Instead, he said in an interview, agents asked for march routes and other plans to separate the Proud Boys from the counterprotests. At other times, he said, agents warned that they had detected potential threats from the left against him or his associates.
But before the January 6 event, no one contacted the Proud Boys leaders, Tarrio said, although his meetings at Trump’s previous marches in Washington were marked by serious violence.
“They didn’t come to us,” he said.
‘Reject, Reject, Reject’
In the summer of 2017, neo-Nazis, Klans men and other white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville, Va., To announce their resurgence at the “Unite the Right” rally. Its organizer, Jason Kessler, was a member of the Proud Boys.
The group had been founded a year earlier by Gavin McInnes, now 50, the co-creator of the Vice media. (The company has long since severed all ties.) He was a Canadian who became a New Yorker with a record of statements attacking feminists and Muslims, and often expressed a somewhat ironic appetite for chaos. “Can you ask for violence in general?” he once asked in an online video. “‘Because I am.”
The Proud Boys had volunteered as bodyguards for right-wing arsonists like Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos and often clashed with left-wing crowds, especially on college campuses. The Proud Boys’ “free speech” demonstrations in left bastions like Seattle, Portland or Berkeley, California, routinely ended in street fights.
However, Mr. McInnes avoided the Unite the Right meeting, saying in an online video: “Reject, reject, reject.” According to him, the Proud Boys were not white supremacists, but only “Western chauvinists”. This stance helped the Proud Boys to escape scrutiny by federal authorities.