August 15, 2025 – Key DOJ witness says Biden FBI threatened, coerced him to secure Proud Boy convictions

In Email/Dossier/Govt Corruption Investigations by Katie Weddington

Proud Boys member Jeremy Bertino (l),  joins other Trump supporters at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., Dec. 12, 2020. (Credit: Luis M. Alvarez/AP)

National File has obtained exclusive video of Jeremy Bertino’s newly sworn affidavit in which he describes his own malicious prosecution at the hands of Biden’s and Merrick Garland’s prosecutors.

The Biden Department of Justice’s key Dept. of Justice witness in the case against the Proud Boys is recanting his testimony that resulted in convictions and decades of jail time.

Bertino, who was previously a member of the Proud Boys, provided the key testimony that was used to secure the high profile conviction of the leadership of the Proud Boys in the aftermath of the controversial certification of the Nov. 3, 2020 election on January 6th, 2021.

Now, the former Proud Boy says he was coerced by the FBI to provide the damning testimony used to secure high profile convictions of Proud Boy leaders – and to secure their imprisonment.

Now that Joe Biden is no longer in charge of Merrick Garland’s DOJ, Bertino is coming clean.

Jeremy Bertino, in a sworn affidavit provided to attorney Nayib Hassan, affirmed that his prior statements used to convince the so-called “Seditious Five” were coerced under threat of decades in prison.

Federal agents and prosecutors engaged in a sustained campaign of disingenuous negotiation, characterized by a hide-the-ball style of negotiating in which they concealed the true nature of the final charges they would finally levy against Bertino, he says.

By making several much less severe proffers at first, federal prosecutors groomed and cajoled Bertino into a place where he had only two options: testify how they wanted him to, and go free – or tell the truth and face up to 25 years in prison.

The final charges the DOJ would slap on Bertino were not revealed until the prosecutors had sufficiently coached and groomed Bertino in order to elicit a particular testimony desired by the DOJ that would ultimately lead to conviction of Proud Boys for seditious conspiracy, Bertino says.

This act of bringing charges against someone without probable cause and with malice is known as malicious prosecution.

(…) “Then I believe it was the third proffer when they told me what the charges were gonna be. They were the gun charges and seditious conspiracy. So all along they were playing it along, like, ‘We’re not gonna charge you. We just need you to help us frame this story this way,” Bertino explained.

“That’s when they put the pressure on, and were like, “Hey, you’re either gonna play ball, or you’re looking at 25 years’.”

In his sworn affidavit, Bertino describes a process in which prosecutors dangled freedom in front of him before ultimately threatening to drop the hammer on him out of the blue.

To avoid the hammer, Bertino was coerced to carefully choose his words in order to create a specific kind of picture surrounding the Proud Boys’ involvement with January 6th and the 1776 Returns document.

“They were like, “You can’t outright lie, and tell me that something happened that didn’t happen, but you’re gonna have to bend your statements. Basically, “Help us frame this story the way it needs to be framed.”

“They said that without saying that directly to me, it was kinda communicated to my attorneys, you know, “We’re not using these words for this. We’re not using [the word] ‘plan,’ we’re using [the word] ‘goal’’ These were the things that were communicated to me, were the things that I had to say,” Bertino detailed.

(Read more: National File, 8/15/2025) (Archive)