Jack Cashill's Capitol Riot Revisionism, Part 2

The WorldNetDaily columnist is still inventing conspiracy theories about the riot and whitewashing the behavior of those who participated in it.

Jack Cashill has long worked to whitewash the Capitol riot by manufacturing conspiracy theories about it, portraying participants as mere patriots and denying their criminal acts. He kicked off his May 29 WorldNetDaily column this way:

On Memorial Day, I attended the Ashli Babbitt Freedom March in Washington, D.C. From the looks on the faces of the tourists I sensed that few of them knew who Ashli Babbitt was.

Ashli, of course, was the 14-year Air Force veteran shot and killed at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Even on the right, few know the story of Rosanne Boyland, who was also killed as a result of a police action on Jan. 6.

Actually, she was not. As ConWebWatch pointed out the last time he tried to whitewash Boyland — when he falsely claimed authorities were blaming her death on a methamphetamine overdose — it’s entirely likely she took a larger-than-prescribed dose of Adderall, an amphetamine, which on top of other health issues such as obesity and diabetes contributed to her death. (At least he finally figured out how to spell her name correctly.) Then it was on to whitewashing another riot participant, in the service of promoting his whitewash-laden book:

The media have done their best to suppress the stories. So it should not surprise that almost no one knows the fate of Victoria White, the victim of what journalist Julie Kelly calls “the worst incident of police brutality since the civil rights era.”

White is one of the 10 women I profile in my newly released book, “Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6.” Not willing to put up with the airline’s absurd COVID restrictions, White drove from Minnesota to D.C. with her 17-year-old daughter and two friends.

White was among the last people to leave the Ellipse where President Trump had spoken. By the time she reached the Capitol, about a 45-minute walk, protesters had already swarmed the lower west terrace.

There she saw a man pounding away at an exterior window with what appeared to be a crowbar. Upset by his lawlessness, Victoria tried to pull the vandal – still unidentified – down, yelling, “We don’t do that. That’s not us.”

Then two men grabbed Victoria and pulled her off the man with the crowbar. “Get her out of here,” said a guy with a bullhorn.

White’s adventure was just beginning. While protesters were freely walking into the Capitol through multiple open entrances, the police were guarding the lower west terrace tunnel like it was the Alamo.

As White tells the story, she was “pushed into the tunnel” by the crowd and “sucked in” by the momentum. The video leaves little dispute about what happened next.

As documented in White’s lawsuit against two Metropolitan PD officers, Jason Bagshaw, then a lieutenant, and Neil McAllister, Victoria endured what was arguably the most severe police beating of a female ever captured on video.

This oddly gratuitous assault took place some 90 minutes after the last Congress member left the Capitol.

Not so much. Here’s a more accurate version of events from the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C.:

White was seen in open-source video arguing with rioters who were attempting to break the glass doors of an entrance. White then pushed her way toward the tunnel entrance, where a squad of Metropolitan Police (MPD) officers were preventing rioters from entering the building. As the mob chanted, “pull the cops out!” White raised her fist and cheered as the rioters forced a large flagpole into the entryway where the MPD officers stood guard.

White pushed her way closer to the entrance, where she helped to hoist up another rioter who proceeded to assault officers. White was seen pointing and cheering as the rioter swung from the top of the entryway and kicked MPD officers.

At about 4:05 p.m., White made her way to the lower West Terrace entrance. After losing her red cap and black coat in the chaos, she grabbed one of the MPD officers standing on a ledge. Officers pushed White back with their riot shields and fended her off with a baton. White then grabbed one of the shields and blocked the baton with her hand. Minutes later, officers apprehended White, and she was escorted out of the Capitol building.

Cashill also failed to mention that White violated the terms of her pre-sentencing release by traveling to Washington to attend congressional hearings and pose for pictures that she posted on social media, even though she was forbidden by those terms from visiting the city except for scheduled court hearings. The judge claimed White was “cavalier” with the rules and was not forthcoming about her intentions during her visit, then added new conditions to her release, banning her from the capitol building unless she receives prior approval. Cashill also somehow forgot to mention that White pleaded guilty to interfering with law enforcement officers during a civil disorder, and was sentenced to 10 days in prison, 90 days of home detention. and 24 months on supervised release.

Still, Cashill remained in full whitewash mode:

Three months later, the FBI and local police came to White’s home in force at the crack of dawn. “They surrounded my block, weapons drawn. My daughters were freaking out.”

The agents handcuffed her outside her home and took her to the federal facility in Minneapolis for processing. “My name,” said Victoria, “was forever tarnished.”

Of the eight living women I profile, six have been imprisoned, two await sentencing. White was one of the six.

