The U.S. Capitol Police officer who fatally shot Ashli Babbitt on January 6 as she was trying to break into the hallway where lawmakers were evacuating was not security detail assigned to a specific member of Congress, NBC News reports.
Trump, in his ongoing effort to both whitewash the deadly insurrection he incited and to pin the blame on Democrats, suggested without evidence during an interview with Fox’s Maria Bartiromo on Sunday that the officer was “the head of security for a certain high official, a Democrat.”
The right-wing fever swamps seized on the comments to aggressively speculate that Trump was alluding to Nancy Pelosi.
That rumor is false, a source confirmed to NBC News and CNN Monday.
NEW: The U.S. Capitol Police officer who shot Ashli Babbitt on January 6 was not part of a security detail for a specific member of Congress, a law enforcement source tells @CNN, knocking down a claim made by President Donald Trump over the weekend. Per @ZcohenCNN
— Pervaiz Shallwani (@Pervaizistan) July 12, 2021
NEW: The officer who shot Ashli Babbitt at the Capitol on 1/6 was not a part of a specific security detail to a member of Congress, a senior law enforcement official tells NBC News.
This refutes the assertions made by former President Trump in a televised interview yesterday.
— Tom Winter (@Tom_Winter) July 12, 2021
The ex-president also called Babbitt an “innocent, wonderful, incredible woman,” part of his attempt to rebrand the violent mob of his supporters and the events of that day as “peaceful.”
Trump lied? Imagine that…
It continues to shock and dismay me that so many people are willing and able to disregard what we all saw and heard with our own eyes and ears in real time. Reality? We don’t need no stinking’ reality!
The ex-president also called Babbitt an “innocent, wonderful, incredible woman,” part of his attempt to rebrand the violent mob of his supporters and the events of that day as “peaceful.”
She was a nutbar:
Babbitt also had a history of confrontational behavior. In 2016, she was charged with reckless endangerment, dangerous driving and malicious property damage in Maryland, but she was later acquitted, according to court records. A former girlfriend of Babbitt’s husband wrote in the application for a protection order against Babbitt that Babbitt had followed her in a car and rear-ended her three times, multiple news outlets reported.
Could someone please parse the headline as it makes no sense. Something is missing and implied.
That said, I’ve been wondering how we can get through to even some of the people who believe everything he says and inhabit the alternative reality that he and other Repubs and the RWNM propogate. Even if they’re “only” 30-40% of Americans, that’s a dangerously high number. It used to be that they believed that Social Security was a Ponzi Scheme. Now it’s that they believe that it’s a communist plot by cannibalistic pedophiles to steal their bodily fluids.
How do you get through to that? He’s not speaking to us or the other 60-70%, but to Trump Nation. And it’s working. If he told them that Biden melted down the Statue of Liberty and turned it into Bitcoin, they’d believe it, even if they were literally standing in front of it. They’d say “No, that’s a fake that he put up after he melted down the real one!”.
In all fairness, he also said that about Irma Grese.