Which side will the cops be on?
On January 6th the police did their jobs fighting against the rabid mob threatening to kill members of congress and Vice President Pence. But I still wonder what police around the country might do in the face of an organized right wing rebellion. So many of them are MAGA.
Here’s the story of one who was in cahoots with the Proud Boys leading up to January 6th:
It’s good to have friends in high places.
Federal prosecutors on Friday highlighted a nexus between a top intelligence official in D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, a relationship which continued from July 2019 through the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Former Metropolitan Police Department officer Shane Lamond, who supervised the intelligence branch of the department’s homeland security bureau, faces four counts stemming from allegations that he fed information to Tarrio about law enforcement investigations into him and then lied about it to federal agents.
An attorney for Lamond didn’t immediately return our request for comment. But the indictment lays out multiple situations in which Lamond allegedly initiated contact with Tarrio, feeding him sensitive information about investigations into the Proud Boys and Tarrio specifically.
At times, Lamond apparently suggests that he sympathizes with Tarrio politically.
After the November 2020 election was called, Lamond allegedly wrote to Tarrio saying, “Hey brother, sad, sad news today. You all planning anything?”
“Yep,” Tarrio replied.
One hour later, Lamond allegedly wrote to Tarrio that the pair should switch to an encrypted messaging app because social media accounts “belonging to your people are talking about mobilizing and ‘taking back the country.’”
Lamond was put on leave in February 2022 due to suspicions over his ties to the Proud Boys. At the time, Tarrio told reporters that Lamont would tell the group where counterprotestors were staging.
But at Tarrio’s seditious conspiracy trial this year, defense attorneys for the Proud Boys chief revealed several of the texts between the two as part of an effort to show that the group was cooperating with — and not attempting to overthrow — governmental authority.
That’s the nightmare fuel which permeates the texts, however: the prospect of polarized law enforcement officers siding with a violent right-wing street mob.
It’s only one guy but when I was watching that fatuous “weaponization” hearing yesterday with the FBI “whistleblowers” it was clear they are full-blown MAGA extremists. I have little doubt that there are many more just like them all over the country. And it’s a terrifying prospect.