A leader of the Proud Boys convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack intends to seek a pardon from President-elect Trump.
Joe Biggs, a Florida Proud Boy and onetime correspondent for the far-right website “InfoWars,” is serving a 17-year prison term after a jury last year found him guilty of sedition and other serious felonies. His lawyer, Norm Pattis, has written a letter requesting clemency from the former and future president but said it has not yet been sent.
“Congratulations on your re-election to the Presidency. You are now in a position to close a painful chapter in American history involving the prosecution and imprisonment of protesters at the Capitol on January 6, 2021,” Pattis wrote in the letter. “On behalf of Joseph Biggs, I am urging you to do so by granting Mr. Biggs’ request for a complete pardon for his actions on that day.”
Biggs joins the ranks of other Jan. 6 rioters who have signaled they plan to seek pardons, including former Proud Boys national Chair Enrique Tarrio and Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes. Both Tarrio and Rhodes were convicted of sedition and sentenced to lengthy prison terms.
On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to “rapidly review” the cases of Jan. 6 defendants and “sign their pardons on Day 1” if reelected. It remains to be seen whether he will pardon or commute the sentences of all 1,500-plus rioters charged for participating in the mob, some of them or none of them at all.
In the letter, Pattis described Trump as “no stranger to prosecutions warped by partisan vendetta” and claimed that Biggs is a victim of the same misuse of the law.
He pointed to the Civil War, suggesting that wiping Biggs’s slate clean would “close the book” on Jan. 6 and allow the nation to move forward, as it did when clemency was granted to thousands of Confederate supporters.
“These are divisive times,” Pattis wrote. “The divisions were acute in 2020, when millions believed the election was stolen and turned out to make sure electoral integrity was preserved. Suspicions and bitterness about the election lingers to this day.
“A pardon of Mr. Biggs will help close that wound and inspires confidence in the future,” he said.
Prosecutors said at trial that Biggs led members of the Proud Boys to the Capitol on Jan. 6 and spoke with the first rioter to breach police barricades just minutes before he acted. They requested a sentence of 33 years in prison.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, who oversaw the Proud Boys sedition case, declined to hand down that lengthy of a sentence but did apply a terrorism enhancement to Biggs’s sentencing guidelines.
Pattis represented Biggs at trial and has remained his attorney on appeal. He said in the letter that his office also intends to request pardons or amnesty for two of Biggs’s co-defendants in that case, Proud Boys members Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola.
