D.C. Police Officer Charged with Leaking Information to Proud Boys Leader

Even after Jan. 6, Mr. Tarrio and Mr. Lamond continued to communicate about the legal fallout from the riot, exchanging reactions to the violence and trading information about the larger investigation. Texts included in the indictment show that Mr. Tarrio, who had also passed along information to the F.B.I. and Florida police officers in the past, appeared to have kept a similarly close and cooperative relationship with Mr. Lamond.

“I think I could have stopped this whole thing,” Mr. Tarrio texted on Jan. 7, before offering to help the police arrest someone in connection with the riot.

“Let me know if she’s on your list,” Mr. Tarrio wrote. “I’ll have her turn herself in.”

“Looks like the feds are locking people up for rioting at the Capitol,” Mr. Lamond texted back on Jan. 8. “I hope none of your guys were among them.”

In addition to obstructing the investigation into Mr. Tarrio, Mr. Lamond had deliberately misrepresented the conversations to investigators, prosecutors said. Mr. Lamond described the exchanges as “one-sided” and as routine intelligence-gathering when he had often reached out to Mr. Tarrio with privileged details about Metropolitan Police Department activities.

Lawyers for Mr. Tarrio sought to call Mr. Lamond a defense witness at the sedition trial, but Mr. Schamel told them that if Mr. Lamond were called to testify, he would invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Mr. Tarrio’s legal team then tried to have Judge Timothy J. Kelly confer immunity on Mr. Lamond and compel him to take the stand, but the judge refused to do so.

Unable to obtain Mr. Lamond’s live testimony, Mr. Tarrio’s lawyers chose to introduce several of the text messages the two men exchanged in an effort to show that they were in close contact with each other in the run-up not only to Jan. 6 but also to other pro-Trump events in Washington that preceded it.

The lawyers were hoping to persuade the jury that Mr. Tarrio could not have been planning a seditious plot against the government while actively keeping a veteran police officer in the loop about the Proud Boys’ activities.

“I am shocked and disgusted to see that the government used certain information in the indictment against Lt. Shane Lamond that was not allowed to be introduced in our trial,” said Nayib Hassan, a lawyer for Mr. Tarrio.