years, so the outrage addicts on our side could begin angrily ranting about how it should have been X+1 years instead. Sure enough, after Tarrio was given a whopping 22 years in prison, so many angry ranters went to work on Twitter that the phrase “only 22” ended up trending. But in reality, 22 years is a very, very long time. Tarrio is still in his thirties now, but he’ll be a senior citizen by the time he gets out.
This puts us in an interesting place. Well, it puts Tarrio in a very boring place. His life, at least as he knows it, is over. He can bet his future on the laugh out loud pipe dream that Donald Trump is somehow magically going to shake off his own prison sentences and become President and pardon Tarrio. Or Tarrio can start to seriously think about flipping on the people he can flip on.
Whether Tarrio decides to flip or not, today is a very good reminder that the leaders of this plot were always going to see their lives destroyed over it. It took longer than we might have liked, but the leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers domestic terrorist groups are now rotting in cages. They may not have physically led the charge in storming the Capitol, but they led the coup plot – and they had help.
That’s why it’s time for people like Roger Stone to panic. Stone was deeply involved in all of this, right up to the point where one of the Oath Keepers acted as his Washington DC chauffeur leading up to January 6th. If Enrique Tarrio’s life is now over because he helped plot this stuff, then Roger Stone has to be worried that he’s in the same boat. The only difference is that Tarrio is young enough to maybe get out of prison when he’s an old man. Stone is an old man already.
We still don’t know precisely who all is on Jack Smith’s target list. He’s listed six co-conspirators in the fake elector plot. But Smith still hasn’t brought any charges yet in the Willard Hotel “command center” plot, where numerous Trump underlings allegedly helped try to make January 6th happen. Smith doesn’t seem like the type to simply overlook an entire tentacle of Trump’s election overthrow plot, while being so thorough with regard to the other tentacles.
So now we wait. We wait to see if people like Enrique Tarrio realize their lives are over unless they take corrective action, and flip on people like Roger Stone. We wait to see if Jack Smith has been targeting people like Stone all along. And Stone is far from the only Trump underling who still has to be sweating it out. He’s just the first one who comes to mind.
