Zachary Rehl has been one of WorldNetDaily writer Alicia Powe’s favorite Capitol rioters, portraying him as a patriot while censoring the truth about what he did there. Powe’s dishonest whitewashing continued in a Dec. 22 article:
For the first time in months, having recently been released from another nightmarish stint in solitary confinement, Jan. 6 political prisoner Zachary Rehl reached out to WorldNetDaily … with good news.
With President-elect Donald Trump slated to take office on Jan. 20, Rehl says he no longer fears the prospect of a decade or more behind bars for what was essentially a “thought crime.”
In an email from FCI Petersburg, the medium-security correctional facility in Virginia where Rehl is serving a 15-year sentence, he details how the other inmates incarcerated there cheered and congratulated him on the night of Nov. 5, amid the prospects of his release and exoneration by presidential pardon.
any of the other prisoners he is housed with are doing time for murder, rape, robberies and other felony offenses that warrant incarceration in a medium-security facility. Nearly all the inmates in the prison resoundingly agree that Rehl is no criminal and is being held captive as a political prisoner, the Marine veteran explained.
“Even ones who wanted [Trump] to lose, they still shook my hand and congratulated me on my pending release,” Rehl wrote in an email exclusively to WND.
“At the end of the day,” he said, “no one likes to see another person suffer behind these walls that don’t deserve it, and I think it’s a nod to my character that all people I encountered felt that I shouldn’t be here and were happy for me that I get to go home.”
The idea that Rehl is a man of “character” is a lie. As we documented, Rehl assaulted law enforcement by spraying a chemical irritant at them, lied about doing that during his trial, broke into a senator’s office where he smoked and posed for pictures, then expressed pride for the Proud Boys assault he helped lead afterwards in a message to his mother. It’s hilarious that Rehl is relying his fellow thugs to claim that he “is no criminal and is being held captive as a political prisoner.”
In that vein, Powe repeated her severe whitewashing of Rehl’s criminality and falsely portrayed as a victim by helping him whine that he was being treated as the criminal he is:
As WND has reported, at the Jan. 6, 2021 “Save America” rally, Rehl was shot multiple times with rubber bullets as the police indiscriminately gassed and threw flashbang grenades into the moderately peaceful crowd. He then walked through the building for approximately 12 minutes and took a few selfies.
Rehl’s wife was six months pregnant when the FBI barged into their home and dragged him away at gunpoint in a predawn raid. He and his co-defendants Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Dominic Pezzola and Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys national chairman, and were locked in solitary confinement, or the “hole,” for nearly 18 months in six-by-eight-foot cells at the Alexandria Detention Facility in northern Virginia.
In Alexandria, they reported that they were practically starved to death, usually served small portions of rotten food and permitted out of their windowless cage for just 15 minutes a day to use the shower, use the microwave and use the surveilled phone.
While Rehl, Nordean, Biggs, Pezzola and Tarrio were segregated in torturous isolation alongside serial pedophiles and murderers, the Lockerbie Bomber was being detained in the same facility in general population.
Powe offered no independent verification of any of Rehl’s claims — she doesn’t want to sully her biased narrative with the truth. She then served up unsubstantiated claims about Rehl’s trial:
On May 4, 2023, Rehl and his co-defendants were convicted by a jury of “Seditious Conspiracy, Obstruction of an Official Proceeding and Aiding and Abetting, Destruction of Government Property and Aiding and Abetting, Entering and Remaining in a Restricted Building or Grounds, Disorderly Conduct in a Restricted Building or Grounds.”
Immediately being found guilty of seditious conspiracy, the Marine vet was stripped of his military service benefits and forced to pay back every dollar of benefits he received after the Capitol riot.
In January 2023, jury selection of the Proud Boys leadership trial was what defense attorneys claim was a complete mockery which obliterated the rule of law.
Each D.C. resident that qualified to sit on the jury resoundingly affirmed that were ardent Democrats and leftwing activists. Also, each juror echoed propaganda disseminated by the mainstream media claiming the Proud Boys were a group of “white supremacists,” “insurrectionists” and “seditionists.”
The defense counsel for the five defendants repeatedly objected to admitting these clearly far-left activists on to the jury and insisted endlessly that the trial should be relocated to a jurisdiction that did not have a 92-percent voting rate for Joe Biden.
For the duration of the nearly 7-month-long trial, only the jurors wore masks in adherence with government recommended COVID protocols throughout the entire day. Prosecutors complied with the mask mandate, until the second the jurors left the room, when they would take them off practically gasping for air, a charade emblematic of the entire kangaroo trial.
Despite GOP members of Congress sitting across the street from the courthouse where every Jan. 6 defendant, including President-elect Donald Trump, has been tried, there was no one to turn to for remedy. The conclusion was known from the start, and throughout the trial the only hope for justice was an appeal or a pardon, if Trump would somehow overcome all the obstacles against him and win in November 2024.
On Aug. 31, 2021, Judge Kelly viscerally took glee in sentencing Rehl to 15 years in prison. Weeks after he was sentenced, the U.S. Department of Justice appealed the sentences of Rehl and his co-defendants … demanding even more prison time.
Unsurprisingly, Powe offers no substantiation for the motives she imputed on Kelly. Powe also gave Rehl space to praise Trump for his imminent release:
Trump’s survival of the two assassination attempts was due to divine intervention, Rehl contends, a sign from God that the torturous incarceration he is enduring will soon come to an end.
“I had some worries of fraud, but after I saw God was on our side and saved him from that shooting, all doubt in my mind left and I was 100% sure he would win,” he wrote.
Holidays, especially Christmas, have been dreadful for the past four years since the government confiscated Rehl’s freedom and upturned his life. But this Christmas, the weight of the world is no longer on his shoulders as it had been.
[…]Rehl doubled down on his support of Trump over the summer, permanently etching the words “Hold the line” on his right arm alongside a jail-tattooed sketch of Donald Trump, and rested assured that the good guys would soon take back power and restore the rule of law.
And he was right.
Only a far-right propagandist like Powe would work so hard to whitewash a thug like Rehl and censor the truth about his crimes and bizarrely fret that Rehl paying the price for his acts of violence — like most criminals — equate to his “freedom” being “confiscated.” Powe has never asked about how the lives of the police officers guarding the Capitol were upturned by Rehl spraying a chemical irritant at them.
Meanwhile, Powe has yet to explain why an October article she wrote has been mysteriously removed from the WND website.