The New York Times reports:

Mr. Biggs recorded a podcast after the riot in which he declared that the attack on the Capitol was “a warning shot to the government.”

Mr. Biggs’s contacts in the world of right-wing politics were never restricted solely to the Proud Boys. Like Mr. Tarrio, he has long had ties to Roger J. Stone Jr., one of Mr. Trump’s political advisers. He has also been involved at the edges of far-right disinformation campaigns like the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which falsely held that top Democrats like Hillary Clinton ran a child sex trafficking operation from the basement of a Washington pizzeria.

While working at Infowars for its proprietor Alex Jones, Mr. Biggs often covered the far-right militia movement. In 2014, for example, he followed members of the Oath Keepers to Ferguson, Mo. as the group deployed — in its own words — to protect local businesses against unrest that stemmed from a failure to bring charges against a local police officer who killed a Black man, Michael Brown.

During the sedition trial, prosecutors played a brief video from Jan. 6 in which Mr. Biggs could be heard saying that he was trying to get in touch with Mr. Jones and wanted to meet up with him that day. While the two men never did seem to meet at the Capitol, Mr. Jones, who helped lead a crowd from Mr. Trump’s speech near the White House to the Capitol grounds, attracted serious scrutiny from investigators but was ultimately not charged in the inquiry.

Judge Kelly’s decision to impose what is known as a terrorism enhancement on Mr. Biggs’s sentence was one of the most consequential he made on Thursday. The measure can be applied if prosecutors can show that a defendant’s actions were undertaken in an effort to influence “the conduct of government by intimidation and coercion.” [Continue reading…]