WND’s Cashill Mixes Capitol Rioter’s Sob Story With Isolated Case Of Election Fraud

Jack Cashill began his Jan. 31 WorldNetDaily 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.

Unfortunately for Cashill, a couple weeks after his column was published, the activists with True the Vote — whose alleged research formed the basis of the claims in “2000 Mules” — admitted that it didn’t have evidence to back up the claims it made about purported ballot-stuffing in Georgia, and that Georgia officials also found no evidence. All of which means that Cashill didn’t need to put all those scare quotes in when complaining about how the film has been debunked, even though he offered no evidence to contradict the debunking.