Jack Cashill's Capitol Riot Revisionism, Election-Year Edition
The WorldNetDaily columnist tried to build a conspiracy theory around Kamala Harris not being at the White House during the riot, and whining that his pet theories were ignored.
WorldNetDaily columnist Jack Cashill has spent the past few years trying to whitewash the Capitol riot, create revisionist narratives around it, as well as building related conspiracy theories. He tried to manufacture another one in his July 3 column, under the headline “Question No. 1 for Kamala: Where were you on January 6?”:
All of a sudden, Kamala Harris matters. It’s not just that she would ascend to the presidency should the current placeholder be displaced willfully or otherwise.
No, what makes Harris suddenly relevant is that powerful people want her to be the candidate in 2024, none more powerful than kingmaker, Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina.
“This party should not, in any way, do anything to work around Ms. Harris,” Clyburn warned his fellow travelers Tuesday. “We should do everything we can to bolster her whether she’s in second place or at the top of the ticket.”
When Clyburn talks people listen. He boosted Obama over Hillary in 2008, Hillary over Bernie in 2016, and Biden over Bernie in 2020. His endorsement of Harris for the top spot had many of the Left’s talking heads walking back all the mean things they had been saying about Kamala these past four years.
Should Harris be the nominee, one question that needs to be asked is how she spent the day on Jan. 6, 2021. For the year following that memorable day, she said not one word at all about her whereabouts.
On Jan. 6, 2022, Harris broke her silence – sort of. During a televised speech from the Capitol, Harris told the public only where she wasn’t, namely at the U.S. Capitol with her fellow senators.
Harris made this concession only because Politico had that very day broken the story that on January 6 Harris was not at the Capitol where everyone thought she was but at the DNC headquarters.
So, not a conspiracy theory — Cashill answered his own question. So he went on to a new one:
Like everyone else in the major media, Politico links the bombs to the riots under the assumption the bomb makers were part of the “destructive” plot to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election.
Harris knows better. She knows that the bombs were planted not by the Trump people, but by the anti-Trump people. She may not know who precisely the anti-Trump people are, but she knows enough not to talk about the bombs or her own proximity to one of them.
Much as we see in the scramble to replace/resurrect Joe Biden, the leftist coalition to thwart Trump is not a monolith. As I discuss in detail in “Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6,” several different entities had a hand in the attempt to discredit the MAGA movement on that fateful day.
Still, despite answering his own question, Cashill tried to salvage a conspiracy out of it anyway:
The first questions to Harris should be establishing ones: Where were you at 1 p.m. on January 6, and why were you there?
More difficult questions follow: Why have you concealed your presence at the DNC? Why have you not talked about the bomb? How have you resisted the urge to dramatize your brush with death at the hands of these white supremacists?
Harris’ silence, as they say, speaks volumes. To date her silence offers the strongest confirmation that January 6 is, in part at least, an inside job.
Despite the fact that there is no there there, Cashill desperately wants you to think there is. So he hooked up with his favorite charlatan filmmaker to further the conspiracy in his Aug. 21 column:
In our just released 3-minute video, “KamalaGate,” Los Angeles filmmaker Joel Gilbert and I ask two basic questions of Kamala Harris.
The first is, “Why did you lie about where you were on January 6, 2021?” The second related question is, “Why did you tell no one where you really were?”
This mattered because as a Secret Service “protectee” her presence in a building made that site a “restricted” space. By leaving the false impression that she was at the Capitol, prosecutors were able to ratchet up the charges against January 6 defendants.
But, Harris was not in the Capitol during the riot, not for a minute, not for a second. As to why Harris told no one where she had been, namely at the DNC headquarters a block or so from the Capitol, we have a good idea.
As Harris knew or soon found out, 1 p.m. was the witching hour on January 6. Minutes before 1 p.m., Ray Epps and his crew breached the Capitol perimeter.
At just about 1 p.m., a still-unidentified man hung a noose on a gallows that stood unmolested for hours. Shortly after 1 p.m., a still-unidentified man, the “scaffold commander,” mounted the scaffolding with an electric bullhorn and urged people to keep moving forward.
These lies had immediate consequences. For nearly a year, January 6 prosecutors told jurors that Harris “remained within the Capitol building” throughout the day.
Most relevantly perhaps, 1 p.m. was roughly the time pipe bombs from a still-unidentified bomber were found near the RNC and the DNC offices.
