So far, more than 570 people have faced criminal charges relating to the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6 this year, following a rally near the White House where then-president Donald Trump egged them on to march on the Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification by Congress of Joe Biden’s victory in the November 2020 presidential election.
Trump was impeached for an historic second time, accused by the House of inciting the riot. He was acquitted in the Senate, although several Republicans voted to convict him.
Ashli Babbitt was shot dead on January 6 by a Capitol Police officer, who has not been identified, as she tried to get into the House chamber through a smashed window in a door leading from the Speaker’s chamber.
The Capitol Police has just issued its internal findings that the officer acted lawfully and will not face disciplinary action.
Babbitt, 35, was an Air Force veteran who embraced far-right conspiracy theories on social media, including Trump’s lies that he only lost the election because of widespread fraud across the US.
Officials at local, state and national level declared the 2020 election the “most secure” in US history and many dozens of lawsuits by the Trump campaign to try to overturn results in various states all failed, with some judges excoriating lawyers such as Rudi Giuliani and Sidney Powell who made the arguments in court and in press conferences that Trump was the winner.
Back in January, Lois Beckett and Vivian Ho reported for the Guardian that:
Babbitt’s Twitter account showed a woman deeply engaged for months with a conspiracy theory that painted Democratic lawmakers as evil pedophiles, and then persuaded, and infuriated, by Trump and his allies’ lies about election fraud.
For weeks before she joined the mob in Washington, Babbitt had been retweeting false claims from Trump himself, as well as the pro-Trump lawyers Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, alleging massive voter fraud and asserting that Trump had won the 2020 election.
Many of Babbitt’s tweets, according to extremism experts, also marked her as a believer in QAnon, a conspiracy theory that claims Donald Trump has been trying to save the world from a cabal of satanic pedophiles, including Democratic politicians like Biden and Hollywood celebrities, and that he will soon bring his enemies to justice.
