WASHINGTON (AP) Ready for all-out war, leaders of the far-right Proud Boys extremist group viewed themselves as foot soldiers fighting for Donald Trump as the former president clung to power after the 2020 election, a prosecutor said Monday at the close of a historic trial over the U.S. Capitol insurrection .

Jurors began hearing attorneys closing arguments for the case against former Proud Boys national chairman Enrique Tarrio and four lieutenants. They are charged with seditious conspiracy for what prosecutors say was a plot to stop Congress from certifying President Joe Biden s electoral victory on Jan. 6, 2021, when the pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol.

Proud Boys were lined up behind Donald Trump and willing to commit violence on his behalf, prosecutor Conor Mulroe told jurors, who heard more than three months of testimony. These defendants saw themselves as Donald Trumps army, fighting to keep their preferred leader in power no matter what the law or the courts had to say about it.

The prosecutions words underscore how the Justice Department has worked throughout the trial to link the violence on Jan. 6 to the rhetoric and actions of the former president. Prosecutors have repeatedly shown jurors a video clip of Trump telling the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by during his first presidential debate with Joe Biden.

Defense attorneys have said there is no evidence or a conspiracy or a plan for Proud Boys to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Mulroe said a conspiracy can be an unspoken and implicit mutual understanding, reached with a wink and a nod. A plan, he added, isnt the right word for what this case is about.

Tarrio is one of the top targets of the Justice Departments investigation of the riot that erupted at the Capitol. Tarrio wasnt in Washington, D.C., that day but is accused of orchestrating an attack from afar.

The Justice Department has already secured seditious conspiracy convictions against the founder and members of another far-right extremist group, the Oath Keepers . But this is the first major trial involving leaders of the far-right Proud Boys, a neofacist group of self-described Western chauvinists that remains a force in mainstream Republican circles.