A former Proud Boys leader and convicted seditionist pardoned by Donald Trump has claimed that he received personal thanks and praise from the president in a meeting at Mar-a-Lago.
At one point Enrique Tarrio told The New York Times that Trump told his table: “Love you guys.”
Tarrio, who chaired the far-right militant group from 2018 to 2021, was sentenced to 22 years in prison in 2023 for conspiring to violently usurp the peaceful transfer of power by storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan 6, 2021 — the longest sentence received by any Capitol rioter.
But in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Saturday, Tarrio claimed to have enjoyed a glowing welcome from Trump at the president’s private club and personal residence in Florida.
He “said he was sorry for what Joe Biden did to all J6ers,” Tarrio said. “He knew the hardships me and my family faced for three long years … and he said he is working on making things right.”
Tarrio added: “I thanked him for giving me my life back. He replied with: ‘I love you guys.’”
To the “J6ers, he wanted me to send ‘yall a message. He said: ‘Thank you,’” Tarrio wrote.
Tarrio told the Times he wasn’t certain about Trump’s vow to “make things right.”
The Times corroborated Tarrio’s meeting with Trump, citing interviews with Tarrio and his mother, Zuny Duarte, who was also at the dinner, as well as with an anonymous senior White House official.
The official said that Tarrio and Duarte were invited to dinner at Mar-a-Lago by a club member and introduced to the president while he was passing by their table.
The Independent has asked the White House for comment.
Tarrio and Duarte told the Times that they spoke with Trump at Mar-a-Lago for around 10 minutes, and that he had told them he believed Jan 6 defendants had been wrongly treated.
Duarte further said that Trump had immediately recognized Tarrio’s name, saying: “Oh, you’re that guy.”
Tarrio was pardoned this January on Trump’s first day back in office. The president also pardoned more than 1,500 supporters who had been charged with or convicted of crimes connected with the Capitol riot, including serious assaults on police officers protecting the building and lawmakers inside. Some of the rioters chanted “hang Mike Pence” because they didn’t want the then-vice president to certify a legitimate presidential election.
Fourteen militant group leaders had their sentences commuted, but Tarrio received a full pardon and was immediately released from prison.
Within a month he was arrested again for simple assault after being accused of whacking a phone out of a protester’s hand during a rally outside the Capitol.
Although Tarrio himself was not in Washington, D.C. during the Jan 6 attack due to a court order, prosecutors charged that he had helped coordinate the action and encouraged Proud Boys remotely from a hotel room in Baltimore.
In a post-pardon interview with far-right broadcaster Alex Jones, Tarrio said: “I’m happy that the president’s focusing not on retribution and focusing on success, but I will tell you that I’m not gonna play by those rules.”
The “people who did this, they need to feel the heat. They need to be put behind bars, and they need to be prosecuted!” he emphasized.
