The Justice Department is asking a federal court to dismiss a lawsuit brought against it by members of the Proud Boys who claim their convictions related to the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack were the result of “political prosecution.”
In a court filing Monday, the Justice Department argued the lawsuit should be tossed out for reasons including that “the malicious prosecution claim lacks merit; and the United States is not liable for punitive damages.”
DOJ’s defense of the prosecutions, however, appears to go against what Republicans and President Donald Trump’s allies have long argued: that the hundreds of cases brought against people who participated in the January 6 attack often amounted to political persecution from Joe Biden’s Justice Department because they targeted Trump supporters.
Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, Joseph Biggs, Ethan Nordean, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola sued the government in June for $100 million, claiming their prosecutions amounted to an “egregious and systemic abuse of the legal system and the United States Constitution to punish and oppress political allies of President Trump, by any and all means necessary, legal, or illegal.”
The lawsuit came months after Trump pardoned Tarrio and commuted the sentences of the other four men. The president has also personally defended pardoning people who assaulted police officers on January 6.
Shortly after his inauguration, Trump issued the full pardons to more than 1,000 people charged in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. He dropped charges for those with prosecutions still pending in courts and commuted the sentences of 14 people, including the high-profile leaders of the far-right Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who were convicted for their roles in the attack.
The president said that month that those who were pardoned for their roles “have already served years in prison, and they’ve served them viciously. It’s a disgusting prison. It’s been horrible. It’s inhumane.”
Tarrio welcomed the pardon at the time and praised Trump for giving him his “life back,” while also claiming the justice system was weaponized against January 6 defendants.
“The people who did this, they need to feel the heat. They need to be put behind bars and they need to be prosecuted,” Tarrio said in an interview with the right-wing host Alex Jones at the time.
In its Monday court filing, however, the Justice Department said the men’s lawsuit “should be dismissed in its entirety,” because they presented no evidence that law enforcement or the prosecutors “relied on knowingly false or fabricated evidence to initiate” their prosecution.
“It defies ‘judicial experience and common sense’ to believe that Plaintiffs cannot make more specific allegations at this stage about what evidence was false, fabricated, or wrongfully withheld as part of their prosecution,” Justice Department attorneys wrote.
Thomas Ranieri, attorney for the Proud Boys members who filed the lawsuit, told CNN in a statement, “I am not surprised that the DOJ and [FBI agent Nicole] Miller would want to fight this before we have the opportunity to do discovery and depositions, because that might become truly embarrassing for them.”
Miller was a lead agent on the cases against the Proud Boys, and she is named in the lawsuit.
Ranieri added, “This is not the first time (nor is it likely to be the last) that the DOJ and the FBI have used underhanded tactics to secure a conviction that was politically expedient.”
The DOJ attorneys also pointed to the fact that a federal court reviewed the cases against the men at their detention hearings and “concluded that the ‘weight of the evidence is strong.’”
The Justice Department pointed to several specific pieces of evidence including that the district court “relied on photo evidence of Pezzola robbing a police officer of his riot shield and using it to break a window into the Capitol.”
It added that there is “incontrovertible photo evidence of Nordean, Biggs, and Rehl inside the Capitol building,” which was used “to support their arrests and detentions.”
“And while Tarrio was not at the Capitol on that day and the district court found there was no ‘smoking gun,’ the court considered Tarrio’s contrary arguments and still found the evidence of his involvement in a seditious conspiracy to be ‘very strong.’”
It will now be up to a judge to decide whether to toss the Proud Boys’ lawsuit. CNN has reached out to the Department of Justice and the plaintiffs’ lawyers about the case.
CNN’s Shania Shelton contributed to this report.
This story has been updated with additional details.
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