A federal judge in Washington found Lt. Shane Lamond, a former intelligence officer in the Washington police department, guilty of obstruction of justice and lying to investigators on Monday, ruling that he had improperly concealed details about his relationship with Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the far-right group the Proud Boys.
Mr. Lamond had drawn attention from the Justice Department for cultivating an unusually close connection with Mr. Tarrio in the months leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol — a relationship, prosecutors said, that crossed into inappropriate conduct after Mr. Lamond leaked details about an investigation into Mr. Tarrio over his setting fire to a Black Lives Matter banner during a protest in Washington after the 2020 election.
In her ruling, Judge Amy Berman Jackson, a district court judge, said that the hundreds of messages she reviewed between Mr. Lamond and Mr. Tarrio illustrated that Mr. Lamond had been undermining his colleagues with “entirely unauthorized” back channeling with Mr. Tarrio, conduct that she viewed as “entirely contradictory” to the police department’s interests.
During his trial, Mr. Lamond’s lawyers had argued that he had reached out to Mr. Tarrio as part of his duties as an intelligence officer, and that Mr. Lamond shared periodic updates about the status of police and F.B.I. investigations into the Proud Boys’ activities as part of building a relationship.
But Judge Jackson said she found that explanation unconvincing. She cited several instances where Mr. Lamond had volunteered tips about police activity “that he had no business providing,” and had even prodded others in the police department for information about their investigation of Mr. Tarrio that he then passed along to him.
While Mr. Lamond later tried to give the false impression to federal agents that he was cultivating Mr. Tarrio as a source to help law enforcement keep track of his movements, Judge Jackson said she disagreed.
“The defendant wasn’t using Tarrio as a source,” she said. “It was the other way around.”
In announcing her verdict, Judge Jackson said she had plenty of reason to find Mr. Lamond guilty from his texts to Mr. Tarrio, even without considering any politically charged content of the conversations between the two men. In those conversations, Mr. Lamond often expressed support for Mr. Tarrio’s ideology and sympathized with the Proud Boys’ message, even while acknowledging that many of his colleagues did not share his view.
“All of that is just noise — rhetorical icing on the government’s case,” Judge Jackson said.
She also said that her decision was not based on the chaotic and combative testimony that Mr. Tarrio himself gave as a defense witness earlier during the trial.
Lawyers for Mr. Lamond called Mr. Tarrio, who is serving a 22-year prison term for seditious conspiracy over his role in the Jan. 6 riot, to testify under the expectation that he would downplay the relationship between him and Mr. Lamond.
While Mr. Tarrio testified that the two corresponded only about logistics when he and the Proud Boys expected to be in Washington for demonstrations, his testimony repeatedly veered off into tangents. He revisited the details of his own conviction, attacked the F.B.I. and refused to acknowledge that texts he had sent to Mr. Lamond were authentic.
Judge Jackson described Mr. Tarrio’s appearance as a “personal performance” that did little to benefit Mr. Lamond’s case, adding that she found little that he said convincing and that there was more than enough evidence to find Mr. Lamond guilty on Monday.
“Enrique Tarrio was a terrible witness, one of the worst I’ve had the opportunity to sit next to during my tenure on the bench,” she said.
Mr. Lamond was convicted of three counts of making false statements to investigators and one count of obstruction of justice through a bench trial that started earlier this month. He is scheduled to be sentenced on April 3.
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