The widow of Ashli Babbitt, the only person who was actually killed during the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol Building, spoke out after the first prime-time hearings of the House committee hand-selected by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to investigate its origins.
Babbitt, who was an Air Force veteran and a huge supporter of former President Donald Trump, was fatally shot in the neck by Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd on the day of the riot as protesters massed on the other side of a door from him.
In an interview months later, Byrd claimed, “I know that day I saved countless lives,” while at the time Fox News’ Tucker Carlson reported that the office had gone unpunished for accidentally leaving his loaded firearm in a men’s bathroom at the Capitol complex.
Fox News added:
Aaron Babbitt told Carlson he understood his late wife was never mentioned in Thursday’s hearing, adding one Republican member of the committee previously donated to a GoFundMe supporting Byrd and advertised it on social media.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois wrote in November the fundraiser was a “worthy cause as this man has faced quite an onslaught of misinformation and extreme threats.”
“I had no intentions of watching [the hearing] in the first place,” Aaron Babbitt said, before going on to blast Kinzinger’s patronizing statement.
“And, we can go back to last week when I was listening to Mayor Giuliani’s radio show. And when he was getting questioned by them, he straight up asked them, ‘Are you going to talk about Ashli Babbitt?’ — And he said, everybody just blankly stared at him, looked down and looked like they were following a fly around the room.”
That response, Aaron said, proved to him that the committee is a politicized sham and is not at all interested in the circumstances surrounding his wife’s death.
“I truly believe in my heart that they know it’s that it’s murder, so they can’t admit to it. And so they have to just bypass it and blow by it and just act like it never happened,” he said.
Carlson then asked Babbitt if he has ever heard from Kinzinger or any other lawmakers, responding that for the most part, he hasn’t, with one notable exception: Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who called to offer his condolences on his wife’s untimely death.
The two then went on to discuss a new video from the day of the riot they said showed that Ashli was trying to suppress some of the more angry protestors and telling them to be calm and not cause any property damage.
Carlson dedicated his Thursday monologue to the hearings airing at the same time as his program, blasting the process as little more than political theater:
You know it tells you a lot about the priorities of a ruling class that the rest of us are getting yet another lecture about January 6th tonight from our moral inferiors, no less. An outbreak of mob violence, a forgettably minor outbreak by recent standards, that took place more than a year and a half ago, but they’ve never stopped talking about it.
In the meantime, in the 18 months since January 6, gas prices have doubled. Drug ODs have reached their highest point ever. The U.S. economy is now careening toward a devastating recession at best and scariest and least noted of all, this country has never in its history been closer to a nuclear war.
Yet the other networks can’t be bothered to cover any of that tonight. Instead, they’ve interrupted their regularly scheduled programming to bring you yet another extended primetime harangue from Nancy Pelosi and Liz Cheney about Donald Trump and QAnon. The whole thing is insulting.
In fact, it’s deranged and we’re not playing along. This is the only hour on an American news channel that will not be carrying their propaganda live. They are lying, and we are not going to help them do it. What we will do instead is to try to tell you the truth. We’ve attempted to do that since the day this happened.