Of course, 1 p.m was the time the certification process began. The evidence strongly suggests an orchestrated plot to incite chaos and blame Trump and his supporters for whatever followed.
Actually, no, it doesn’t. His Ray Epps conspiracy theory was debunked long ago. Still, he can’t stop smearing the guy anyway:
Trump did not incite the riot. His enemies did. An FBI that was able to pluck a peaceful great grandmother out of the crowd and arrest her has still not been able to identify several of the key provocateurs.
Epps, the most conspicuous of the provocateurs, was outed not by the FBI but by pro-Trump protesters.
Not only did Epps encourage the initial breach and a secondary breach, but he also provided hands-on help to those pushing a large metal Trump sign into a line of police officers.
Perversely, the more evidence that surfaced against Epps, the more the media embraced him and the more the FBI ignored him. For its part, the House Select Committee treated Epps as though he were an endangered species.
Not until Sept. 23, 2023, did Epps plead guilty to a single misdemeanor charge and only then because his preferential treatment embarrassed the keepers of the narrative. The great grandmother in question got a stiffer sentence.
In fact, as even Cashill admitted, the “great grandmother in question,” Rebecca Lavrenz, committed a crime and it was caught on video, yet she continues to deny guilt. Contrary to Cashill’s claims that Epps “encourage the initial breach and a secondary breach,” Epps actually tried to de-escalate the violence at points and cooperated with authorities, and unlike Lavrenz, never entered the Capitol building.
Despite all that, Cashill still ended on a conspiratorial note: “The question Harris needs to answer is the question, slightly modified, that Sen, Howard Baker famously asked of Richard Nixon, ‘What did she know and when did she know it?'”
Campaign conspiracy theories
Cashill spent a good part of the 2024 presidential campaign trying to build a conspiracy theory out of Kamala Harris not being at the Capitol the day of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot — never mind that even Cashill admits and doesn’t dispute the fact that she was at the Democratic National Committee headquarters that day, which completely undercuts his conspiracy theorizing. Nevertheless, Cashill continued to push it anyway in his Sept. 11 column:
Amidst the sea of lies, omissions and half-truths offered by ABC’s David Muir and Vice President Kamala Harris Tuesday night on the subject of January 6, one highly consequential deception stands out – Harris’ absence from the Capitol.
“I was there,” said Harris. Well, no Kamala, you were not. And Harris’ absence speaks to what remains Harris’ greatest unspoken liability.
Cashill then quickly moved to praising Donald Trump for repeating his (dubious) talking points about the riot during his debate with Harris:
Muir then asked Trump, “Is there anything you regret about what you did on that day? Yes or no?”
Trump responded accurately that he did not organize the day’s rally, but expecting a big crowd, he asked Nancy Pelosi, then speaker of the House, for 10,000 National Guard troops.
“They rejected me,” he said. “Nancy Pelosi rejected me. It was just two weeks ago, her daughter has a tape of her saying she is fully responsible for what happened.”
More accurately, it was Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser who rejected the White House offer, but Trump’s claim about the tape is accurate.
In fleeing the Capitol on January 6, a panicking Pelosi said, “We take responsibility, Terri [McCullough, her chief of staff]. We did not have any accountability for what was going on there, and we should have. This is ridiculous.”
The House speaker is ultimately responsible for the security of the Capitol. Pelosi knew this. “Why weren’t the National Guard there to begin with?” She asked. “[The Capitol Police Board] clearly didn’t know. And I take responsibility for not having them just prepare for more.”
Trump was in no position to respond. He was speaking at the Ellipse, a 45-minute walk from the Capitol. The Ray Epps-led attack on the Capitol began at 12:53 p.m., 20 minutes before Trump finished his speech.
Trump did not “incite” these people to riot as Harris claimed. They did not hear a word of his speech.
As ConWebWatch pointed out, Pelosi never claimed that she took “responsibility” for the riot, Pelosi was not in charge of security at the Capitol, and Trump’s claim that he sought or authorized National Guard troops has been repeatedly debunked. (Also, Ray Epps never entered the Capitol building, so he could not have “led” the attack.) Cashill then returned to his Kamala conspiracy, with the help of his favorite discredited charlatan filmmaker:
Most relevant, however, was Harris’ claim that “she was there.” She wasn’t. She was at the DNC when, at the 1 p.m. witching hour, a pipe bomb was found. She was not at the Capitol during the riot for a minute.
