DC Officer Accused of Leaking Info to Proud Boys Leader

A DC police officer was arrested Friday on charges he lied about leaking confidential information to a leader of the far-right Proud Boys extremist group and obstructed an investigation after group members destroyed a Black Lives Matter banner in the nation's capital. An indictment alleges that Metropolitan Police Department Lt. Shane Lamond, 47, of Stafford, Virginia, warned former Proud Boys national chairman Enrique Tarrio that law enforcement had an arrest warrant for Tarrio related to the banner's destruction, per the AP. A federal grand jury in Washington indicted Lamond on one count of obstruction of justice and three counts of making false statements.

Lamond, who supervised the intelligence branch of the police department's Homeland Security Bureau, often contacted Tarrio about Proud Boys' planned activities in Washington. Mark Schamel, an attorney for Lamond, has previously said that Lamond's job was to communicate with a variety of groups protesting in Washington, and his conduct with Tarrio was never inappropriate. Prosecutors say the two men communicated at least 500 times across several platforms over a period nearly a year and a half. Lamond began using the Telegram messaging platform to give Tarrio information about law enforcement activity around July 2020, about a year after they started talking, according to prosecutors. By November of that year, he was talking about meeting Tarrio during a night out.

Lamond, whose job entailed sharing what he learned with others in the department, asked Tarrio whether he should share the information Tarrio gave him about Proud Boys activities, prosecutors said. Earlier this month, Tarrio and three other group members were convicted of seditious conspiracy for what prosecutors said was a plot to keep then-President Donald Trump in the White House after he lost the 2020 election. Jurors who convicted Tarrio heard testimony that Lamond frequently provided the Proud Boys leader with internal information about law enforcement operations in the weeks before other members of his group stormed the Capitol. (More Proud Boys stories.)