Her phone rang on that day in early July, nearly six months after a police officer’s bullet killed her daughter as she and a mob of rioters seeking to overturn the election stormed a barricaded door deep inside the U.S. Capitol.
Micki Witthoeft answered the call and listened as former president Donald Trump expressed condolences over
Ashli Babbitt’s violent death and acknowledged, she said, that her daughter had died Jan. 6 trying to salvage his lost presidency.
Witthoeft took the opportunity during the 30-minute call to ask Trump for help getting information about Babbitt’s death and to fight for those still imprisoned because of the riot.
After their call, the circumstances of Babbitt’s death — once a focus of right-wing extremists and white supremacists — became a talking point for the nation’s most dominant Republican.
“Who shot Ashli Babbitt?” Trump asked over and over in the ensuing days, suggesting that the 35-year-old Air Force veteran was the victim of an overzealous Capitol Police officer whose identity was being covered up.
“Every time he talks about her, he says her name,” Witthoeft said in a phone interview. “He could say ‘Her’ or ‘She’ or whatever. But he says ‘Ashli Babbitt.’ He is sure to mention her name repeatedly. I appreciate that. It’s millions more people I can reach.”
In the months since Jan. 6, Trump and his allies have waged a fevered campaign to rewrite the narrative of one of the darkest days in the nation’s history, when
a mob attacked the Capitol, threatening to kill Vice President Mike Pence and using baseball bats and flagpoles to beat police officers as they hunted for lawmakers, many of whom hid behind locked doors, fearing for their lives.
Inside the Capitol siege: How barricaded lawmakers and aides sounded urgent pleas for help as police lost control
Yet, instead of marauders invading the Capitol, Trump and his acolytes describe a largely peaceful crowd of protesters unfairly maligned and persecuted by prosecutors, Democrats and mainstream journalists.
At the center of their revisionism is Babbitt, their martyr, whose fatal attempt to leap through a door that led to the House chamber — captured in graphic detail on video — they describe as a heroic act of patriotism.
“An innocent, wonderful, incredible woman, a military woman,” Trump said during an appearance on Fox News. At a Florida rally July 4, he called her shooting “a terrible thing” and said “there was no reason for it.”
Just before she was shot, Babbitt was among a group of rioters bashing in the glass-paneled doors that led to the Speaker’s Lobby, down the hall from the House chamber, where lawmakers were being evacuated.
“There’s a gun! There’s a gun!” someone shouted when an officer, on the other side of the doors, aimed his weapon in the direction of the mob.
Despite the warning, someone appeared to hoist Babbitt up so she could step through an opening in the door created after its glass panels were shattered. A bullet struck her and she fell back on the floor.
Prosecutors determined it was reasonable for the officer to believe he was firing in self-defense or to protect members evacuating the House chamber.
With the 2022 midterm elections looming, Democrats, along with a handful of Republicans, are challenging Trump’s narrative about Jan. 6. At a House select committee hearing Tuesday,
four police officers catalogued the emotional and physical abuse they suffered defending the Capitol and how betrayed they feel by Republican lawmakers.
“I feel like I went to hell and back to protect them and the people in this room,” D.C. police officer Michael Fanone told the committee. “But too many are now telling me that hell doesn’t exist or that hell actually wasn’t that bad. The indifference shown to my colleagues is disgraceful.”
Trump has complained to aides that his supporters were treated far worse than Black Lives Matter protesters charged last summer, and that the Justice Department and others want to use prosecutions of Jan. 6 crimes to damage him.
“They’ve got to pretend that Ashli Babbitt was some kind of Osama bin Laden or some kind of guy flying a plane into a building,” Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative podcaster with 1.7 million Twitter followers, told his audience.
D’Souza, whom Trump pardoned in 2018 for making illegal campaign contributions, said a “big lie” has been spun that “there were these seditious Trump supporters trying to overthrow the constitution mounting an al-Qaeda-style attack.”
Even Russian President Vladimir Putin joined in. Questioned during an interview with NBC News about political jailings in his country, Putin asked if the correspondent had “ordered the assassination of the woman who walked into the Congress and who was shot and killed by a policeman?”
(Stopped when I realized how long this article was)