As early as the Jan. 17, 2021, edition of “CBS Sunday Morning,” Harris had clearly been instructed not to talk about the DNC or her alleged proximity to an assassination attempt.
“I was at the Capitol that morning,” Harris told Jane Pauley, “and then I was in a meeting, and I was told that I should leave. And then I was taken to a secure location, with my husband.”
Nearly four years later, Harris continues this deception. For those who prefer video to print as an explanatory medium, Los Angeles filmmaker Joel Gilbert and I compressed the whole of “Kamalagate” into a 3-minute video.
Whatever Harris’ role, the evidence continues to mount that there was a plot underway on January 6 – yes, an “inside job” – to incite enough chaos to shut down the certification process.
The launch hour seems to have been 1 p.m., the time when the certification process began at the Capitol, when Epps and crew breached the perimeter and when the bomb was discovered outside the DNC.
The question Harris needs to answer is this: What did you know about the plot and when did you know it?
The fact that nobody outside conspiracy-obsessed haters like Cashill and Gilbert seems to prove there was no “plot” at all.
In his Sept. 16 column, Cashill made the conspiratorial demand that if Trump wins the election, J.D. Vance should head an “American Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” which would “would offer amnesty to those willing to tell the truth about the corruption of justice in the past decade.” He added: “Unlike Trump, Vance has not been a victim of this corruption. He could manage the affair dispassionately and legitimize the conciliatory nature of the ARTC and, by extension, the Trump presidency.” One of the things Vance could adjudicate is his Kamala conspiracy theory:
During the debate, Kamala Harris did not shy from repeating the lies about January 6 that, in her case, are both personal and damning. No, Trump did not “instigate” the riot, “some officers” were not killed, and she was not at the Capitol at any time during the riot. J6 is a large, unwieldy subject, but a useful point of entry would be Harris’ caginess about her actions that day.
At the press conference, Vance would do well to zero in on the inarguable fact that Harris has repeatedly deceived the public about her presence at the DNC at the very moment the pipe bomb was discovered and the riot launched – by people who did not attend Trump’s speech. Her deceit did corrupt the cases of hundreds of unjustly punished J6ers and may be a cover for a genuine “inside job.”
Cashill did not explain why any of this matters to anyone not in his right-wing bubble.
Cashill didn’t engage in much 2024 presidential election activism beyond pushing his Kamala Harris conspiracy theory. Much of it, in fact, was spent indulging in other riot-related conspiracy theories. Cashill complained in his Oct. 2 column that the vice presidential debate didn’t delve into his pet conspiracy theories:
Nearly four years after Jan. 6, 2021, I have yet to hear a serious debate on what actually happened on that fateful day, and Tuesday’s debate between Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Sen. J.D. Vance continued that unfortunate tradition.
Toward the end of the debate, CBS’s Nora O’Donnell front loaded the question on the “state of democracy” with all the usual Democratic talking points about January 6.
Knowing there was nothing he could say in two minutes to straighten out the record on January 6, Vance adroitly maneuvered to what he called the “much bigger threat to democracy than anything that we’ve seen in this country in the last four years, in the last 40 years,” namely the threat of censorship.
Walz, on the other hand, could not wait to recall the imagined horrors of January 6. “One hundred and forty police officers were beaten at the Capitol that day,” he insisted, “some with the American flag. Several later died.”
Walz added a fresh new layer of lie to Kamala Harris’ description during her July debate with Donald Trump. Said Harris, “On that day, 140 law enforcement officers were injured. And some died.”
In Walz’s retelling, the officers were “beaten,” some, improbably enough, “with an American flag.”
In fact, one rioter was indeed convicted and sent to prison for beating a police officer with a flagpole attached to an American flag. It’s documented fact, not “improbable.” Cashill went on to blame the officers for their own injuries:
Not surprisingly, media accounts in the days following the event exaggerated the nature of the injuries to the officers, but nowhere near 140 officers were “beaten.”
To give some sense of the severity of the injuries, a New York Times February 2021 article leads with this sentence, “One officer lost the tip of his right index finger.”
The second incident the Times cited was of a police woman standing behind a metal barrier who was pushed over when the barrier fell.
“We don’t have to hurt you – why are you standing in our way?” the Times quoted a protester as telling her “as he helped her to her feet.” Odd behavior for an insurrectionist.
Unmentioned in the Times articles was the fact that many officers were injured as a result of friendly fire. The undertrained Capitol Police were launching tear gas into the crowd, which on more than one occasion wafted back in their direction.