“God allowed me to live for a reason,” said White, “and I believe it’s to speak the truth and to tell people what happened that day and what’s continuing to happen to American citizens.”

Cashill didn’t mention that White was “imprisoned” for only 10 days and, even then, only on weekends. And neither he nor White have posited that the reason “God allowed me to live” was to serve as an example to those to attempt to overthrow the government in the service of an amoral man who refuses to mentally accept that he lost an election — and who continually refuse to accept responsibility for their actions, which are actually what “forever tarnished” her name.

Another whitewash

Cashill began his June 5 column by gushing over yet another Capitol rioter:

“What’s somebody like that doing at a hearing about COVID?” Anthony Fauci asked a CNN host. As shall be seen, there is more to this question than meets the eye.

Fauci was referring to the mischievous January 6 veteran Brandon Fellows. Fellows was thrown out of the subcommittee hearing Monday for making faces behind Fauci while he talked.

I had the pleasure of meeting Fellows in D.C. during the Ashli Babbitt Freedom March on Memorial Day. We walked and talked together for a few blocks. He is a character.

As the marchers headed down Massachusetts Avenue toward the D.C. jail, with American flags and Trump flags flying, the neighbors, all white, felt free to shout the most vile epithets their limited imaginations could conjure.

Laughing, Fellows joked back that he had just been paroled to the district a week earlier and was pleased to be their new neighbor. His good nature only enraged his critics more. As I said to Fellows at the time, “This is your jury pool.”

A dozen members of that pool saw to it that Fellows went to prison. His crime was to enter the Capitol through an open door and put his feet up on the desk of U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., while smoking marijuana.

He hurt no one, broke nothing. Now just 30, Fellows had been incarcerated since July 2021 and remains on probation.

Needless to say, Cashill is misleading about Fellows’ actions and his sentence. As a less biased media outlet reported:

At trial, prosecutors showed Fellows entering the U.S. Capitol through a broken window and then proceeding to Sen. Jeff Merkley’s (D-OR) office, where he smoked marijuana. Fellows then joined rioters in the Crypt before heckling officers who didn’t have helmets on his way out of the building. Prosecutors said Fellows then posted extensively on social media, “glorifying the violence of his fellow rioters.”

Fellows was initially granted pretrial release but had his bond revoked after multiple violations, including calling the mother of his probation officer. His defiant behavior continued following his rearrest. Fellows fired multiple attorneys and ultimately chose to represent himself – including during a disastrous bond review hearing in which he appeared to admit to illegally attempting to get judges removed from cases in D.C. and New York. In addition to his conviction at trial, Fellows was also found in criminal contempt of court for repeated outbursts, including calling the proceeding a “kangaroo court” and a “nazi court.”

[…]

“You have repeatedly made a mockery of these proceedings,” McFadden said, noting Fellows had shown the “height of contempt” for all three branches of government and had “flagrantly lied” on the stand at trial. McFadden also pushed back against Fellows’ belief that he was the victim of a “grand conspiracy” against him.

“It is, rather, your defiance of any and every attempt to try to get your actions to conform to what the law requires that has gotten you to this point,” McFadden said, adding in exasperation a short time later, “It’s time for you to grow up!”

Cashill then tried to help Fellows and other rioters deflect responsibility for their behavior by letting him blame it on someone else:

As to what “somebody like that” was doing at the Fauci hearings, the government’s abuse of individual freedom during the COVID reign of terror helped radicalize Fellows.

“COVID lockdowns in N.Y. told me I wasn’t supposed to work,” said Fellows in his pre-sentencing memo. “All the while not giving me any money, they instead threatened fines on people who worked.”

Fellows was not alone in his outrage. In researching my new book, “Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6,” I was surprised to find just how direct a role COVID oppression played in inspiring people to go to Washington.

Of the 10 women I profile in the book, nine were outspoken COVID dissidents. Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot and killed on January 6, had a perfectly apt name for COVID, the “controla virus.”

“We are being hoodwinked. The sheep need to wake up,” Ashli posted on social media. A sign on the door of her and her husband Aaron’s pool supply business captured the take of most J6 protesters.

Cashill then found another criminal rioter to whitewash:

In a foreshadowing of what would happen after January 6, the heavily indoctrinated Americans felt empowered to monitor and report on their fellow citizens.

“Random people became citizen cops preventing you from living your life doing ordinary things,” said Dr. Simone Gold, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. “I was watching Nazism unfold.”

In May 2020, Dr. Gold recruited some six hundred physicians to sign an open letter to Trump protesting the lockdowns. She showed up at the Capitol on January 6 as a respected physician/attorney and founder of America’s Frontline Doctors, but she, too, left as a “domestic terrorist.”

