Former Proud Boys Lawyer Now Working in Denton Courts, Investigation Finds

If you get arrested in Denton County and find yourself in need of a court-appointed attorney to defend your case, you might wind up with a lawyer who sports a white-nationalist tattoo.

That’s according to a recent investigation by The Barbed Wire, which found that Jason Lee Van Dyke, a 45-year-old attorney from Decatur who is known for associating with extremist organizations like the Proud Boys and Patriot Front, has represented at least three dozen individuals in Denton County court since 2024. In at least 15 of those cases, Van Dyke represented non-white clients, the report found, something that several civil rights organizations said should “raise a red flag.”

Gabriel Rosales, state director of Texas LULAC, told The Barbed Wire he believes cases handled by Van Dyke should be reopened and investigated. Van Dyke told The Barbed Wire he also serves as a court-appointed attorney in several other counties, although the outlet did not verify which counties he works in at the time of publication.

“You could pull as many cases as you want,” Van Dyke told the outlet. “You could try to figure out which ones are white and which ones are not. I guarantee you’re not going to find me treating those clients any bit differently than how I treat everybody else, because it doesn’t matter.”

Archived social media posts show Van Dyke has used a bevy of racial slurs in the past. In a series of 2014 tweets that Van Dyke told The Barbed Wire were taken out of context, the lawyer expressed enthusiasm for lynching.

“I’m not excusing what I said,” Van Dyke told reporter Steven Monacelli, who reports on extremism. “What happened is I lost my temper.”

In social media posts, Van Dyke has referred to himself as “unapologetically fascist” and believes the country needs “less democracy, not more.” (Editor's Note: This is a deeply ironic statement for someone who serves as a court-appointed attorney, a right enshrined in the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.)

According to The Barbed Wire, Van Dyke has served as the national chairman of and general counsel to the Proud Boys, a “violent,” white-nationalist hate group as defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Van Dyke is also linked to the Texas Neo-Nazi group the Aryan Freedom Network, and attempted to join the FBI-defined terrorist group The Base. (Van Dyke told The Barbed Wire he was trying to infiltrate, not join, The Base.)

The Southern Poverty Law Center has also identified Van Dyke as the "preferred lawyer” for Patriot Front, a North Texas-based white supremacy group that started as an offshoot of the extremist group Vanguard America, which organized the Unite the Right rally in August 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, where one woman was killed. This past June, the SPLC published an article about Van Dyke’s leading of Brazilian jujitsu classes for the group.

The lawyer also has a tattoo on his shoulder of an eagle flying over a banner that reads “Life Liberty Victory,” the Patriot Front slogan.

“I mean, generally, you don’t get tattoos unless you’re personally involved,” Scott Ernest, a former white nationalist who now runs the Center for Extremism Prevention and Intervention, told The Barbed Wire.

Van Dyke’s license to practice law was suspended in 2019 by the State Bar of Texas after the attorney made a public death threat, the investigation states. He has also been involved in a lawsuit involving a false police report, for which he was sentenced to 24 months’ deferred adjudication.

Despite a series of other legal probes into his practice, Van Dyke is still licensed by the State Bar of Texas, which gives him the right to practice in Texas. Denton County’s rules that “attorneys must not be currently under indictment” to serve as court-appointed lawyers indicate that Van Dyke’s former legal troubles may not disqualify him from serving.

“To the best of our knowledge, all of the attorneys currently on the Denton County Court appointment list meet the Minimum Attorney List Qualifications in the Denton County Statutory County Courts Indigent Defense Plan,” the Denton County Indigent Defense Office told The Barbed Wire.

The outlet was able to speak to two clients of Van Dyke, and neither was willing to talk on the record about their representation. No client-held concerns regarding Van Dyke’s extremist past emerged in the reporting of the story.

Still, Ernest told reporters, “I wouldn’t be comfortable having him as my court-appointed lawyer.”