August 27, 2021, 6:55 am*
The officer who shot Ashli Babbitt during the Capitol riot has spoken out after being cleared of any wrongdoing, but Babbitt’s widower isn’t interested in what he has to say.
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Lt. Michael Byrd’s name had officially been kept secret following the events of January 6, even as Republicans called him a murderer and demanded his identity be released. But despite best attempts, and a Justice Department investigation that cleared Byrd’s shooting of Babbitt, who was hit while climbing through a broken door leading to the Speaker’s Lobby, his name eventually leaked online.
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And ever since then, Byrd says he has received a parade of death threats from Trump supporters who want him held accountable for Babbitt’s death.
“They talked about, you know, killing me, cutting off my head. Very vicious and cruel things,” he told NBC’s Lester Holt. “There were some racist attacks as well. It’s all disheartening, because I knew I was doing my job.”
But Byrd’s coming forward seems unlikely to sway the opinions of the extremists who continue to paint those at the Capitol riot as victims rather than domestic terrorists. And one person who really doesn’t care what the officer has to say is Babbitt’s widower, Aaron Babbitt.
“I don’t even want to hear him talk about how he’s getting death threats and he’s scared,” he told Tucker Carlson after Byrd’s interview. “I’ve been getting death threats since January 7th — two, three, five, 10 a day — and all I did on January 6th is become a widower.”
Byrd has said that he repeatedly told Babbitt and the others trying to break through the door and head closer towards members of Congress to stop what they were doing and get back, while Babbitt’s lawyer has argued that no warning was given prior to the single shot.
“I tried to wait as long as I could. I hoped and prayed no one tried to enter through those doors,” Byrd said. “But their failure to comply required me to take the appropriate action to save the lives of members of Congress and myself and my fellow officers.”
The high tensions on all sides surrounding the events of the Capitol riot have left Americans divided on what happened with Babbitt — deemed a martyr by the right and a terrorist by the left — and what should happen to Byrd.
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Now that he has provided his own account of the events, that conversation is continuing, and remains just as heated.
Let’s keep it
If the Capitol terrorists were Black, you bigots wouldn’t be complaining about Lieutenant Michael Byrd shooting Ashli Babbitt, you’d be praising white officers for unloading their clips into the bodies of Black people, because that’s what they would’ve done.
— Bishop Talbert Swan (@TalbertSwan) August 27, 2021
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*First Published: August 27, 2021, 6:54 am
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