WND Publishes Another Unreliable Gateway Pundit Article Defending Capitol Rioter

WorldNetDaily has been resorting to ridiculously biased and omission-laden stories from the notoriously unreliable Gateway Pundit to try and manufacture sympathy for participants in the Capitol riot, and it happened again with a republished Aug. 17 article written by Gateway Pundit chief Jim Hoft:

January 6 political prisoner Ryan Samsel has been held in prison without trial now since January 2021.

During his two-and-a-half years without trial Ryan has been moved around to 17 different facilities. Ryan has been beaten, abused, tortured, and neglected since his arrest in January 2021.

Earlier this week The Gateway Pundit received exclusive photos from Ryan Samsel’s prison cell at the FDC in Philadelphia. The cell was a size of a closet with a light on all of the time. The cell had a thin blue mattress, no sheets or blankets, no clothing, and he was kept here for five months straight.

The photos are just shocking. This is taking place in America today. This is who we are.

[…]

Ryan believes the government tortured him for months so he would rat out the Proud Boys. They even beat Ryan numerous times and kept him locked down so he couldn’t communicate with anyone.

This torture is taking place in America today.

Where is the Republican Party?

Where is the ACLU, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch?

Missing from Hoft’s manufactured pity piece is any substantiation of the claims he makes about Samsel, as well as any mention of what Samsel did. The latter was summarized by the Department of Justice when he was indicted:

According to court documents, Samsel was captured in publicly available video taken of a crowd pushing and pulling on barricades on the west side of the Capitol. In the process of pushing the barricades to the ground, Samsel and others knocked over a U.S. Capitol Police officer, causing a head injury as the officer’s head hit the ground. In another confrontation, according to court documents, Samsel attempted to pull a riot shield from a uniformed U.S. Capitol Police officer.

We thought right-wingers didn’t like it when police officers were assaulted. But that’s not all; he had quite the criminal record even before the Capitol riot. As a more fact-based news outlet reported, Samsel has been accused of attacking other people, usually women, at least six times, and he had at least four prior convictions for crimes that sometimes left his victims fearing for their lives. 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.

And we’re still not done. Last year, Samsel 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.

Samsel claims to have been beaten by jail guards after an argument over toilet paper escalated. But it does appear that he’s getting back what he did to other people.

There’s a reason Hoft censored that information — he wants to falsely portray Samsel as a martyr when he’s really nothing more than a thug who apparently can’t take what he’s been dishing out for years. And it raises even more questions about WND’s desire to remain in business that it considers Hoft and the Gateway Pundit — who, again, are being sued for defamation for falsely accusing a pair of Georgia election workers of fraud — to be a reliable news source worth republishing without question.