Jack Cashill's Capitol Riot Revisionism

The WorldNetDaily columnist whitewashes the behavior of Capitol riot participants, tries to turn Ashli Babbitt into a martyr -- and demonizes the law enforcement officer who shot and killed Babbitt during the riot.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 8/5/2024

The headline in the otherwise useless Kansas City Star caught my eye, “Kansas City man spent 6 seconds in Capitol on Jan. 6. Now he’s charged with 4 crimes.”

As veteran Star reporter Judy Thomas gleefully informs the paper’s dwindling reader base, “The arrests have come as the massive Capitol riot investigation has picked up the pace, more than 21⁄2 years after the Jan. 6 breach. The arrest tally now stands around 1,100, on charges ranging from demonstrating in a Capitol building to seditious conspiracy.”

Why, one wonders, has the FBI “picked up the pace”? This is the same FBI that sat on Hunter Biden’s laptop for nearly a year, doing little but hiding it.

All of Thomas’ breast-beating is undone by two words, “six seconds.” The headline begs the question, “What horrible thing must this ‘Kansas City man’ have done in those six seconds to deserve being arrested two-and-a-half years after the fact?”

When sane readers discover that Angelo Pacheco did exactly nothing in those six seconds, they have to question just how far out of control the FBI investigation has gone. This is no manhunt. This is a witch hunt.

[...]

An FBI special agent with the FBI domestic terrorism squad tells what steps she (an assumption) took that led to the arrest of this idealist turned “terrorist.”

The agent was helped greatly by a citizen-narc, unknown to Pacheco, who allegedly reviewed his Facebook and Instagram pages, and likely his profile on KCPT, to tag Pacheco as a junior insurrectionist.

“Based on that information,” the agent reviewed the photo on Pacheco’s driver’s license and identified him as being on the Capitol grounds Jan. 6, “wearing a distinctive American flag trapper hat on top of a white baseball cap.”

[...]

Six seconds of nothingness. That’s it. Reading this, I feel embarrassed for the agent and disgusted anew by the actions of the Bureau that employs her, the Department of Justice that oversees the Bureau, and the capo di tutti capi who runs this criminal enterprise.

Cashill didn’t mention that there’s also a picture of Pacheco hanging on scaffolding outside the Capitol building, suggesting his motives may not have been quite as benign as Cashill wants us to think.

Cashill then tried to justify Pacheco’s appearance at the riot: “Even if Pacheco thought the voting in the 2020 election was on the up-and-up – please! – he had to know too how the FBI colluded with the intel community to rig the election against Trump. He had every right to be upset.” Cashill provided no evidence to support his conspiracy theory or why he thinks Pacheco shared his belief in it.

Cashill didn’t note that Pacheco could have simply avoided all this by, you know, not entering the Capitol building — there was no legitimate need for him to do so, even for six seconds. And the length of time does not matter; once Pacheco crossed the threshold of the Capitol doors, he committed a crime. Instead, he whined:

Six seconds was enough to nail Pacheco for his effort to “knowingly enter” a restricted building, to “disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business,” to “engage in disorderly or disruptive conduct,” and to “parade, demonstrate, or picket in any of the Capitol Buildings.”

Four counts. All misdemeanors. And likely hundreds of thousands of dollars spent to ruin this one ambitious young man’s life. Meanwhile, back in Washington, Hunter Biden…

Again, Pacheco chose to enter the Capitol and, thus, indisputably committed a crime by doing so. The government is not “ruining his life” by holding him accountable for his behavior — that’s called the American justice system. And we thought right-wingers believed in law and order.

Cashill also didn’t explain why crimes should not be prosecuted if he approves of the commission of them. Then again, he loves criminals who commit the right crimes (like killing a black person), as his support for George Zimmerman and Derek Chauvin has demonstrated.

Cashill began his Jan. 31 column with another sob story about a Capitol rioter:

On Jan. 6, 2021, Rachel Powell, a mother of eight from central Pennsylvania, went to the Capitol and admittedly got a little carried away.

Powell did help break a window. She pushed against police barricades and encouraged others to surge forward against police lines. Prosecutors asked for eight years, one year, a cynic might suggest, for each of her eight children.

