Feds seek 30 years in prison for Philly Proud Boys president Zach Rehl’s role in Jan. 6 attack

Zach Rehl, head of the Philadelphia chapter of the Proud Boys, could spend three decades in federal prison if prosecutors get their way later this month at his sentencing hearing.

The role that Rehl and three other leaders of the neofacist organization played in organizing the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol “threatened the bedrock principles of our country” and warranted the significant punishment, government lawyers argued in a court filing late Thursday.

Their recommendation of 30 years is considerably more than that of the most serious prison sentence imposed so far against a participant in the Capitol siege — the 18-year term given in May to Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes.

“These defendants and the men in their command saw themselves as the foot soldiers of the right — they were prepared to use, and they did use, force to stop the ‘traitors’ from stealing the election,” Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jason B.A. McCullough and Conor Mulroe wrote of Rehl and his codefendants. “They failed. They are not heroes; they are criminals.”

Like Rhodes, Rehl, 37, of Port Richmond, and three codefendants — Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys national chairman; and regional leaders Ethan Nordean and Joseph Biggs — were convicted by a federal jury on seditious conspiracy charges, the most serious count levied against any of the more than 1,000 charged participants in the Jan. 6 riot and one that carries a prison sentence of up to 20 years.

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

In their filings this week, prosecutors urged U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly to stack that maximum sentence on top of punishment for the other counts on which the Proud Boys leaders were convicted and impose an enhanced terrorism penalty.

Prosecutors also announced their intention to seek sentences of 33 years for Tarrio and Biggs, 27 for Nordean and 20 for Dominic Pezzola, a Proud Boys member from New York who was convicted alongside the others on less serious felonies but acquitted at trial of the sedition charge. All five defendants are set to be sentenced the week of Aug. 28.

McCullough and Mulroe painted the Proud Boys’ conduct as worse than their Oath Keepers counterparts.

Rhodes was convicted of stockpiling weapons and amassing a strike force outside of Washington in expectation of former President Donald Trump giving them the word to attack.

But by the time he and the other Oath Keepers began to mobilize toward the Capitol, a crowd of nearly 200 whipped up by the Proud Boys had already helped initiate the first breach of police lines that day.

Rehl and his codefendants, they said, stood at the vanguard.

“F— ‘em. Storm the Capitol!” he shouted in a cell phone video shot moments after that breach.

And within minutes, according to the footage presented by prosecutors during his trial, Rehl — a former Marine and the son and grandson of Philadelphia police cops — was deploying pepper spray against officers in his path.

“They viewed themselves as revolutionaries,” McCullough and Mulroe said, “and they believed fully in their cause.”

But Rehl’s attorney, Norman Pattis, maintained that his client’s firmly held, if incorrect, belief that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen and that he was protecting democracy should prompt the judge to have mercy.

In his own sentencing recommendation, Rehl’s attorney urged the judge to release his client after the two and a half years he’s spent in prison since his 2021 arrest.

“These defendants are not terrorists,” wrote Pattis, whose previous clients have included right-wing provocateur Alex Jones. “Whatever excess of zeal they demonstrated on Jan. 6, 2021, and no matter how grave the potential interference with the orderly transfer of power due to the events of that day, a decade or more behind bars is excessive punishment.”

Throughout the four-month trial that played out in Washington earlier this year, just steps from the Capitol, Rehl continuously sought to portray himself as an unwitting participant in an attack that caused millions of dollars in damage, injured scores of officers and threatened the peaceful transition of power.

Though he and the other Proud Boys leaders had spent weeks heeding Trump’s call to gather in Washington Jan. 6 and organizing a crowd to march on the Capitol that day, Rehl maintained none of them anticipated the chaos that eventually erupted.

“If I believe that I did anything wrong,” he told jurors while testifying in his own defense, “I really do truly apologize.”

Prosecutors, however, quickly punctured that pretense using Rehl’s own words.

Rehl testified that, as head of the Proud Boys’ Philadelphia chapter, he’d led a more disciplined and politically focused group than some other chapters, which had gained notoriety for street brawls with counterprotesters in incidents leading up to the Jan. 6 attack.

But text messages introduced by prosecutors showed Rehl valued members who could “throw down” and fast-tracked the membership of one man whom he described as “ready to crack skulls.”

In the run-up to Jan. 6, Rehl was one of several leaders of the organization handpicked by Tarrio to organize the Proud Boys actions. He’d endorsed on social media “firing squads for the traitors that are trying to steal the election.”

When confronted during his trial testimony with body camera footage that appeared to show him pepper spraying police during the riot, Rehl responded that he “couldn’t recall” if he’d assaulted an officer that day.

And once the Capitol was eventually cleared and recriminations had begun to set in, Rehl expressed regret that he and the mob he helped lead hadn’t succeeded.

“Looking back, it sucked,” he texted other members of the Philadelphia chapter on Jan. 7. “We shoulda held the Capitol. … Everyone shoulda showed up armed and took the country back the right way.”

McCullough and Mulroe said Thursday that Rehl’s words should leave little doubt of his true intentions that day.

“They unleashed a force on the Capitol that was calculated to exert their political will on elected officials by force and undo the results of a democratic election,” they wrote.

Pattis, however, called for restraint, arguing that whatever his client’s crimes he’d already been sufficiently punished.

Rehl has spent most of the last two and a half years awaiting trial in solitary confinement. While in prison, he missed the birth of his second child and the high school graduation of his first. As a result of his conviction, the disability checks from his military service, which had supported his family, have been withdrawn.

“We are a nation born in dissent; our politics has often been raw and raucous,” Pattis wrote. “The challenge in divided times is not to divide and conquer, but to build bridges between people who love this country, sometimes in shockingly different ways.”