D.C. police lieutenant sentenced to 18 months for leaking to Proud Boys

A former Washington, D.C., police lieutenant convicted of leaking information about a police investigation to the leader of the Proud Boys group on the eve of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, was sentenced Friday to 18 months behind bars. Shane Lamond was not immediately taken into custody.

He will now will see whether President Donald Trump will pardon him, as he did the Proud Boys leader who showed up at the federal courthouse Friday in support of Lamond.

Senior U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said pointedly that she would not be considering the possibility of a pardon in her sentencing decision. “I’m going to do my job to the best of my ability, which I think is determining the right sentence,” the judge said, and that others would then take actions she could not control. Trump has recently issued pardons to other members of law enforcement convicted in federal trials, including two MPD officers convicted in the death of a teenage cyclist and a Virginia sheriff convicted of accepting bribes.

Lamond, who chose a bench trial with Jackson instead of a jury trial, said he disagreed with her guilty verdicts on his charges of obstructing justice and lying to federal agents about his interactions with Enrique Tarrio, but “in retrospect, I agree with the court and prosecutors that I made numerous errors. In hindsight, I would have done things differently. My heart is truly in the right place, and I would never do anything that would negatively impact this police department or this city.” Jackson commented that she did not sense true remorse in Lamond’s comments. Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys in early 2021, testified on Lamond’s behalf at trial – Jackson said she didn’t believe him – and he watched Lamond’s sentencing from the audience Friday.

“I believe that he needs a pardon, and I believe me coming here would help,” Tarrio said. He said “the only reason that Shane Lamond was arrested” was because Tarrio listed him as a witness for the Proud Boys’ trial in 2022, at which Tarrio was convicted of seditious conspiracy, sentenced to 22 years, and then pardoned in January by Trump.

Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers who was convicted of seditious conspiracy, was also in the courtroom, his first appearance there since his 18-year sentence was commuted by Trump. “I’m here to bear witness that he needs a pardon,” Rhodes said. “All of this is a travesty of injustice.”

In early 2021, Lamond, a 23-year MPD veteran, had been in contact for 18 months with Tarrio in Lamond’s role as head of the police intelligence unit. Lamond testified, and text messages confirmed, that he was trying to monitor the movements of the group when they came to D.C. and learn their plans for the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally headlined by Trump.

The Proud Boys had previously drawn concern when Tarrio took a Black Lives Matter banner from a historic African American church downtown and burned it in December 2020. A separate unit of the MPD investigated the case and asked Lamond to question Tarrio about it. That unit then obtained a warrant for Tarrio. Records show Tarrio, while flying to D.C. on Jan. 4, 2021, alerted three people that a warrant had been issued for him, which could have caused problems if Tarrio wanted to evade arrest.

Prosecutors alleged that Lamond tipped off Tarrio to the warrant, then lied about it in three false statements to investigators. In the trial before Jackson, Tarrio testified that Lamond didn’t tip him off, and he repeated that outside court on Friday. Jackson said she didn’t believe Tarrio and Lamond.

“The record shows,” Jackson said, “that Tarrio was using Lamond as a source, not the other way around, and that the defendant was happy to help him out. Had he not compounded this offense with lies to the special agents, I don’t know if we’d be here today.”

Testifying in his defense, Lamond acknowledged that he shared inside information with Tarrio about the flag-burning investigation, but maintained that he acted within the bounds of his job and didn’t support the Proud Boys. He vehemently objected to prosecutors’ characterization of him as a “sympathizer or double agent,” insisting he was doing his job by cultivating a source in a group that had a history of violent behavior.

“That is absolutely not the way police treat information about a warrant,” Jackson said Friday, “and Mr. Lamond knows that … He lied to the federal agents when he was a sworn law enforcement officer himself.”

Lamond, 49, was given until Aug. 1 to surrender because of pending back surgery.