A soft-hearted judge gave her 57 months, 42 more months than New York City attorney Urooj Rahman received for fire-bombing a police car during the George Floyd riots in May 2020.

“I’m with family right now,” Powell texted me on Jan. 7, 2024. “It would be better to write me because I have one day left, which I will spend with family. I might be able to email you as well.” Powell left the next day for prison – FCI Hazelton in Braceton, West Virginia.

Cashill is, again, deliberately understating what Powell did, falsely implying that her prison term stems largely from breaking a window. As a more honest news outlet reported, she didn’t merely “encourage[] others to surge forward against police lines” per Cashill’s — she used a bullhorn to do so. And she didn’t merely “push[] against police barricades” — 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. Further, she has been largely unrepentant about what she did, angry that she’s facing consequences for her actions.

Cashill then got mad that CNN’s Anderson Cooper pointed out her lack of remorse in issuing “a homily so deep in mindless sanctimony it belongs in a time capsule”:

“It’s amazing to me, although it shouldn’t be,” said Cooper, “that you know she spent three years locked up in her home and could have done some research, and she continues things which are demonstrably false and just lies. I mean, it’s pathetic.”

Weeks before Cooper opined about things that are demonstrably false, CNN ran a story headlined, “See the surveillance video Trump allies are using to sow doubts about voting.”

The video captured illegal ballot harvesting on the incumbent’s behalf during a Democratic mayoral primary in Bridgeport, Connecticut’s largest city.

A whistleblower handed over the video to the challenger. As a Democrat and a racial minority, the courts and the media had to listen to him. So blatant was the fraud that a judge nullified the election.

This “wild” story being too big for CNN to ignore, the producers found a way to turn it against Trump. Asked anchor Kristin Fisher, “How are Trump and other right-wing figures trying to capitalize off this scandal.?”

Reporter Marshall Cohen smirked, “They have had a bonanza with it in the right-wing media.” Cohen dismissed Trump’s claims about widespread voter fraud as “completely wrong.” The reporter had consulted with the “experts,” and they assured him that voter fraud is extremely rare. Case closed.

Now his two storylines come together:

Not so fast. Two weeks after the “pathetic” Rachel Powell headed to prison, a victim of Trump’s alleged lies about voter fraud, the New York Times dug a little deeper into the Bridgeport scandal.

Knowing its readers were not keen on learning about voter fraud, the editors put their minds at ease with the semantic pretzel of a headline, “Election Fraud Is Rare. Except, Maybe, in Bridgeport, Conn.”

Here too, “experts” were recruited to assure readers that “election fraud is rare.” Bridgeport was an exception but, reporter Amelia Nierenberg conceded, the 2023 election was not a one-off.

“Ballot manipulation has undermined elections for years,” reported Nierenberg. “Residents of the city’s low-income housing complexes described people sweeping through their apartment buildings, often pressuring them to apply for absentee ballots they were not legally entitled to.”

Added Nierenberg, “Sometimes, residents say, campaigners fill out the applications or return the ballots for them – all of which is illegal.” This was the kind of scheme Project Veritas unearthed in Minneapolis in 2020, and that the Times so grossly misreported that Project Veritas felt compelled to sue for libel.

In fact, the now-defunct Project Veritas told a story about the “scheme” it claimed to have “unearthed” in Minneapolis that was discredited; its main source recanted his claims, and there’s no link whatsoever to Rep. Ilhan Omar, as the PV video claimed. PV’s lawsuit against the Times is noteworthy because PV convinced a judge to impose prior restraint on the Times by keeping it from reporting on internal PV memos it received. Cashill also offered no evidence that what happened in Bridgeport is happening nationwide, as he wants you to believe. Instead, he promoted another discredited film about purported election fraud:

The Dinesh D’Souza film “2000 Mules” used geo-tracking data to make the case that schemes similar to Bridgeport’s were not unusual in large Democratic cities.

Specifically, D’Souza accused the Democrats of throwing the 2020 election to Biden through the use of massive illegal vote harvesting in the major cities of critical swing states.

