A Massachusetts Trump supporter who openly associates with known neo-Nazis and took part in the Jan. 6 Capitol siege has stiffed his lawyer, and continues to attend far-right political rallies while under indictment, according to the man’s attorney and photographs provided to The Daily Beast.
At best, say legal experts, Mark Sahady’s behavior is bad optics and could serve to irritate the judge deciding his fate. At worst, his actions could potentially constitute a violation of the bail conditions set by the court.
“I have a motion to disappear from the case because (1) my client hasn’t paid me at all for work performed in this case and (2) he is not returning my phone calls,” defense attorney Rinaldo Del Gallo III told The Daily Beast in an email.
Del Gallo declined to specify how much money Sahady owes, but said that it wasn’t just the many hours he put in on the case, it was also the intense nature of the work. He said he had to pull at least one all-nighter preparing Sahady’s defense because he wanted to make sure he got out of jail—and was successful in securing his release.
“Often, when clients are in trouble and in jail, they cry, ‘My kingdom for a horse,’” said Del Gallo. “Once they have extricated themselves from the morass, there is an onset of amnesia regarding the trouble they were in.”
Multiple images of Sahady, 46, inside the Capitol building during the deadly insurrection were captured on camera and video. In the run-up to the Capitol sacking, the computer programmer and U.S. Army veteran boasted on social media about having organized 11 buses to transport protesters to D.C. in the attempt to stop President Joe Biden’s electoral victory from being certified.
“What particularly bothered me is that I had done a lot of pro bono work for Mark’s groups in the First Amendment area which seemed to count for nothing, and he clearly has the ability to pay,” said Del Gallo.
Sahady, a gun-owning U.S. Army veteran who lives with his parents in Malden, Massachusetts, has echoed former President Donald Trump’s oft-repeated—and entirely untrue—assertion that the 2020 election was stolen from him. He is infamous throughout New England as a leader of “Super Happy Fun America,” a right-wing “straight pride” organization. Sahady is not a member of the Proud Boys, but has been to their rallies and has professed his support for the “Western chauvinist” organization, which is classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In Facebook postings, Sahady has also expressed admiration for tactics employed by brutal Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose regime was notorious for executing liberals by dropping them from helicopters. Some Sahady-organized events have drawn attendance from openly fascist groups like the Nationalist Social Club (NSC-131), members of which also attended the Jan. 6 rally outside the Capitol.
Less than two weeks after the sacking of the Capitol, Sahady was arrested by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force and charged with knowingly entering or remaining in a restricted building or grounds without lawful authority and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, both misdemeanors. In Sahady’s initial court appearance in Boston federal court later that day, Magistrate Judge Jennifer Boal ordered him released, but issued strict rules regarding what he could and couldn’t do while awaiting trial.
“Do not attend or organize any public demonstrations/rallies/protests without prior permission of U.S. Probation and Pretrial Services,” said those release conditions, which also prohibited him from associating with any other defendants or witnesses in the case.
Del Gallo, a First Amendment purist who considers himself a “Bernie Sanders progressive,” said he had “many concerns” about the guidelines.
“There were and are many First Amendment concerns that I had with respect to the provision that he not attend or organize any demonstration/rally/protest without the permission of Probation and Pretrial Services, but at the time I lost all contact with Mr. Sahady, which was one of the reasons I made a motion [to] disappear,” he explained. “Having lost all contact with Mr. Sahady despite numerous attempts to contact him, because of the complete breakdown of attorney/client communications, I did not pursue any avenues of relief against these restrictions on his First Amendment activity.”
When Sahady’s case was transferred from Massachusetts District Court to Washington, D.C., where it will be adjudicated, a new judge handed down a second set of release conditions. This time, the court specified that Sahady not travel out of state without notifying the court, to check in weekly by telephone, and not to violate any laws. The judge did not specifically lay out a new prohibition on attending or organizing rallies, but did not explicitly remove the previous conditions set in Boston, either.
