Jack Cashill stopped being an actual WorldNetDaily columnist earlier this year, and WND has since been reduced to copying-and-pasting Cashill’s writings on his Substack to pass for somewhat regular columns (it’s unclear whether Cashill actually approves of this). One example of this was a May 15 column on behalf of his current favorite white guy who killed a black person, headlined “Judge: Police brass deceived jury in Derek Chauvin trial”:
Assistant Minneapolis Police Chief Katie Blackwell made the classic mistake of suing a truth teller for defamation, namely the intrepid Liz Collin of Alpha News. In her book,”They’re Lying: The Media, The Left, And The Death of George Floyd,” and in her documentary, “The Fall of Minneapolis,” Collin claimed Blackwell may have lied on the witness stand by stating that Derek Chauvin’s use of force on George Floyd in 2020 was improvised and unauthorized.
In Minneapolis, Blackwell had every reason to expect a stacked deck, but Collin held all the cards. The court filings of her and her co-defendants, as reported by the Minnesota Star Tribune, “included sworn declarations from 33 former MPD officers who served with Blackwell and an officer still on staff. Those officers alleged that the restraint used by Chauvin on Floyd was part of department training.” Fourteen of those went so far as to allege “Blackwell committed perjury when she testified at Chauvin’s criminal trial.”
In a stinging 58-page order, Hennepin County Judge Edward Wahl soundly rejected Blackwell’s suit. Collin and her co-defendants, he wrote, “hit every legal standard necessary to avoid the lawsuit going to trial – including that their questioning of whether Blackwell lied on the witness stand met the legal standard of ‘substantial truth.'”
In fact, the judge did not rule that Blackwell committed perjury — he simply ruled that her lawsuit against Collin did not meet the standard of defamation. Her film “The Fall of Minneapolis” is filled with falsehoods and manipulation and lacks a factual basis for its claims. Cashill continued to complain:
The key exchange in the spring 2021 Chauvin trial revolved around Exhibit 17, a still image of Chauvin with his knee on the back of Floyd’s neck. When the prosecutor, pointing to the image of Chauvin, asked how his restraint differed from those the MPD authorized, Blackwell responded, “I don’t know what kind of improvised position that is. So that’s not what we train.”
Wahl did everything short of calling Blackwell a liar. “Her answer reasonably invites viewers, jurors, and now the public to conclude that the depicted technique was never trained by MPD.” He added, “That impression is undermined by evidence in the record showing that MPD training materials from 2018-2019 – the period of Blackwell’s tenure – included images of officers applying knees to the neck or upper back.”
But as one observer pointed out, Collin and Alpha News are far from the “truth-tellers” Cashill claims they are, and they did get things wrong in their film:
Remember Alpha News’s false definition of the [maximum restraint technique] as a knee-on-neck restraint. If one believes that MRT is indeed what we see in ex. 17 (it’s not), the fact that Blackwell says she doesn’t recognize the technique does indeed seem like a lie. Unfortunately, their definition of the MRT is so outlandishly dishonest that it’s impossible to maintain while showing more than tiny fractions of the trial at a time.
[…][J.C. Chaix and Liz Collin don’t shy away from the fact that they are indeed accusing these witnesses of committing perjury. Considering their incorrect definition of MRT, this accusation seems unwise[.]
Further, far from declaring Blackwell to be a liar and perjurer, our observer further pointed out:
In his order’s first pages, Judge Wahl writes that “The Court neither finds nor implies that any of Blackwell’s testimony in the Chauvin trial was false, improper, or misleading,” in direct contradiction to the public responses of the defendants and their counsel. The lawsuit’s dismissal is good for them, certainly, but “these statements are not defamatory” in no way means “this documentary is truthful.”
Cashill’s argument that Collin’s film met the standard of “substantial truth” was also undermined by the judge:
In other words, if it’s possible to interpret an incomplete set of facts to support a given conclusion, it can be deemed “substantially true.” If the media chooses to omit truthful information which could present a more balanced version of events or favorable depiction of a subject, that isn’t defamatory either. Again, “not defamatory” and “truthful” are not synonyms. I prefer journalism which advances the best possible interpretation of reality created from the most complete set of facts.
Nevertheless, Cashill insisted that “the case is collapsing” and insisted that “there would have been no case, no trial. no convictions—no riots— if what President Biden called ‘the knee on the neck of black America’ had been something other than white.” Yes, Cashill is that desperate to defending a fellow white guy for killing a black man.