WASHINGTON — Shane Lamond, the former leader of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department’s intelligence division, was found guilty on Monday of obstructing justice and lying to federal investigators about leaking insider information to Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, the former leader of the extremist Proud Boys who is now serving 22 years in prison for seditious conspiracy.
The bench trial for Lamond, who was first charged last year, lasted a little over a week before U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson delivered the verdict. Lamond had waived his right to a jury trial. Sentencing guidelines for the obstruction charge vary between a minimum of three years and a maximum of 30. The false statement charges carry a penalty of up to five years in prison per charge. Lamond is facing three false statement charges.
The 48-year-old veteran of the police force came under criminal investigation when federal agents were examining phones seized in 2021 from members of the far-right Proud Boys. One message from the leader of the Proud Boys, Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, suggested that he had a contact on a local police force named “Shane.”
The FBI and the Department of Justice began investigating Lamond shortly afterward, attempting to assess whether the head of MPD’s intelligence division had spent weeks illicitly disclosing sensitive information to Tarrio about a police probe into the destruction of a Black Lives Matter banner. The banner was stolen from a historic Black church in Washington on Dec. 12, 2020, and set on fire. Tarrio eventually pleaded guilty to the destruction charge and was sentenced to five months in prison.
When Tarrio went on trial and was convicted of seditious conspiracy in 2023, prosecutors said the Proud Boys leader used his connection to Lamond to surveil the progress of the banner-burning probe and ultimately coordinate his arrest on Jan. 4, 2021.
This maneuvering allowed Tarrio to create an alibi for his whereabouts on Jan. 6, 2021, according to prosecutors. Tarrio wasn’t on Capitol grounds during the insurrection because he had been ordered to leave Washington two days earlier. He ended up in a hotel room in Baltimore and watched the riot unfold on television while chatting with Proud Boys on and off the scene.
The alibi was not foolproof, though. After Tarrio was indicted for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, a jury in Washington last year convicted him of seditious conspiracy, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, conspiracy to prevent members of Congress from discharging their duties and more.
Lamond has insisted since he was first indicted that his relationship with Tarrio was professional and that his communications with the far-right leader — the men shared hundreds of texts and voice memos, and they communicated in secret channels on Telegram ahead of Jan. 6 — was centered purely on surveillance of a source during a tumultuous period in the nation’s capital.
Protests following the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020 rocked the city and gave way to pro-Donald Trump rallies that November and December that led to violent clashes between Proud Boys and counterprotesters.
When Lamond took the witness stand on Dec. 6, he said he never supported the Proud Boys organization and was not, as U.S. attorneys argued, a “Proud Boys sympathizer” or “double agent.”
The regular contact with Tarrio was “critical to get verified intelligence on the activities of these groups,” he testified, according to a local CBS affiliate.
Lamond admitted from the stand on Friday that he had told Tarrio police were looking into whether the destruction of the BLM banner would amount to a hate crime. The former lieutenant conceded that he had also told Tarrio he didn’t think the incident should be investigated as a hate crime.
According to prosecutors and witnesses — including Lamond’s onetime supervisor, D.C. MPD Police Executive Assistant Chief Jeffery Carroll — this was not something Lamond should have shared with a source. Carroll testified that the discussion of law enforcement’s internal deliberations on how to pursue charges for a suspect is out of bounds because it could cause a “whole host of legal issues” for the underlying case.
Telling a source who may be involved in a crime how they will be treated can cause that source to flee or destroy evidence, Carroll said.
“I just don’t think it’s proper in general,” he said.
Lamond testified that he didn’t think telling Tarrio about the possible hate crime enhancement was that big of a deal because it was “public information” that the banner-burning might be treated as a hate crime.
Lamond and Tarrio met privately at a Washington, D.C., bar just days after the Black Lives Matter banner was burned on Dec. 12, 2020.
Messages presented in evidence show the meeting came about after Tarrio asked Lamond for his insights on how police really viewed the Proud Boys. A daytime pro-Trump rally on Dec. 12, 2020, went over largely without incident, but that night — the same night the banner was burned — Proud Boys and counterprotesters came to blows as multiple fights broke out and people were stabbed, including Proud Boys leaders like Jeremy Bertino. Tensions were extremely high after the stabbing, with Proud Boys offering sharp criticism of local police, who they felt had abandoned them in favor of protecting “antifa” or leftist protesters.
When Tarrio asked Lamond for his insights, Lamond responded that it was too much to text, and the men agreed to meet at a bar known as The Dubliner on Dec. 15, 2020.
On the stand, Lamond testified that Tarrio did not confess during that meeting that he had destroyed the BLM banner. The former lieutenant said that he had never tipped Tarrio off about when police ultimately signed off on a warrant for his arrest for the burned banner, either.
Tarrio admitted to destroying the banner on social media sites like Parler and Telegram on Dec. 18, 2020. He did an interview with The Washington Post, saying that he had destroyed the banner but he refused the suggestion that it was a hate crime. Tarrio said he believed BLM had “terrorized the citizens of this country” and that his actions weren’t about race, but ideology. He offered to fly himself to Washington to be arrested on his own dime.
When the Proud Boys leader took the stand for a contentious day in court last week, he testified that he was “dead set” on taking credit for the banner burning because he wanted to create a “circus” atmosphere and be arrested.
Text messages shown at trial documented Tarrio telling Lamond he was involved in the banner-burning. On Christmas Day 2020, Lamond even told Tarrio that investigators were trying to identify Tarrio in photos and that an arrest might be imminent.
Under questioning at trial, Lamond admitted that he had never told his supervisors at the department about those messages.
According to The Washington Post, during cross-examination, when prosecutor Joshua Rothstein asked Lamond if he had realized that the discussions with Tarrio about whether a warrant was being issued could potentially impact an arresting officer’s safety, Lamond replied: “It’s possible.”
Until the 2020 election was called for President Joe Biden, the majority of the communications between Tarrio and Lamond happened in recoverable text channels like iMessage. Then, on Nov. 7, 2020, Lamond told Tarrio they should change to encrypted chats. The men sent hundreds of secret chats and dozens of voice messages on Telegram. The voice memos were deleted, and their contents have not been recovered. Evidence showed that after Jan. 6, Lamond had deleted his communications with Tarrio from his device completely. They were only found because of records left over in other Proud Boys devices reviewed by investigators.
Lamond and his defense lawyers argued he only ever meant to help fellow officers. Lamond’s lawyer Mark Schamel pointed to emails, for example, where Lamond’s supervisors came to him for help after Dec. 18 seeking to identify Proud Boys — and the man they would come to learn was Tarrio — from the Dec. 12 crime scene. Schamel noted that Lamond gave his colleagues Tarrio’s phone number. And while Lamond at first said he couldn’t see Tarrio’s face clearly enough in the crime scene photo to ID him, he eventually shared a photo of Tarrio with his colleagues.
An MPD detective investigating Tarrio’s case at the time, Franklin Then, testified that the ID wasn’t especially helpful, though. Lamond had sent back a photo of Tarrio that had already been circulating in the press, and the lieutenant had failed to tell his colleague that he had only just met Tarrio at a bar a week earlier.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.