Cashill offered no evidence that “many” officers were the victim of “friendly fire.” He then rehashed his previous ranting that initial reports around the death of Brian Sicknick suggesting he died from riot injuries were deliberate and there was some grand conspiracy to hide that he died of a stroke — making sure not to mention that a medical examiner ruled that “all that transpired” that day contributed to Sicknick’s stroke-related death. He concluded by whining:
Democratic politicians have been finessing the lie ever since and adding subsequent suicide deaths to the body count.
What they do not talk about are the four protesters who died that day, three by police action. Nor do they report the beatings suffered by the protesters, many of which were captured on video.
Cashill didn’t explain why violent rioters should have been allowed to continue rioting.
The conspiracy theories continued in his Oct. 9 column:
The deeper I get into the mysteries of Jan. 6, 2021, the more mysteries I uncover.
In reading the most recent motion against President Trump by special counsel Jack Smith, I came across the following: “The defendant [Trump] at least has an argument – though he issued the 2:38 p.m. and 3:13 p.m. Tweets only after being harangued by his staff while he adamantly refused to do anything at all – that he was addressing a matter of public safety as President (the riot at the Capitol).”
What struck me as odd was not that Smith buried the exculpatory remarks Trump made in those tweets – hell, he buried Trump’s “peacefully and patriotically” caution during his speech – but that he placed them at 2:38 p.m. and 3:13 p.m.
In my book “Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6,” I placed the tweets at 1:38 p.m. and 2:13 p.m. My best source was an article in FactCheck.org from Feb. 17, 2023, headlined, “Trump’s Dubious Claim About ‘Hidden’ Tweets Exonerating Him for Jan. 6 Capitol Attack.”
Cashill seems to have forgotten the concept of time zones. Washington, D.C., is in the Eastern time zone while Kansas City, where Cashill is based, in the Central time zone. He continued by interjecting his obsession with Ashli Babbitt:
Consider this gem: “A woman who attempted to forcibly enter the Chamber of the House of Representatives through a broken window while the House was in session was shot and killed by police guarding the chamber.”
The unnamed woman, an unarmed 14-year Air Force veteran named Ashli Babbitt, was shot and killed without warning at 2:44 p.m. The House was not in session. The report writers knew this. By corrupting the timeline, they attempt to exonerate the shooter.
Cashill seems to be implying that Babbitt and the other rioters should have been allowed to loot and ransack the House chambers because it wasn’t in session.
Cashill spent his Oct. 16 column trying to avoid holding Babbitt and other rioters accountable for the consequences of their own actions:
Thanks to a precise and well-documented timeline assembled by journalist Julie Kelly’s ace researcher, Haley McLean, we now have a much clearer idea of who was responsible for the chaos and death on Jan. 6, 2021.
Spoiler alert: It wasn’t President Donald Trump. And although House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Capitol Police deserve a healthy share of the blame, their real crime was ineptitude.
The real crimes, the high crimes, were plotted and executed on the far side of the Potomac. Indeed, had the Pentagon brass responded as a nonpartisan military should have, J6 protester Rosanne Boyland would surely be alive today and maybe even Ashli Babbitt.
In a more honorable universe, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, would have, if not fallen on his sword, at least resigned in shame on Jan. 7.
Accepting that resignation, before resigning himself, would have been Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy.
Cashill then repeated dubious claims about the death of rioter Rosanne Boyland, claiming that one officer “beat the lifeless Boyland over the head with a stick so hard the stick snapped in two.” In fact, a police investigation found that the police officer’s actions were “objectively reasonable,” which tells us that Cashill may be exaggerating things.
Cashill concluded by whining that only Trump appears to have been “punished” for his actions on Jan. 6. Given that he was the guy who incited the riot, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t be.
As part of WorldNetDaily’s anti-Kamala Harris propaganda operation during the election, Elizabeth Farah issued a series of videos titled “Kamala’s America: The Nightmare Scenarios Revealed” that featured various right-wingers spouting the approved narrative. One of those videos was an Oct. 3 conversation with Cashill, who peddled his Capitol riot conspiracy theories, including his new book about them centered on Ashli Babbitt, the rioter who was shot by police inside the Capitol. The book apparently features 10 female riot participants, and Cashill claimed that “none of them committed a crime to speak of,” then admitted that “one woman broke a window. She’s a mother of eight, and she’s serving four and a half years in prison. That’s what the Merrick Garland-Biden-Harris Justice Department looks like.” Cashill appears to be talking about rioter Rachel Powell. As ConWebWatch pointed out the last time Cashill tried to portray her as a victim, she did much more than break a window — she encouraged other rioters to surge forward against police lines using a bullhorn, and she carried an ax and a large wooden pole while storming into a restricted section of the Capitol. When police raided her home, they found bags loaded with duct tape, rope cell phones, throwing stars and other weapons.