The much anticipated film premiered in packed theaters across America on Monday, May 2, 2022. On that same May 2, 2022, Politico reported on the leaked initial draft of the Supreme Court opinion striking down Roe v. Wade.

The leak was unprecedented. In fact, as Politico reported, “No draft decision in the modern history of the court has been disclosed publicly while a case was still pending.”

This story gave the media all the excuse they needed to ignore “2000 Mules” and all the leisure time its “fact checkers” needed to “debunk” and “discredit” the film’s claims.

It turned out that all these vignettes were to become part of a book Cashill was writing that whitewashed the participants in the riot and demonizing those in law enforcement who defended the Capitol against them. He served up another effort on that front in his March 20 column, making sure to play the sympathy card by calling the participant in question a “great-grandma”:

This past Saturday I had the honor of hosting a small fundraiser for Rebecca Lavrenz, one of the 10 women I am profiling in my upcoming book, “Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6.”

Rebecca and her daughter Jennifer stopped by Kansas City where I live on their way to Washington, D.C. If the Sixth Amendment still holds in the district, “an impartial jury” will decide whether Rebecca is guilty of the misdemeanors with which she is charged.

Rebecca faces many of the standard J6 charges: disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly conduct in a Capitol Building or grounds; and parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol Building.

There is no dispute as to what Rebecca did to earn these charges. On Jan. 4, 2021, she left her Colorado Springs home and drove 1,600 or so miles to D.C. by herself, arriving on the evening of Jan. 5.

On Jan. 6, at 2:43 p.m., this devoutly Christian great-grandmother entered the Capitol through a door on the more orderly east side of the building that had been opened from within.

“I went to pray for my country,” Rebecca told me. She did just that for 12 minutes before exiting the building. Although fellow protester Ashli Babbitt was shot and killed while she was in the building, Rebecca saw no violence or vandalism.

Rebecca’s trial begins on Monday, March 25. She was offered a plea deal but refused to testify falsely against herself. Said Rebecca, “I didn’t do anything wrong!”

If there is “no dispute as to what Rebecca did to earn these charges,” then Lavrenz should not be fighting the charges and should admit guilt. Instead, Cashill helped her play victim by repeating the right-wing narrative that right-wing insurrectionists can’t get a fair trial in the District of Columbia:

Rebecca, of course, knows the Sixth Amendment holds no purchase in the district. “IMPOSSIBLE to get a fair trial in Washington, D.C., which is over 95% anti-Trump, & for which I have called for a Federal TAKEOVER in order to bring our Capital back to Greatness,” Trump posted on Truth Social in August 2023.

Trump was not exaggerating. In 2016. Hillary Clinton may not have won the states of Wisconsin or Michigan, but she crushed Trump in the District of Columbia.

In fact, Hillary was the first presidential candidate ever to win more than 95% of the district’s two-party votes. Trump received just 4%. In 2020, incumbent President Trump upped his total, but only to 5%. Of the 50 states, by contrast, none gave Trump less than 30% of the vote.

Given their historic commitment to justice, one would think that the stacking of these juries would upset self-professed liberals. In fact, that commitment has always been more imagined than real.

Cashill is being deliberately obtuse. He knows full well that an entire population doesn’t sit in judgment of a defendant, 12 jurors do. There is a jury selection process,and both the prosecution and defense lawyers, as well as the judge, will screen jurors and try to eliminate those who they believe cannot be impartial. Merely living in a particular city is not evidence that a prospective juror cannot be partial.

Cashill then turned to whitewashing the riot itself:

On the first anniversary of January 6, for instance, all 51 ACLU chapters signed on to the kind of letter the ACLU chapter of ancient Rome might have written about the Vandals or the Visigoths.

“On January 6 of last year, the residents of D.C. were traumatized as an insurrectionist mob roamed our streets, harassed our neighbors, and violently broke into the Capitol Building, killing at least five people – all in an attempt to overthrow the counting of American citizens’ votes.”

The only thing the ACLU got right in this letter was the date. There was no insurrection. No one roamed the streets or harassed neighbors. Like Rebecca, the great majority of protesters walked into the Capitol through open doors, prayed or took selfies, and left peacefully.

