Days after former president Trump demanded to know the name of the police officer who shot and killed Ashli Babbitt during the Capitol insurrection, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) cheered and welcomed the support for the far-right cause célèbre.
“Six months ago today, Ashli Babbitt, a 110-pound woman with nothing in her hands, not a rock, not a stick or a bat, was shot dead by a still unknown Capitol Hill police officer,” reads a press release issued by Gosar’s office. “And now President Trump has joined me in seeking the truth.”
Gosar has taken a lead role in stoking rage on the right-wing fringe about Babbitt’s death. A Capitol police officer shot and and killed Babbitt on Jan. 6 as she, backed up by a mob of rioters, climbed through a doorway into the House Speaker’s Gallery, where members of Congress were evacuating.
A DOJ inquiry did not find evidence to support charges against the officer; Babbitt’s family have sued D.C. for records on the officer.
But Gosar, who has ties to the far-right, has taken a lead role in pushing the idea that the federal government “executed” Babbitt. When DOJ officials have come before the House Oversight Committee, on which Gosar sits, to testify about Jan. 6, Gosar has used it as an opportunity to ask who “executed” Babbitt.
In the statement, Gosar restated his mantra of the past few months, demanding to know the identity of the officer who killed Babbitt while claiming the existence of a shadowy “effort to cover up the full circumstances of this homicide and the American people won’t stand for it.”
He once again referred to Babbitt’s death as an “execution,” saying that “we do not allow the execution of citizens by street ‘justice’ in our country.”
He went on to ask in the statement “why have no charges been brought against the shooter for negligent homicide or more?”