Cashill repeated his victim narrative on Babbitt, claiming she was acting at least somewhat responsibly while in the Capitol building. He once again made sure not to mention that, as a more credible news organization reported, before the riot Babbitt “had become consumed by pro-Trump conspiracy theories and posted angry screeds on social media. She also had a history of making violent threats.” Cashill then stated that the officer who shot Babbitt “created a martyr. … who is the last person you want to be as a martyr — attractive, Air Force veteran, married.”
Farah joined in the conspiracy-mongering:
So much happened with January 6. So much of it was misinformation, disinformation and carefully orchestrated, and you know, some are keeping with the narrative — it’s a violent insurrection, an insurrection with no weapons, a violent insurrection where everybody forgot to bring their weapons. And you’re bringing up some things that I’ve either forgotten — this is why the book is so important — or that I never knew.
In fact, a number of the rioters were armed.
Cashill rehashed his conspiracy theory that the riot was an “inside job,” rehashing the old, discredited attacks on Ray Epps as an alleged plant — Farah called him an “apparatchik” while Cashill called him a “mole” –as well as pushing his Kamala Harris conspiracy theory.
Farah repeatedly mispronounced Harris’ first name incorrectly throughout the 79-minute video, putting the accent on the second syllable; she did pronounce it correctly a couple times, then whined, “Do you know how many times I had to say the word ‘Kamala’ to try and pronounce her name correctly just for the record?” Actual, responsible journalists wouldn’t be whining about getting something correct.
If Trump was to win, Cashill called for “a recognition, first off, that you’re never going to get justice in Washington, D.C. … No political Democrat will ever be convicted and no political Republican will ever be committed.” He then called for “a South Africa-style truth and reconciliation commission. So what they set up was this commission in which, if you told the truth about what you had done, they would grant you amnesty. So I’m more interested right now in truth than an actual real injustice. The justice will come in that these people will be forever known for what the infamous deeds they’ve done. There are so many of them — they’d have to take a number, there’d be a queue outside the door.” He also called for all nonviolent protesters to be pardoned. On top of that, Cashill said, federal courts should be moved out of Washingon, D.C.
In a discussion of purported “snitch lines,” Cashill complained of a case in which one rioter’s “son ratted out … his father, and the guy’s serving four years in prison now, even though he didn’t even go into the building.” Farah chimed in that the son has “got, no doubt, some teenage angst, he’s on his high horse, you know, in his ivory tower, like most teenagers are. They’re self-righteous, and he calls in his dad, which may be something he regrets the rest of his life. … So he snitches on his dad, his dad is, in essence, put in prison because his son is annoyed that he got — had his phone taken away once, put on restrictions, whatever. You can build any scenario around it. Point is, the man never even met into the Capitol building and now he’s serving a four-year term.” Cashill then likened this to a case in the old Soviet Union in which a child was allegedly portrayed as a hero for turning in his parents, declaring that “we’re just one step away from that now.”
In fact, the father, Guy Reffitt, was using increasingly violent rhetoric in texts with his son and even threatened his life over turning him in, claiming “traitors get shot.” Reffitt was a member of the Three Percenters anti-government militia, and he was equipped with a handgun, body armor, a helmet, radio and zip-tie cuffs outside the Capitol, where he incited the crowd into storming the building, declaring he would drag Nancy Pelosi out of the building and hoped that her head would hit every stair on the way down. Contrary to Farah’s biased take, the son does not regret turning Reffitt in, calling him a “narcissist.”
The rest of the video was Cashill and Farah fearmongering about what Harris and Walz would purportedly do. Farah went on to declare that “all leftists despise the rule of law” — even though she and Cashill favor subverting the rule of law by pardoning Capitol rioters who violated it.
Cashill also laughably claimed, “We’ll be getting arrested, Elizabeth, for doing this show.” It seems both Cashill and Farah are desperate to be seen as martyrs when all they are are liars and fearmongerers trying to profit off of that.