Then too, the only killing that day was done by the Capitol Police. As to the five dead officers, one died of a stroke unrelated to his experience on January 6, and four others committed suicide over the next seven months.

For the last three years, judges have been repeating this same outrageous “five killed” lie before juries, which may help explain why no jury has acquitted a J6 defendant. Nor has any judge granted a single defendant a change of venue away from this deeply propagandized hell hole.

Ironic that a deeply propagandized writer like Cashill would accuse others of being “deeply propagandized.” He also offered no evidence that judge has reference the “outrageous ‘five killed’ lie before juries” — in fact, a medical examiner ruled that “all that transpired” that day contributed to officer Brian Sicknick’s stroke-related death the day after the riot, and at least one other officer’s post-riot death was ruled to be in the line of duty. Cashill also failed to mention that one key reason “no jury has acquitted a J6 defendant” is that their crimes were captured on video for all to see, including those of Lavrenz.

Cashill concluded with one more stab at making his defendant look sympathetic:

If found guilty, Rebecca could be looking at $210,000 in fines and a year in prison. Yet she remains stubbornly and prayerfully optimistic. Guided by an inner light, this charmingly defiant great-grandmother may be the woman destined to alert the willfully ignorant to the greatest mass injustice against American citizens since Japanese internment.

Cashill is simply lying at this point. There is no injustice here — he even admitted earlier in his column that “There is no dispute as to what Rebecca did to earn these charges.” Lavrenz committed a crime and it was captured on video, and Cashill even concedes the crime — which blows up his ludicrous comparison of her case to Japanese internment.

A few weeks after Cashill’s column appeared, Lavrenz was indeed found guilty of charges related to her participation in the riot; given that there’s no evidence she engaged in violent behavior, it’s unlikely she will face the full “$210,000 in fines and a year in prison” Cashill fearmongers about. Lavrenz, meanwhile, is fully engaged in her own victimhood narrative, ranting after the verdict: “They are trying to stop our voices, put fear in our hearts and take away inalienable rights given to us by God. But I will not let that happen to this praying great-grandma as long as I have breath.”

Lionizing Ashli Babbitt, demonizing law enforcement

Cashill took a different approach in his Feb. 7 column, attacking the law enforcement officer who shot and killed Capitol insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt. He started by trying to suggest that Babbitt wasn’t the extremist she actually was, while also hinting at the right-wing conspiracy theory that the protesters were actually undercover agents provocateur:

A suit filed recently by Judicial Watch on behalf of Ashli Babbitt’s widower, Aaron Babbitt, shows just how perverse is the state of justice in the age of Obama-Biden.

On Jan. 6, 2021, the 5-foot-2 Ashli found herself trapped by a crowd in the narrow corridor leading to the Speaker’s Lobby of the U.S. Capitol.

In that crowd was Zachary Alam, a 30-year-old with a criminal past. He reached between the three Capitol Police officers guarding the doors to the lobby and began smashing the glass, shouting a very un-MAGA like, “F–k the Blue.”

Alam’s glasses flew off on impact. Fleeing the madness, Ashli hopped into the window pane now fully free of glass. Only a person as small as she could have managed that feat.

Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd, the incident commander for the House on Jan. 6, promptly shot her, the least justifiable police shooting ever caught on video.

Cashill didn’t mention that Alam has been convicted of several felonies related to the riot, which undermines his suggestion that he was an undercover agent. He also failed to make clear that the alleged version of events he’s reciting is an approved narrative issued by Judicial Watch taken from its lawsuit, and that it has yet to be held to court examination — indeed, PolitiFact called that story “speculative and unsubstantiated,” adding that “Videos of the incident do not clearly capture all that Babbitt was saying and doing, let alone feeling, at the time.” Nevertheless, Cashill quoted further from the unsubstantiated Judicial Watch lawsuit to attack Byrd:

As the Babbitt suit makes clear, Byrd violated just about every USCP directive on the use of deadly force. Masked and out of uniform, Byrd did not identify himself as a police officer, did not give Ashli verbal orders to stop, nor give her a chance to comply.

Byrd did not “diligently assess” the situation before firing. He never considered any other defensive tactics or compliance techniques. He disregarded the presence of seven other police officers in his line of fire.

