Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner is pushing for the jailing of a co-founder of a group called Veterans for Trump after that right-wing figurehead, Joshua Macias, was seen in recently released footage of a pre-January 6 meeting that also included Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and then-Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio. Both Rhodes and Tarrio are now charged with seditious conspiracy tied to the riot.
Macias is currently facing charges for issues separate from the riot. After the last presidential election, he was arrested after traveling into Philadelphia with a fellow right-wing extremist, weapons, and ammunition. Macias and his co-conspirator, a man named Antonio Lamotta, were arrested near the Philadelphia Convention Center, which was in use as a vote-tabulation center. The weapons the pair possessed obviously suggest that they planned for some kind of confrontation, which could have been deadly.
Krasner’s office “has filed a motion seeking to have Macias held in contempt of court, due to new information that has surfaced about Jan. 6, 2021,” per The Philadelphia Inquirer. “That includes recent federal indictments, and documentary footage showing Macias meeting with Enrique Tarrio, the then-leader of the Proud Boys, in an underground parking garage the evening before the Capitol siege.” That footage appears to have been released in May. A filmmaker who, with his team, seems responsible for it publicly testified to the House riot committee last week. Krasner’s team has previously sought the revocation of Macias’s bail. “Krasner said that given the surfacing of this video, Macias should be “locked up” while he awaits trial,” a Pennsylvania news outlet explains.
“When we first encountered [Macias and Lamotta] we knew it was serious,” Krasner stated. “But we thought they were medium-sized fish. We thought they weren’t sharks. Stewart’s a shark. Enrique Tarrio is a shark. And who are they meeting with in this underground parking lot, who were they choosing to meet with face-to-face so there’s no electronic communications that can be tracked? Why are we meeting underground? There were only four or five people in this meeting, and now that meeting is being lifted up to show that there was specific collusion between the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers in advance. And who was there with them?” (The answer, of course, is Macias.) Macias “has proven how dangerous he can be… This is a startling revelation,” the DA said. Krasner has characterized the original November 2020 incident involving Macias as a “mass shooting that was narrowly averted,” and Lisa Deeley, chairwoman of the Philadelphia City Commission, harbors the same belief.
Former Philly City Commissioner Al Schmidt faced death threats after Trump angrily tweeted about him following the last presidential election because of his resistance to false claims of election fraud. “After the president tweeted at me by name, calling me out the way that he did, the threats became much more specific, much more graphic and included not just me by name, but included members of my family, my name, their ages, our address… just every bit of detail that you could imagine,” Schmidt told the House committee investigating the Capitol riot during Monday proceedings.
