Alicia Powe wrote in an Oct. 18 WorldNetDaily article:
January 6 political prisoner Ryan Samsel has sounded an alarm via text message from his jail tablet to WorldNetDaily while detained in general population of the Washington, D.C. Correctional Treatment Facility.
The J6 defendant, who like other “J6ers” has been held in pretrial detention for an extraordinarily long period of time – almost four years – said in a text sent Wednesday that a jail guard took away his mattress while spewing racial epithets. Immediately after this, he asked his family and this reporter to call the jail’s command center to investigate the situation.
“Hey can you call LT brown at command center and ask why he took the mattress away and called me a cracker and is mad BC I had ppl call up there for my legal mail they wont give me,” Samsel wrote. “He said ant no cracker getting a mattress and took my mattress.”
Samsel is also blowing the whistle on what, ironically, could be called an election-fraud scandal of sorts inside the jail.
The law in Washington, D.C. – specifically D.C. Law 23-277, the Restore the Vote Amendment Act of 2020 – “allows District residents to vote while incarcerated.”
“I have everyone writing grievance on the jail for not giving us [our] ballots and now [they’re] holding my mail,” Samsel wrote.
The notorious “D.C. Gulag,” in which approximately 300 January 6 defendants have been held pretrial for nearly four years, is the same correctional facility in which Samsel was assaulted by jail guards weeks after his Jan. 30, 2021 arrest, after protesting in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
Samsel’s 2021 beatdown by jail guards resulted in the fracturing of his “orbital floor and potentially untreated brain damage,” according to his medical records.
The first assault he sustained while incarcerated for J6 was directed by agents with the FBI following his refusal to take a plea agreement that entailed casting “blame” on former president Donald Trump for his “role” in the Capitol riot.
During another assault at another prison, Samsel explained that he was tied to a 4-point restraint chair and held backwards for approximately 12 hours while being brutally assaulted by jail guards who spat on his face and berated him with profane racial epithets.
You might remember Samsel as the thuggish Capitol rioter who has been continually whitewashed by Powe and other Gateway Pundit-affiliated writers in order to portray him as a victim. But his record shows he is anything but — during the riot, Samsel knocked over a Capitol Police officer while trying to destroy barricades around the Capitol, causing her to suffer a concussion. Samsel also has a history of violence and thuggery, not to mention criminality and violence — at the time of the riot, he had an open warrant regarding accusations that he broke into a woman’s house to attack her and was on parole for brutally assaulting his pregnant girlfriend. Samsel also reportedly wrote a letter talking about getting rid of politicians with a woodchipper, and he has previously made several statements about stabbing or punching FBI agents. Powe has never told her readers about Samsel’s history of violence.
Interestingly, Powe’s article has been deleted by WND for unexplained reasons. We found this text at a different website that copied-and-pasted it there. One has to wonder if there was something so egregiously false in it that a lawsuit was threatened; WND rarely responds to polite requests to correct the record. It certainly can’t because WND wanted Powe to substantiate her claims — indeed, nothing about Samsel is backed up with on-the-record evidence — or to balance her article by telling the other side of the story. It’s unlikely that WND found its journalistic conscience.
Still, you’d think WND would at least try to be honest with readers and tell them why Powe’s article was deleted.
Curiously, Powe herself seems to be undergoing a disappearing act. According to her WND archive, her last article there was Oct. 29, and she hasn’t written anything for Gateway Pundit since August. If she is truly out of the picture, such a ridiculously biased and absurdly dishonest reporter will not be missed.