Most critically, Ashli did not pose “an imminent danger of death or serious injury.” When Byrd fired, he did not even know she was a female.

From there, Cashill complained that “For nearly nine months after the shooting, the media showed no interest in Byrd’s identity,” and that by contrast “the Minneapolis PD made no effort to protect Derek Chauvin and his colleagues,” going on to huff that “The media competed to dox police officers, especially white ones, involved in any controversial police action.” Cashill concluded by smearing Byrd as a liar, dubiously portraying overstatements as “lies”:

As Holt repeated twice, the USCP, the Metropolitan PD and the Justice Department had all cleared Byrd of any wrongdoing. What they could not clear him of, especially after his one-time appearance on NBC, was lying.

Byrd lied about things big and small, even things he didn’t have to lie about. Most grandiose was his claim, “I know that day I saved countless lives.”

In truth, the bullet that killed Ashli Babbitt was the only bullet fired that day in or around the Capitol. Among those Byrd claimed to have saved were members of Congress who were “disabled” or very nearly so.

“Some of those individuals were in the lobby with me,” said Byrd. In fact, there were no members of Congress in the lobby, let alone disabled ones.

To show their indifference to the truth, and their disdain for the MAGA movement, the regime had Byrd promoted to captain two years after the interview.

Meanwhile, speaking of threats, Derek Chauvin struggles to recover from those 22 knife wounds he endured in an Arizona prison.

Cashill is a major Chauvin apologist who spreads conspiracy theories in a desperate attempt to distract from the fact that we all saw the George Floyd video.

The centerpiece of Cashill's book is indeed the story of Ashli Babbitt. According to the book excerpt published May 15 at WND, Cashill unsurprisingly performs a whitewash on Babbitt as well; he relied on the account of Tayler Hansen, an anti-abortion activist who happened to be filming her inside the Capitol to describe her alleged interactions with Alam, whom other riot defenders have tried to portray as an Antifa provocateur. Cashill didn’t explicitly make that claim, but he hinted at it by claiming that “Alam had no social media history tying him to Trump or the MAGA movement.”

Cashill gushed that Babbitt “took matters into her own hands, literally,” as she allegedly saw Alam and others break out a window, “yanked at Alam’s backpack with her right hand. As he spun around, she slugged him square in the face with her left fist. His glasses flew off on impact. Fleeing the madness, Ashli hopped with some assistance into the window frame now fully free of glass. Only a person as small as she could have managed that feat.”

Cashill then rehashed previous attacks on Byrd, hyping his purported incompetence as an officer. But he apparently made no attempt to contact Byrd for his book, making this account largely speculation by highly biased Babbitt apologists who have an unambiguous bias that can’t be trusted at face value. The excerpt concludes with Cashill ramping up Babbitt’s victimhood:

When California physician Dr. Austin Harris tried to treat Ashli, the police pulled him off and cleared the other protestors trying to help. According to Hansen, that is all they did. “The cops just continued to stand there,” he told filmmaker Nick Searcy. “They didn’t help her. She clearly needed her throat cleared from the blood. They didn’t do anything. They just let her bleed out. And that was it.”

The FBI would later arrest Dr. Harris on the same cooked-up charges they did most other protestors. A half-hour after the shooting, Ashli was pronounced dead at Washington Hospital Center.

As to Hansen, no official ever talked to him or asked to see his video despite Hansen’s repeated attempts to reach out. “I begged and I begged these people on the committee,” said Hansen, but no one wanted to know what he saw.

Cashill doesn’t say what, exactly, was “cooked-up” about the charges against Harris. In fact, as a former friend documented, Harris desired to “be with the MAGA crowd,” posted a photo of himself on the Capitol steps wearing a “Lions Not Sheep” cap and tried to falsely blame the riot on Antifa as “a false-flag event to allow even more oppression of conservatives.” He was ultimately sentenced to probation after taking a plea deal.

Cashill made no mention of the fact in this excerpt — and, one can presume, in the book as well — that, as a more credible news organization reported, 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.” That inconvenient fact would interfere with Cashill’s martyrdom narrative, you see.