Media missed how Proud Boys worked with FBI to bring down left-wing operations: report

David McAfee
May 6, 2023, 

Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio (Photo by Chandan Khanna for AFP)

Despite the Proud Boys being all over the news for seditious conspiracy convictions, most outlets failed to mention that the FBI was actively working with numerous members of the far-right group, including its former leader, to specifically target those on the left, according to a report from Jacobin.

Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio is among up to nine members who reportedly served as informants to the FBI. Those informants were partly helping law enforcement target "Black Lives Matter protesters and other left-wing activists," according to Jacobin's Branko Marcetic.

"That fact doesn’t just make the FBI’s failure to detect and prevent the Capitol riot even more baffling," Marcetic wrote. "Revelations from the trial suggested that the FBI’s historical and ongoing fixation on left-wing protests potentially blinded it to the threat of the far right, and that the bureau is even happy to collaborate with far-right groups as a way of neutralizing what it sees as a greater threat from the Left."

Marcetic said only two news outlets, including the Associated Press and the Washington Post, mentioned the FBI connection at all.

"The AP’s reference was perfunctory — contained in a single line about how 'revelations of government informants in the group' prolonged the trial — leaving the Post as the one and only news outlet that specified that Tarrio himself was a longtime informer for law enforcement in a wide range of groups beyond and before the Proud Boys," according to the Jacobin report. "His own lawyer called him 'prolific' informer in a 2014 court proceeding."

Marcetic said mainstream outlets like CBS, ABC, NBC, and USA Today had no mention of the FBI's informant deals.

"Explicitly progressive or liberal-leaning outlets were no better than the mainstream," the report says. "Tarrio and other Proud Boys’ status as FBI informers was absent from Mother Jones’s write-up on the verdict, as well as those of the Guardian, Vice, Huff Post, and Salon."