“One important lesson I’ve learned over the last few years,” said the undaunted Dr. Gold in January 2024: “When they try to discredit you by labeling you a conspiracy theorist, it’s probably because they’re hiding a conspiracy.”

Gold is lying, but Cashill won’t tell you that. She is a notorious anti-vaxxer and a grifter who has been sued by America’s Frontline Doctors for stealing millions from the organization to fund her personal lifestyle. In being sentenced to two months in prison for her behavior that day — which included illegally entering the Capitol, giving speeches encouraging the rioters and being part of a mob that was trying to break into the House chamber, then later ignored police commands to leave Statuary Hall so she could finish giving a speech — the judge criticized Gold’s organization for misleading supporters into believing her prosecution was politically motivated and trampled on her free speech rights, calling it “unseemly” that America’s Frontline Doctors has invoked the Capitol riot in raising money, including for her salary.

In other words, Gold has turned her participation in the riot into a money-making grift — but Cashill won’t tell you that either since he’s trying to perform his own grift from the riot. He concluded by once again trying to blame Fauci for the riot:

At the House committee hearings this week, Dr. Fauci listened contemptuously as one Congress member after another rattled off the disastrous consequences of the COVID policies he set and the desperate efforts he has made to cover his sins.

Yet for the major media, the takeaway message was that a J6er made faces while Fauci spoke.

Just like Cashill to deny that criminals have any culpability for their crimes.

Out-of-context Pelosi video

Cashill began his June 12 column with another attempt at Capitol riot revisionism:

For the last three-and-a-half years, the Democrats have owned the Jan. 6 narrative. Republicans in Congress and the media gave it away without a fight.

The good news is that party standard-bearer Donald Trump appears intent on taking it back. On Sunday in Las Vegas, Trump made his strongest statement yet about that memorable day, saying, “There has never been people treated more horrifically than J6 hostages.”

Trump offered no evidence to back up that claim, and Cashill didn’t either. But who needs facts when a conspiracy theory is much more interesting? The main purpose of Cashill’s column is to create a false narrative about a clip of Nancy Pelosi talking about the riot, just as his fellow WND writers have:

Shot in the backseat of Pelosi’s vehicle as she was being driven away from the Capitol on Jan. 6, Pelosi speaks about her own role in allowing the chaos to happen.

“We take responsibility, Terri,” a testy Pelosi says to her chief of staff Terri McCullough. “We did not have any accountability for what was going on there, and we should have. This is ridiculous.”

At this point, Pelosi appears to respond to a question McCullough asked earlier about calling in the National Guard. “You’re going to ask me in the middle of the thing when they’ve already breached the inaugural stuff that should we call the Capitol Police. I mean the National Guard,” Pelosi snaps. “Why weren’t the National Guard there to begin with?”

“They thought they had sufficient resources,” says McCullough referring to the Capitol Police.

“No, it is not a question of how they had … They don’t know,” a rattled Pelosi shoots back. “They clearly didn’t know. And I take responsibility for not having them just prepare for more.”

Pelosi has a lot to take responsibility for. Not since the War of 1812 has congressional leadership so clearly failed in its duty to keep the nation’s capital secure.

The question remains, however, whether the failure was by design. “People don’t really want to get to the bottom of this,” former Capitol Police Chief Steve Sund told Tucker Carlson in 2023. “This didn’t have to happen.”

Sund’s requests for assistance from the National Guard were denied before Jan. 6 and inexplicably delayed during the siege.

Within minutes of the first breach by Ray Epps and crew at 12:53 p.m., Sund called the House sergeant at arms, Paul Irving, demanding help from the National Guard. Irving told Sund he had to run the request up the chain to Pelosi.

Cashill is also taking the Pelosi video out of context — she never claimed that she took “responsibility” for the riot, and Pelosi was not in charge of security at the Capitol. As Rep. Joseph Morelle pointed out when Sund peddled this same story to a House committee, Irving as appointed by Republicans, and the Pentagon, which then was controlled by Trump appointees, also contributed to the delay in sending National Guard troops. Morelle also called out Sund for blaming only Pelosi and not Trump or the rioters. Also, despite Cashill’s claim of a “breach” by Epps, he never entered the Capitol building.

Cashill repeated another right-wing lie in claiming that “Although President Trump had pre-authorized the deployment of 10,000 troops – unusual behavior for an insurrectionist – the Pentagon hesitated.” The claim that Trump authorized National Guard troops has been repeatedly debunked, but the truth doesn’t serve Cashill’s narrative. Indeed, he sought to promote a conspiracy theory, as he is wont to do:

Challenged about her own leadership, Pelosi rushed to the MSNBC studios on Monday to shore up the Democrat narrative.

