Sen. Tom Cotton took a lot of opprobrium for bringing up, during this year's stimulus debates in Congress, that some really vile people would get checks, given the poor construction of the Democrat-led law.

Why a killer like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the last living 2013 Boston Bomber, would somehow need a federal stimulus check, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer, went unanswered.  What the heck would he spend it on, other than to give it to his terrorist buddies?  All sorts of jailbirds would get them — Chapo Guzmán?  The shoe bomber?  The underwear bomber?  Susan Smith?  Scott Peterson?  The subhumans who shot up the synagogues in Philadelphia and Poway, Calif.?  The freak who machine-gunned the theater in Aurora, Colorado?  Parkland killer Nikolas Cruz?  The demonic animal who killed the kindly black churchgoers who welcomed him into their Bible study in South Carolina?  The dirtbags who shot Reps. Gabby Gifford and Steve Scalise?  Ghislaine Maxwell and, while he was alive, Jeffrey Epstein?  Based on the logic of the bill, they all could get their stimulus checks, too.

It was grotesque.  Nobody wants the scum of the earth voting while they are incarcerated.  But somehow, Democrats wanted to hand them money.

But when Cotton brought the matter up as a legitimate point of concern in Congress, which is actually his job, he was raked through the press as a fear-monger, and worse still, called a liar by someone who should have known better: the chief fact-checker for the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler.

Turns out Cotton was right, though, and now prosecutors are trying to claw back that stimulus check to compensate Tsarnaev's victims.  According to Newsweek:

Prosecutors have filed a motion seeking funds from Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's inmate trust account, including a $1,400 COVID-19 relief payment he received in 2021.

Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts Nathaniel Mendell filed a motion on Wednesday asking for funds from Tsarnaev's account to be taken and used as restitution to his victims, according to Boston Fox affiliate WFXT. The motion indicated that Tsarnaev had an account balance of $3,885.06 as of Dec. 22, 2021, including a $1,400 COVID-19 stimulus payment deposited to the account in June.

That was a big story in Massachusetts, and well beyond.  Kessler found himself on the spot, for those two Pinocchios he dumped onto Cotton for telling the truth about this.  He's now admitted he was wrong.

According to Fox News:

Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler offered a mea culpa of sorts after having rewarded two Pinocchios to Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., for predicting that murderers like convicted terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev would receive a COVID stimulus check. 

In March 2021, Kessler ran the headline "Murderers, undocumented immigrants: Hyped-up claims about who's getting stimulus checks" with an image of Cotton plastered on the page, challenging claims that he and Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wy., made that the $1,400 checks Americans were set to receive would be going to those not qualified or worthy for them. 

What's annoying about this is that he couldn't remove all the Pinocchios he gave to Cotton for this.  He left one up as a salve to his pride, claiming that it was a matter of context.  Can't he be a man about this and admit he was wrong?  That his partisanship for the left has clouded his fact-checking judgment?  Either Tsarnaev would get his check or he wouldn't.  That's fact-checking.  Context is just slippery silt to seal a Democrat "narrative."

Any questions as to why fact-checkers are no longer trusted by the public?

Image: Aaron "tango" Tang via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.