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“If violence did occur, it was celebrated,” Mr. Greene stated, “and folks have been inspired for having responded in type from somebody attacking them or no matter it’s. That’s the place I acquired my expectation: from the individuals round me.”
Early in his testimony, Mr. Greene challenged one other one of many Proud Boys’ oft-repeated statements about violence: that the group’s members by no means hunt down aggression, however merely react to it.
He instructed the jury how a big group of Proud Boys went searching for battle with their leftist adversaries within the antifa motion on Dec. 11, 2020, one night time earlier than they have been to participate in a pro-Trump rally in Washington.
“After we have been marching round, we have been on the lookout for antifa,” he testified. “We have been attempting to get as shut as doable, come nose to nose with them. And once we did discover them, we have been attempting to goad them into bodily confrontation.”
In truth, the confrontation got here the subsequent night — on Dec. 12 — when, because the jury has repeatedly heard, Mr. Tarrio and a number of other different Proud Boys stole a Black Lives Matter banner from a neighborhood church and burned it within the streets. Not lengthy after, the Proud Boys engaged in a violent scuffle with antifa protesters and a few of their very own members have been stabbed.
Prosecutors plan to make use of that incident to point out the jury how the Proud Boys turned in opposition to the police after years of getting troublingly shut relationships with officers throughout the nation. The federal government desires to show that the group turned disillusioned, believing that regulation enforcement had failed to guard it, to elucidate the occasions of Jan. 6 when Proud Boys took the lead in assaulting the police.
However whereas the jury has been instructed about among the Proud Boys’ violent episodes, it has not heard about all of them. Final week, Jason McCullough, the lead prosecutor within the case, instructed Choose Timothy J. Kelly with out the jury current that the federal government had purposefully not sought to introduce proof of the group’s prior acts of aggression — which, he famous, have been intensive.
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