Roger Stone Press Conference Included Proud Boy Chairman in Tow

Roger Stone is someone with few friends, so yeah, the ones he has are going to be just as pathetic as he is. So let’s talk about his love affair with this group, shall we?

FT. LAUDERDALE, FL – As Roger Stone held a press conference that was aborted because of jeers from the assembled crowd, few noticed that the current chair of the Proud Boys was only a few feet from him taping the conference with his cell phone as Stone took questions, unsurprising given Stone’s undying support for the hate group.

Enrique Tarrio, who also joined his fellow neo-Fascists in Charlottesville, Va during the tragic “Unite the Right” rally in Aug. 2017, stood out with a shirt reading “Roger Stone Did Nothing Wrong”, a play on a well-known T-Shirt that has the same message in regards to the Argentinian dictator Augusto Pinochet. Tarrio, who before he became Chairman of Proud Boys International after founder Gavin McInnes left the group was the president of its Miami chapter, is a regular associate of Stone’s.

Enrique Tarrio of Miami is one of two protesters who showed up in support of Roger Stone. He emphasizes that the indictment doesn’t directly accuse Stone of colluding with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election. https://t.co/MfhyGgTDp5

— Madeleine Wright (@MWrightWPLG) January 25, 2019

According to an interview in the Daily Beast, Tarrio, an Afro-Cuban raised in Miami’s Little Havana,  denies institutional racism exists, and blames hip hop for higher crime rates in Black communities and the disproportionate killing of young black men by police. He was among several Republican operatives that attacked a Democratic Campaign office in October, shouting expletives at then-House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi while she entered a campaign event for Donna Shalala, the Democratic nominee in Florida’s 27th District. This incident came just after Proud Boys attacked a group protesting an appearance by Gavin McInnes at the Manhattan Republican Club in New York. Several Proud Boys as well as another neo-Fascist group, the 211 Boot Boys, were arrested, charged with assault and are currently awaiting trial.

Tarrio was also among the line of militia members who stood at Emancipation Park in Charlottesville protecting neo-Fascists from Antifa as they held a rally that turned into a riot and ended with the death of Charlottesville resident Heather Heyer when neo-Fascist James Fields drove into a group protesting them with his vehicle. On the vest he was wearing that day, he had a patch of the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights (FOAK), which was the paramilitary wing of the Proud Boys. In an interview days later however, he said that he did not participate in the infamous tiki-torch rally the evening before, saying “After I saw the tiki torch thing, I was completely against it.” Despite the proclamation by the Proud Boys that they “disavowed” the Charlottesville rally weeks before and that any members who went to the event were kicked out, Tarrio remained with the group and even joined them during a rally in Portland, Oregon with Patriot Prayer on Aug. 4, months later becoming its chair.

After Tarrio took over leadership, he and Stone appeared in a video where Stone encouraged Proud Boys to “keep the faith” in the wake of the organization’s setbacks stemming from the New York City fight.

Roger Stone was arrested Friday on charges brought by special counsel Robert Mueller that the longtime Donald Trump associate sought stolen emails from WikiLeaks that would damage his opponents during the campaign. He was arrested during a pre-dawn raid orchestrated by the FBI on his Florida home and after he appeared briefly in federal court in Fort Lauderdale, the judge ordered him released on a $250,000 bond. He went outside the courthouse to hold a press conference, but boos, jeers and chants of “Lock him up!” became too loud for him and he stopped and walked back into the courthouse.