The U.S. Justice Department said Monday that it will seek more prison time for former Philadelphia Proud Boys president Zachary Rehl and three other leaders of the militant far-right organization convicted of seditious conspiracy charges tied to their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.
Prosecutors filed notice of their intent to appeal the 15-year sentence that a federal judge in Washington gave Rehl, 38, of Port Richmond, in August — one of the longest prison terms imposed so far against the hundreds of people who have been convicted of playing a role in the insurrection.
Still, that punishment was half of what government lawyers initially recommended and the minimum term called for under federal sentencing guidelines — a fact U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly remarked upon as he announced Rehl’s fate at the end of that summer hearing.
“I will probably never sentence someone 15 years below the guidelines in my entire career,” said the judge, who granted similar breaks to the other Proud Boys leaders.
Appeals from convicted defendants are routine. (In fact, Rehl appealed his conviction in the case in September.) It is much rarer for the government to challenge a judge’s sentencing decision in the appellate courts.
Federal prosecutors successfully appealed the 4 ½-year sentence a judge in Philadelphia gave to former State former State Sen. Vincent J. Fumoleading to a 2011 resentencing during which he was ordered to spend five years behind bars instead.
Rehl’s attorney Norman Pattis balked at the government’s decision to appeal in his client’s case, calling it “ridiculous” and referring to Attorney General Merrick Garland as “unhinged” in an email Tuesday.
“Call him the Inspector Javert of the DOJ,” Pattis said, referring to the single-mindedly obsessed detective from Victor Hugo’s classic novel Les Misérables. “He should take up bungee jumping. This is no longer my government.”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.
But the move follows similar efforts from the office to seek more prison time in the Jan. 6-related case of Oath Keepers Founder Stewart Rhodes, who was sentenced to 18 years behind bars in May — seven years less than the punishment prosecutors had pursued.
In both cases, the defendants provoked an assault on the Capitol that threatened for peaceful transition of presidential power — a historic crime for which there exists little precedent and one that warrants a lengthy prison term, prosecutors argued at the time.
A jury found that Rehl and his codefendants — Proud Boys leaders Enrique Tarrio, Joseph Biggs and Ethan Nordean — organized to rile up members of the crowd that had gathered in Washington on Jan. 6 to support former president Donald Trump and together led a 200-member force in storming the Capitol building.
“These defendants … knew the effect that they had on the people they referred to as the ‘normies,’” Assistant U.S. Attorney Erik Kenerson said at Rehl’s sentencing hearing. “They’re lucky that Jan. 6 did not turn into a mass casualty event.”
Though Kelly determined that their crimes should all be classified as terrorism — a finding that dramatically increased the possible prison time they faced under sentencing guidelines — he said he ultimately did not believe Rehl and the others intended the type of “mass casualty” event typically associated with terrorist acts.
He sentenced Tarrio, the former national chairman of the Proud Boys, to 22 years — the longest sentence in any Jan. 6-related case — and Biggs, of Florida, and Nordean, of Washington state, to 17 and 18 years, respectively.
All three of those prison terms were nine or more years less than the minimum sentenced called for by sentencing guidelines.
Prosecutors are also appealing the 10-year sentence Kelly handed down to Dominic Pezzola, a Proud Boys member from Rochester, N.Y. who stood trial with the others and was convicted of felony crimes, but whom the jury acquitted on the seditious conspiracy charge.
Since he was sentenced, Rehl, a Marine veteran and the son and grandson of Philadelphia police officers, has been transferred to the federal detention center in Center City. He’s launched a blog — titled “Jailed 4 J6″ and hosted by the website of the Patriot Action PAC, which raises commissary money for Jan. 6 defendants — in which he recounts his experiences since his 2021 arrest.
Though Rehl told Kelly at his sentencing that he was “done peddling lies for other people who don’t care” about him, he described his prosecution and trial in a recent post as “some of the most serious, unchecked misconduct in the criminal justice system” and something that should “outrage any constitutional-loving American to their core.”
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