Questions and Consequences

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This morning, I was in court, watching my former coworker and boyfriend be sentenced to eighteen months in prison for passing information onto a terrorist group and then lying about it.

There’s probably a joke here about dating in DC, except reality isn’t always funny.

I went because I wanted to see his face when he was sentenced.  I wanted to see his reaction to facing the consequences of his actions, of his betrayal of his fellow officers, to me personally, and to this country. 

There will also forever be a question mark in my mind as to whether I was used by Lt. Shane Lamond, the former intel head for DC’s Metropolitan Police Department.  I’m left to wonder if he only pursued me because of my position at the Capitol Police. 

Shane made me smile whether it be from the texts he sent me throughout the day or with that off-colored cop sense of humor.  I enjoyed my time with him, both as a friend and as a lover.  I could talk to him about work, and he understood.

This is a story that cannot be viewed divorced of its context and that context happens to be one of the darkest days in American history—January 6, 2021.  The Proud Boys would just be one of many other extremist groups in the United States like Active Clubs, NSC-131, Blood Tribe, the Oath Keepers, or even Antifa, had they not been endorsed by a president who challenged an election.  The Proud Boys were not just another group spouting extremist rhetoric and trying to undermine the foundations of America.  They were one of this country’s most formidable enemies in 2020-2021.      

More than a hundred Proud Boys participated in the riot and its leaders received some of the lengthiest sentences for their roles that infamous day.  Enrique Tarrio, the group’s then-leader and whom I sat behind at the sentencing, received the longest sentence of anyone—22 years in prison—for seditious conspiracy.  While the president may have forgiven Tarrio for his actions, his misdeeds are not forgotten (and the conviction still stands, a fact I had to remind Tarrio of at the sentencing).

The one quote that has been replayed in the media over and over is of Shane telling Tarrio, “Of course I can’t say it officially, but personally I support you all and don’t want to see your group’s name or reputation dragged through the mud.”  In court he argued, “I don't support the Proud Boys and I'm not a Proud Boys sympathizer,” but at the point Shane declared his support for the Proud Boys, on January 8, 2021, the trust with Tarrio was already well-established (and the Proud Boys reputation was mud).  By both Shane’s and Tarrio’s accounts, they had been in communication since 2019.  If he didn’t truly support the Proud Boys, why say anything at all or why provide such a full-throated endorsement of them? Even if we accept Shane’s explanation that he was chummy with Tarrio, “to build a rapport and to kind of gain his trust,” at best, it establishes Shane’s ability to lie convincingly.  At worst, Shane genuinely did support the Proud Boys.

Though there may be doubt in my mind about Shane’s intentions towards me personally, there is no doubt in my mind as to his guilt.  There are three things he did that were the proverbial nails in the coffin for me, the most telling of which was Shane’s initiation of self-destructing messages to communicate with Tarrio.  

Shane testified in his own defense, which is his right to do, but as his testimony showed, there is a reason why most defense attorneys advise against defendants testifying in their own trials. Shane testified that he used the self-destruct feature when messaging Tarrio on Telegram “to mirror him.”  To put a point on that testimony, the prosecution asked Shane again, “So your testimony is that he used a self-destruct timer first and then you used it to mirror him, right?” to which Shane responded in the affirmative.

In the prosecution’s cross examination of Shane, they showed him a text message Tarrio had sent to Shane about a conversation he had had with an MPD detective about the BLM flag burning investigation.  After receiving the message, Shane—not Tarrio—went into Telegram and set his next message to Tarrio to self-destruct.  “You went in and you set a self-destruct timer…And that's the first time that either you or Mr. Tarrio had ever sent -- set a self-destruct timer, right?” the prosecution pointed out, to which Shane responded, “I believe so, yes.”

I’m not an attorney, but I know for a person who is charged three times over with providing false statements to federal officials, providing testimony where written evidence clearly shows that testimony to be a lie, isn’t helpful to anyone’s defense. 

I’m also not a police officer, but even I with just tangential knowledge of police procedures know that when working with informants or sources, whether formally or not, you are working with them to gain information and the information gathered is to be used in furtherance of police operations and/or investigations.  To not document or report—or worse, to destroy—the information gathered is highly problematic. This, combined with the fact that Shane had deleted all his communications with Tarrio (they were recovered from Tarrio’s phone), suggests he understood there were consequences to his actions even if he didn’t fully contemplate or appreciate what those consequences were or could be. 

The second highly problematic action, and one that is a tick in the ‘he used me’ column (though I was not romantically linked to him yet at this point), was when Shane asked me on January 7, 2021, if a certain individual had been identified as having participated in the riot at the Capitol the day before. 

10:36am: Tarrio texted Shane. “I have someone you guys might be looking for…” 

Shane replied at 10:44am, “Copy.  Not that I’m aware of offhand but I will check.”

At 3:17pm Shane texted me, “Hey Julie can you send me the FBI list?”  This referred to the list of individuals we had already identified as having participated in the riot.

I sent Shane the list at 3:33pm.

Four minutes later Shane replied back to Tarrio, “Nope. Not on our list.” 

