For Philly Proud Boys president Zach Rehl, sedition conviction for Jan. 6 attack rests largely on his own words

The morning after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, before the disillusionment and recriminations set in, Zach Rehl — head of the Philadelphia Proud Boys — messaged other leaders of the far-right group exulting in the chaos they’d unleashed.

“I’m proud as f— of what we accomplished,” he wrote, adding in a later message: “This is what patriotism looks like.”

On Thursday, a federal jury in Washington disagreed, convicting him of plotting to carry out one of the most serious attacks on the nation’s halls of power in centuries.

The guilty verdict in the seditious conspiracy case against Rehl and three other leaders of the neofascist Proud Boys — including the group’s former national chairman Henry “Enrique” Tarrio — delivered federal authorities perhaps their most significant win to date in their efforts to hold accountable the hundreds of Americans who participated in the attack.

But for Rehl, 37, of Port Richmond, his conviction marked the culmination of a path that’s seen him evolve in just five years from a relative unknown to a locally prominent right-wing provocateur and now only one of a handful of people in the nation’s history ever found guilty of the rarely used sedition charge — a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

“It doesn’t make sense,” his attorney, Carmen Hernandez, insisted during closing arguments to the jury. “How did Rehl, this nice guy, become labeled as a violent insurrectionist?”

The answer, evidence presented during the four-month trial showed, lies largely in Rehl’s own words.

» READ MORE: Proud Boys verdict: Who is Zach Rehl, the Philly leader of the right-wing group, convicted at Jan. 6 sedition trial

Testifying in his own defense, Rehl portrayed himself on the witness stand as a harmless contrarian who just liked a good protest — and the partying that often came after even more.

While he said he now views what unfolded on Jan. 6 as a “disgrace,” he insisted that he came to Washington on Jan. 6 only to “get [his] voice heard” and only learned afterward that the protest he thought he’d participated in had become a violent riot.

But prosecutors balked at Rehl’s self-portrayal and maintained that his image of an ultimately harmless hard-drinking, “own the libs” instigator was carefully crafted to obscure the more serious threat he and his codefendants posed.

Unlike others convicted of playing a role in the riot, Rehl was not charged with any specific acts of violence or destruction that day. Instead, prosecutors pursued an unusual legal theory that the Proud Boys’ provocation and rhetoric in the run-up to Jan. 6 was designed to “rile up the normies” — Donald Trump supporters unaffiliated with the group — to do anything necessary, up to and including violence, to keep the former president in power.

» READ MORE: Former Proud Boys extremist group leader Enrique Tarrio convicted of seditious conspiracy for Jan. 6 Capitol attack

Rehl, government lawyers maintained, proved a master of the kind of provocative trolling and doublespeak that had become a Proud Boys trademark — by turns, eschewing and embracing violence depending on the audience.

A former Marine, Rehl insisted from the witness stand that his service record demonstrated his respect for law and order. And yet in private chats with other Proud Boys after the 2020 election, he endorsed “firing squads for the traitors that are trying to steal the election.”

He’s repeatedly cited over the years his status as the son and grandson of Philadelphia policemen as proof of an abiding respect for law enforcement.

And yet, in those same chats, Rehl referred to Washington D.C. police using a gay slur, and described officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 “turncoats” who “deserve to be tarred and feathered.”

Video that surfaced during the trial appeared to show him attacking police outside the Capitol with pepper spray — an incident he maintained on the stand he couldn’t recall.

He shrugged off his fiery talk on social media as bravado — “a bunch of shoulda-coulda-woulda crap” — that didn’t mean he truly advocated violence. He accused the government of attempting to send him to prison for exercising his First Amendment rights.

“A lot of time people say they’re going to show up and do this or that and really they want to silence their opponent. It’s bluster, it’s trash talk,” he testified. “The point of activism is to make your opponents uncomfortable.”

But throughout the trial, prosecutors relied on social media posts and thousands of encrypted chat messages to link the rhetoric of Rehl and the other Proud Boys leaders to specific acts of violence they instigated among others in the pro-Trump mob.

“Social media wasn’t a private diary,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Conor Mulroe said during closing arguments. “It was a megaphone, and they used it to radicalize followers.”

To that end, prosecutors argued, the Proud Boys began their preparations for Jan. 6 within moments of Trump’s announcing plans for a rally in Washington the same day Congress was set to certify President Joe Biden’s electoral victory.

Tarrio, the Proud Boys’ national chairman, selected Rehl along with a small group of other chapter leaders from around the country — including their codefendants Ethan Nordean, of Washington, and Joseph Biggs, of Florida — to help organize the response.

They carried out their planning in a chat group dubbed the “Ministry of Self Defense” — a nod to their claim that the only plan they had was to show up to protect Trump supporters from the threat of violent counterprotests.

In truth, Mulroe said, the group’s intent was the opposite — to whip up a “fighting force” for Trump. The goal, he said “wasn’t to prevent violence. It was to channel it.”

Rehl came armed with experience of this type of organizing.

A graduate of Northeast Prep and Temple University, he joined the Proud Boys in 2018 to, as he told jurors, expand his network as he attempted to launch his own business.

But since then, he’s led a 2018 pro-Trump “We the People” rally outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia that drew a minuscule crowd of supporters but provoked heated clashes with a larger group of counterprotesters. And he was among the group of Proud Boys spotted drinking beer, openly carrying the group’s flag and chanting slogans with police officers at a “Back the Blue” rally outside the Fraternal Order of Police lodge in Northeast Philadelphia shortly after the city’s racial justice protests in 2020.

During a late 2020 video chat, he warned the others in the “Ministry of Self Defense” group that Jan. 6 would be a “completely different operation” as they would be more than just ‘flexing our [arms] and s—.” And as the group descended on Washington on Jan. 5, he arrived with a group of Proud Boys from Philadelphia and New Jersey preparing to march the next day.

Videos from Jan. 6 shared widely on social media show Rehl — in a “Make America Great Again” cap and with a Temple Owls backpack — and other Proud Boys leading a group of hundreds on a walk from the Washington Monument to the Capitol building.

And as rioters first breached the police barricades outside it, Rehl and his codefendants stood at the vanguard.

“F — ‘em. Storm the Capitol!” he shouted in a cellphone video shot moments after the first breach. And within minutes, according to the video presented by prosecutors at trial, he was deploying pepper spray against the police in his path.

“Civil War started,” he wrote as the caption to a photo he sent other Proud Boys leaders as the rioters advanced. Rehl, in his testimony, shrugged off that remark as an “ironic” reference to mainstream media panic around that day.

Photos also surfaced of Rehl inside the building, smoking a cigarette while carousing with a mob of rioters in the office of Sen. Jeff Merkley (D., Ore.) — the one thing Rehl did acknowledge during his testimony that he shouldn’t have done.

Beyond that, he told jurors, “If you believe I did anything wrong that day, I really do truly apologize.”

But throughout his testimony, Rehl bristled as prosecutors confronted him again and again with his own bombastic talk in the Proud Boys group chats and the fiery rhetoric of others.

“It’s not my job to police a chat room,” he said. “If a man goes into a chat and says something stupid, that’s on him.”

On that point, the jury’s verdict suggested Thursday, the panel and Rehl agreed.