Proud Boys juror says deleted messages convinced him of guilt

Despite sifting through thousands of text messages and private chats sent by Proud Boys leaders in the run-up to the Jan. 6, attack on the U.S. Capitol, it was the ones that were absent that helped seal the seditious conspiracy case against them, a juror said.

Speaking to Vice News, juror Andre Mundell said he was convinced that four of the Proud Boys that stood trial in Washington DC were guilty because of the lengths they went to cover their tracks.

That included deleting key messages.

“The Proud Boys didn’t want everybody to know the plan, because then I guess it would have gotten out,” he said. “And they didn’t want it to get out,”

He said the many messages the jury reviewed, sent between defendants Enrique Tarrio Ethan Nordean, Joe Biggs and Zachary Rehl, were littered with blank spaces where others had been deleted.

All were found guilty of the conspiracy charge Thursday. A fifth defendant, Dominic Pezzola, was acquitted of seditious conspiracy but convicted of other charges.

“So, they definitely didn’t want people to know,” he said.

He said the jury was also struck by the lack of messages telling followers to withdraw from the attack on the Capitol.

“That factored in for me,” he said. “It showed an absence of evidence of standing down. No one says, ‘no, don’t do this. We’re not going to do this.’ There was none of that,”

“And that was probably because they never said it.”