“The president of the United States, the former president and his toadies, do not want to face the facts,” said Pelosi. “They are trying to do revisionist history on January 6, but we cannot let us be dragged into their again false impression about what that happened that day. They know what happened that day.”

No, Republicans don’t know what really happened that day, and Pelosi is desperate to keep it that way.

The fact that Cashill is promoting discredited claims as part of his conspiracy theory tells us he really doesn’t actually care about the facts.

Gallows conspiracy theory

Cashill began his July 17 column with a factually inaccurate tirade against President Biden, (and, of course, tout his book):

In his rambling, dissembling interview with NBC’s Lester Holt on Monday, President Joe Biden told one shameless lie after another – my favorite, a whopper, his calling the Biden regime “the most successful presidency of any president in modern history.”

What intrigued me most, though, were his comments about Jan. 6, 2021. Sprung from his teleprompter, Biden wandered into dangerous territory.

Specifically, he criticized Trump allegedly for saying, “There’s nothing wrong with going to the Capitol, breaking in, threatening people, a couple cops dying, hanging – put – putting up a noose, a gallows for – done for the vice – the former vice president.”

In my book “Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6,” I was able to deconstruct the “dying cops” saga. Officer Brian Sicknick died of a stroke on Jan. 7 unrelated to the events of the day before.

In arguably the most ghoulish hoax in political history, two “law enforcement officials” told the New York Times that the dead Sicknick had been murdered.

Specifically, “pro-Trump rioters” struck Sicknick with a fire extinguisher. This was no mix-up. The Times added this chillingly fraudulent detail: “With a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support.”

The worst real injury any officer sustained on Jan. 6 was a concussion. The four other officer deaths attributed to the protesters were suicides, some of them many months later.

Cashill offered no evidence that the initial erroneous claims about Sicknick were a deliberate “hoax.” As we pointed out the last time Cashill tried to decouple officers’ deaths from the riot, a medical examiner ruled that “all that transpired” that day contributed to Sicknick’s stroke-related death — contrary to Cashill’s claim that his death was “unrelated to the events of the day before” — and at least one other officer’s post-riot death was ruled to be in the line of duty. Strange that the conspiracy-minded Cashill is deliberately refusing to see any link between the riot and the later deaths of several officers, which would seem to be too many to be coincidental.

Instead, Cashill directed his conspiratorial efforts to the mystery of the gallows that was erected on the Capitol grounds on the day of the riot. Despite the fact that nobody has been charged in relation to the building of the gallows, he knew who to blame anyway, with the help of a Republican congressman, Barry Loudermilk:

As Loudermilk noted, the construction should have immediately been removed once discovered. These gallows, however, were left untouched by [Capitol Police] officers from 6 a.m. Jan. 6 until later that evening.

“It is inconceivable that a gallows could be constructed on U.S. Capitol property and left up all day,”said Loudermilk. “These men arrived early in the morning, several hours before the rally even started or anyone had gathered, to construct the gallows platform, yet this structure was allowed to stay intact for all to see.”

He added, “These actions raise more serious and troubling questions. Why didn’t the U.S. Capitol Police take down the gallows once it was seen on Capitol property, and why have the individuals never been identified?”

There is an obvious answer to the first question: If the Capitol Police had taken the gallows down, the media and the House J6 committee would not have had those exquisitely framed images of the Capitol dome as seen through the gallows.

In March 2024, CBS News did a feature on the gallows. Amidst the predictable hysteria about the meaning and intent of the gallows, CBS concluded:

“A CBS News review of the charging documents in the approximately 1,300 Jan. 6 federal criminal cases filed by the Justice Department showed no case in which a defendant is accused of playing a role in the gallows construction.”

A real news organization would have pulled the obvious thread on this ball of confusion: Why no cases for such an obvious provocation?

Biden knows why. He frames the gallows question in the passive voice for much the same reason he never mentions the alleged pipe bombs, also discovered about 1 p.m., or Ray Epps, whose crew breached the Capitol perimeter about 1 p.m.

1 p.m. was the witching hour. Biden knows, or at least suspects, that his own allies were involved in all three of these actions.

President Donald Trump threw a wrench in everyone’s plans by starting his speech an hour late. Had Trump started at 11 a.m. as planned, his people would have arrived at the Capitol right about 1 p.m.

The plot wasn’t perfect, but a complicit media allowed the Democrats to make the best of it. Here’s hoping they’ll soon be hoisted by their own petard.

Interesting that Cashill obsesses over this and shows absolutely no concern about why such an unusually large number of law enforcement members died in the wake of the Capitol riot. You’d think that would be easy bait for a rabid conspiracy theorist like Cashill to freak out over.