Sahady’s new lawyer, John Kiyonaga, argues that the D.C. conditions “logically” supersede the ones set in Boston. However, even he admits he isn’t completely sure that’s the case.
“You could make an argument that the orders of both courts apply,” Kiyonaga told The Daily Beast, adding that in 30 years of practice he hasn’t encountered a situation in which two courts issued orders over one case. “But this is [now] a D.C. case. So my view is that the court managing the proceedings has the exclusive authority to determine the conditions of release. I’m saying this because this is the way I believe the law would work.”
Kiyonaga said he had “a confusing exchange” with the judge in D.C. over “the manner in which she issued the order.” Still, Kiyonaga maintains that “common sense” dictates that since the matter is now in the D.C. court, that D.C. sets the conditions. He said he wanted to make sure Sahady would “only be beholden to one court,” and that he “came away with the impression that [the D.C. judge] agreed with that take.”
“But really, it’s not an open and shut question,” Kiyonaga continued. “This is not a matter of black letter law that you can look up in a handbook. The Constitution and the nature of American criminal law is that the defendant always gets the benefit of the doubt. If he was, God forbid, accused of violating the Massachusetts conditions, I would argue that he was to follow the D.C. conditions—I told him that—so, I could argue that he was under advice of counsel.”
In the weeks and months following the Capitol riot, some who took part in the siege have apologized for being part of it and promised they would keep their behavior in check.
Sahady isn’t one of them.
Last weekend, he and co-defendant Suzanne Ianni, a local politician and Sahady’s co-defendant in the Capitol riot case, were spotted at an anti-mask “freedom rally” in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. In photographs taken by someone who was at the event and sent to The Daily Beast, Sahady can be seen wearing a Super Happy Fun America pin and an Operation Enduring Freedom baseball cap. Ianni, a hardcore Trump supporter and the daughter of a former New Jersey state trooper, is seen in the pictures wearing her signature lilac windbreaker and holding a Super Happy Fun America flag.
Video from the rally even shows Sahady speaking at the event, where an announcer sarcastically introduced him and Ianni as “domestic terrorists.”
“I’m really excited right now, because I’m about to introduce you to a couple domestic terrorists,” a woman told the crowd in the video. “Come on, step right up here. Mark and Sue! Do these guys look like terrorists to you?”
Sahady took the microphone to elaborate. “Yeah, we are definitely not terrorists. On January 6, Super Happy Fun America organized 11 buses with other groups here to go to Washington D.C,” he said, describing the rally as an attempt to stop election fraud, and adding that “we can’t say too much because we’re facing prison time.”
Ianni was given near-identical release conditions as Sahady’s, by both the Boston court and the one in D.C.
In an online posting the day before the demonstration, Ianni, 59, appeared to suggest she was at least partially involved with organizing the rally.
“We changed the event location because we over exceeded the space at the commons,” she wrote in a message to members of the Massachusetts Patriot Party, listing a new address for the March 20 gathering.
Michael Loadenthal, a professor focused on political violence and the law at the Global Center for Advanced Studies, and the founder of the Prosecution Project, which examines and analyzes politically motivated crime, often advises social movement defendants on defense strategy and how to conduct themselves during trial and throughout the indictment period.
“I think if you're trying to show that you're not an active player in an insurrectionary movement, organizing anti-State ‘freedom’ demonstrations while you’re out on bail is not a good way to do that,” Loadenthal told The Daily Beast. “I think it speaks to the political moment we’re experiencing—Trumpists feeling empowered—where half of the country still feels aggrieved in some way. The idea that the election was stolen is a grievance that is not going away.”
Sahady did not reply to an email sent to his personal account, and was unable to be reached by phone. Ianni also did not respond to email queries. Her attorney, C. Henry Fasoldt, declined to comment.
In the end, Rinaldo Del Gallo simply wants Sahady to pay him what he owes.
“Successor counsel was apprised of the situation,” Del Gallo said. “Were I in successor counsel’s situation, I would want to know and I live by the golden rule.”
Kiyonaga said he was not aware of the payment dispute.
Sahady and Ianni are both due back in court on April 1.
