Nick Quested, the filmmaker who documented extremist Proud Boys in the days leading up to and on Jan. 6—and was present for a meeting between their leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio and Oath Keeper head Elmer Stewart Rhodes—is expected to testify before the Jan. 6 committee this Thursday night.
Joining Quested as a witness for the committee’s first live televised hearing this month will be Caroline Edwards, a U.S. Capitol Police Officer who was injured on Jan. 6 during a clash with Proud Boys at the Capitol. She is believed to be the first officer injured that day.
RELATED STORY—The BIG Guide: Who’s who in the January 6 investigation
The next hearing is scheduled for June 13 at 10 a.m. Additional hearings are expected on June 15 at 10 a.m. and June 16 at 1 p.m. A time for the June 21 hearing has not yet been confirmed as of Thursday, June 9. A final presentation is anticipated on June 23 and that hearing will be in primetime at 8 PM.
Daily Kos will offer up-to-the-minute coverage of each hearing on its front page, as well as on Twitter. The hearings will be broadcast and carried live on most major networks except for Fox News. The select committee is also expected to stream the hearings on its website, here.
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Quested’s company, Goldcrest Films, was first flagged in court records when prosecutors asked a federal judge to keep Tarrio behind bars ahead of his trial this summer.
Having tagged alongside members of the Proud Boys since the November 2020 election to document them, Quested was permitted to film the group and, critically, he was at the meeting with Tarrio and Rhodes when they met in an underground parking garage on Jan. 5 in D.C.
Tarrio had been arrested and detained the day before for the burning of a Black Lives Matter banner at a prominent Black church in Washington weeks before. He was released and told to stay out of Washington.
But before he skipped town, he met with Rhodes and others at the Hall of the States parking garage. Tarrio and Rhodes were joined by Joshua Macias, leader of Vets for Trump, and Bianca Gracia, the head of Latinos for Trump. Kellye SoRelle, an attorney for the Oath Keepers, was also present and so too was Amy Harris, a freelance photographer.
Both Gracias and Macias’ organizations secured permits for rallies on Jan. 6. Public permit records show that Roger Stone, Trump’s ally and peddler of election fraud conspiracy theory, was scheduled to speak at the events. He never did. Instead, as the violence erupted at the Capitol on Jan.6, he fled town.
The parking garage meeting lasted about a half-hour and prosecutors contend that the video shows Tarrio eager to have his foot soldiers under his “command and control” for the coming insurrection.
Tarrio, who is a resident of Miami, Florida, has argued in court that the meeting with Rhodes was happenstance and that he simply bumped into Rhodes when he was headed out of D.C. and into Baltimore, Maryland, post-arrest.
Quested could shine a light on what happened in Baltimore, too. He joined Tarrio there after the garage meeting with Rhodes.
Federal prosecutors allege that when Tarrio was in that parking garage, he made curious remarks, including noting to someone there that he had deleted all of the messages on his phone before he was arrested.
In April, exhibits underpinning the Oath Keeper’s conspiracy case featured a batch of text messages that showed, for the first time, how there appeared to be an overlap or direct connection between the extremist Oath Keepers and Proud Boys as the nation careened toward Jan. 6.
One such record snagged from an Oath Keepers group chat showed that when Tarrio’s arrest started to make headlines, Oath Keeper Kelly Meggs, then the leader of the network’s Florida chapter, alerted his clan. He reached out to Tarrio, he said.
“I just called him no answer. But he will call [when] he’s out,” Meggs said of Tarrio.
That evening, another person in the chat—their name was redacted in court documents—responded:
“They [think] chopping the head off kills it or something? Damn fools should have left him alone,” the text said.
RELATED STORY: Oath Keeper texts expose talk of security for Trump world figures plus Proud Boys ties
Tarrio initially faced conspiracy charges connected to Jan. 6, but prosecutors just 24 hours ago announced that he and a handful of his alleged Proud Boy co-conspirators would now also face more charges, including seditious conspiracy.
The only other Jan. 6 defendants charged with seditious conspiracy are members of the Oath Keepers and their head honcho Elmer Rhodes. Rhodes was charged in January alongside 10 co-defendants. Many have flipped and have told authorities that Rhodes oversaw a plan to stop the proceedings on Jan. 6 and use force to do it.
It’s important to note that neither Tarrio nor Rhodes are charged with physically breaching the Capitol. Though they did not storm the building physically, prosecutors have said they oversaw a weaponized, well-orchestrated, and well-funded conspiracy that had one primary mission: to stop the peaceful transfer of power through any means necessary.
If convicted of seditious conspiracy and given the maximum sentence for that charge alone, Tarrio and Rhodes could face 20 years in prison, respectively.
Quested was already deposed by the select committee and testified for seven hours. And in an interview with CBS, he suggested there was animosity between Rhodes and Tarrio at the meeting underground.
“They were not on the same team. There was a trepidation to engage with each other, especially from Rhodes' point of view,” Quested told CBS.
RELATED STORY: Proud Boys leader, 4 lieutenants face seditious conspiracy charges over insurrection involvement
U.S. Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards' testimony will likely feature a detailed recounting of her experience that day. People in the crowd threw a metal bike rack on top of her. She stands just under 5’5”. The rack hit her hard, threw her off balance, and she smacked her head on the concrete on the way down, The New York Times reported this January. She suffered a concussion.
Late Tuesday, Law.com reported that Jeffrey Rosen, the former acting attorney general under Trump was invited to testify before the committee. Daily Kos reported this possibility earlier this week. Rosen has testified about the Trump administration to Congress before.
Rosen told oversight and judiciary committees in both the House and Senate that he was pressured by Trump’s allies at the DOJ—namely, Rosen’s subordinate, Jeffrey Clark—to issue a public statement saying the FBI found evidence of voter fraud in various states. The draft was proposed during a meeting just after Christmas 2020.
Clark threatened to have Rosen ousted at Trump’s behest if he wouldn’t go along with the plan. Rosen wouldn’t. Trump ultimately kept Rosen in place and the letter never went out.