I never would have provided Shane with this information—indeed, I never would have spoken to Shane again and probably would have gone to the FBI sooner than I ultimately did—had I known he was asking me on behalf of Enrique Tarrio and that there was a direct line from me to Tarrio through Shane.  Though it was not one of the charges, that action in and of itself could have been obstruction of justice.  There was an active investigation as to who participated in and perpetrated the riot and Shane was providing information to the enemy—the one person who ended up receiving the lengthiest sentence of anyone involved in January 6th—about the status of potential suspects.  When Shane was asked by the FBI if it “would it be common for [Tarrio] to fish” for information and Shane replied, “He never really asked me questions about, like, you know, what we were doing or anything,” that was a lie.  Plain and simple.  Maybe “fish” was too weak of a word.  Tarrio didn’t have to “fish.”  He asked Shane for information outright and Shane delivered. 

Lastly, Shane had told some of us at the Capitol Police about Tarrio’s pending arrest for the burning of the Black Lives Matter flag, and he told me it was “close hold,” meaning to not share that information with those who didn’t have a need-to-know.  I didn’t even tell the people who worked for me that Tarrio was about to be arrested, but Shane was openly having conversations with Tarrio about the investigation.  Whether he did or did not tell Tarrio he was about to be arrested when his plane landed, wasn’t necessary for me to believe he obstructed justice.  It would have been icing on the cake if that text message had been preserved, but there was plenty of other evidence—written evidence, evidence in Shane’s own testimony.  There was enough to logically conclude that he shared more than he should have with Tarrio as to the investigation. 

Shane bragged to Tarrio about talking down the Criminal Investigations Division from charging the flag burning as a hate crime.  He told Tarrio MPD had received an anonymous tip that it was Tarrio who committed the crime.  He told Tarrio the case was not going to be investigated by the FBI.  He told Tarrio what evidence MPD did and did not have about him.  The defense characterized all this as “sloppy,” but it was more than that and any reasonable, prudent person would see it for what it truly was—obstructing justice. 

Shane is a man of contradictions, which is maybe why I am finding it so difficult to reconcile the Shane I knew with the Shane I now know.  With both Shane and I each having two daughters, we talked about our kids frequently.  Shane recounted how when his daughters were little, he had a case where a little girl the same age as his daughter had been killed in a car accident.  He said he came home and held his daughter and cried.  Without a doubt he loves his daughters, and I could see he was a good father.  He was also very loving and caring towards his elderly mother. 

But Shane also has the capacity to lie and to be untruthful for very selfish reasons.

His first marriage ended after he was unfaithful.  He was unfaithful to his second wife.  He had more than one mistress, even more than one at the same time.  A man unable to keep his fly zipped is a story as old as time, but for Shane (and many other men) the consequences of that were all relatively minor and largely socially acceptable. 

But deceptive behavior under oath to a federal officer is far more serious, something a police officer of twenty-plus years should have known.

Just as an illicit lover can speak to a masculine ego thirsty to be stroked, that same motivation is what I think drew Shane to the Proud Boys.  He relished boys behaving like boys.  And as he was in his job, Shane basked in being the center of attention.  He was the go-to person for information both as an officer and within the Proud Boys, and he reveled in that role.  Shane enjoyed being special within the Proud Boys group, like he was regarded as exceptional within the law enforcement intelligence community.  He enjoyed feeling like he had an important role within the group and that he added value.  He had purpose and the illicitness of it made it even more enticing.

When Shane called me up that last time I spoke to him, he sounded so dejected and sad.  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” he told me.  That was a lie, but I suspect it was one he had told himself so many times that he believed it.  Did he call because he felt close to me or did he call because he wanted to keep me close?  Afterall, he succeeded in doing that with his other mistress.  She wrote a letter of support to the court lamenting Shane as “the kindest and most empathetic” person she ever knew.  I turned over to the FBI all the text messages I had with Shane talking about Tarrio, the Proud Boys, and that infamous meeting at the Dubliner.  I had already gone to the FBI when Shane had called.

I did a podcast with Erik Fleming, and of my relationship with Shane he said, “There’s a human element to all of this stuff.  And I think people, when we get caught up in stories and we watch on the news, and we almost like make cardboard characters of the people we see on the news every day.”  Shane is human and he is more than the sum of his parts portrayed in the media and in court.  We don’t exist in black and white, good and bad.  We all live in shades of gray.  The best person still has the faculty to be corrupt.

In all those letters of support submitted to the court on Shane’s behalf talking about how good a friend, father, and son he is, all those things said may very well have been true, which is what makes the betrayal to me sting all the more.  Humans are imperfect creatures, and this is a story of mistakes, careless and foolish, some of them my own.

I’ll just add one more point here.  It’s not lost on me the irony of Shane, through his family, namely his sister Nicole, calling upon the same people he condemned at trial to support him now.  These are the people Shane was supposed to be protecting the people of DC from, domestic terrorists who celebrated destruction, who plotted to take over the Capitol, who were violent on our streets.  This is who Shane is now soliciting for support.  He wants it both ways—he wants us to simultaneously believe he wasn’t helping the Proud Boys while also asking them to distribute amongst their membership and its supporters a petition to have him pardoned.  It’s just another layer of depravity.  If that’s who Shane wants in his corner, it speaks volumes louder about his character than any letter submitted to the court on his behalf.