Home » Capitol Police Officer Michael Byrd gives an interview outing himself as Ashli Babbitt’s killer

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Capitol Police Officer Michael Byrd gives an interview outing himself as Ashli Babbitt’s killer — 38 Comments

  1. An unarmed woman who was 5’2″ and 125 lbs was shot dead by a big strong black guy with a gun. She was absolutely no threat. And there were heavily armed and uniformed police right behind her. They did nothing.

    If she would have gotten through that broken window, he could have easily have cuffed her or something.

    Deadly force was not necessary.

    Another example of two movies on one screen. One form of justice for Dems and another form of justice for Republicans. Republican trespassers have been held without bond for months in the DC jail.

    And that crazy woman Joy Reid on MSNBC kept referring to Ashli Babbitt (say her name!) as a Q Anon follower. WTF? But it just shows that, for the Dems, it’s okay to murder Trump supporters if that get just a little out of line.

    This is a total and complete outrage especially compared to the overdose death of the drugged up felon St. George Floyd.

    And trust me on this, the Congress will fight the wrongful death case to the bitter end. No pretrial settlement.

  2. No other Capitol police officer felt compelled to discharge his weapon that day.
    Not. One.

  3. Heard a couple of Very Nice Church Ladies express drooling, ghoulish approval of the shooting. From a faith tradition which does not believe in capital punishment for first degree murder.]
    They ought to see the prequel to the rumination about seeing ourselves as others see us.

  4. He’s black. Must be a hero.
    She’s white. Must be a villain.
    Facts & truth don’t matter. Case closed.

    In my world, he & Sirhan Sirhan don’t walk free they reap what they sow.

  5. Neo, you wrote:
    “There’s nothing that is exactly a flat out boldfaced lie there, but the sentence is very misleading.”
    This IS a boldfaced lie: “… the attack, which resulted in at least 5 deaths”
    Most of the 5 deaths were NOT a result of the “attack”. No!
    That’s like the crazies counting a person’s death as due to COVID-19 just because he died near a hospital!
    IIRC, only 2 of the dead had anything to do with the protest: the police officer who had a stroke later, & Ashli Babbitt.
    One was a drug overdose. Can’t make that a result of a protest. Not even “technically”.

  6. I would not be surprised if Byrd had his finger on the trigger at the time, and got bumped or he flinched in response to something. In light of the political hysteria and propaganda, which explanation would be more palatable? No firearm discipline in the bathroom, and no trigger discipline either?

  7. I guess, re -reading, this is the bit you wrote that I question:
    “That may or may not be technically true.”
    Claiming that “the attack resulted in at least 5 deaths” is quite technically FALSE.
    I’ve written & edited many technical papers, & being precise is important. (Many MSM people don’t believe that much, anymore, sadly. )

  8. Marv:

    They are far more careful than you think, and far more clever and subtle in their choice of words. This is why nothing they say was a flat-out LIE:

    They are not saying the attack caused the deaths. By their choice of the words “resulted in,” they are merely saying (in the literal sense) that the attack led to the deaths – in other words, that “but for” the attack, the deaths would not have occurred. The deaths were mostly cardiovascular or some combination of cardiovascular and other (I think one had to do with asthma medication or some other drug). There is no way to prove that these deaths were bound to happen anyway and that the demonstration and its attendant stresses and/or excitement didn’t have at least some influence on the timing of their deaths. Therefore, they are not lying, because the deaths may have had the stress of the demonstration as having some effect on their health and therefore their deaths.

    Obviously, though, that’s not what they are trying to make the reader think. They want the reader to think the deaths were caused by the demonstrators, whether directly or indirectly. But they want to get the reader to think that without the writers directly and unequivocally saying that.

  9. Neo, got it. Thanks for explaining more, rather than just barfing on me. I got excited.

  10. Marv on August 27, 2021 at 4:27 pm said:
    Neo, you wrote:
    “There’s nothing that is exactly a flat out boldfaced lie there, but the sentence is very misleading.”
    This IS a boldfaced lie: “… the attack, which resulted in at least 5 deaths”

    Even calling what went on an “attack” is a lie.

  11. Great article geoffb. Byrd should have been highly trained from his Glynco training.

    From geoffb’s article,

    Also, Roberts said the officer appeared to lack trigger discipline, judging from photos taken by a freelance photographer inside the House chamber before the shooting down the hall in the Speaker’s Lobby. “He’s gunslinging like some cowboy,” the lawyer said.

    In one of the freelancer’s photos obtained by RCI, the officer can be seen advancing toward the door of the chamber while several other law enforcement officers had taken position behind a barricade. His Glock-22 is slung low at his side pointed in the direction of the other officers, whose backs are to him, and his finger appears to be on the trigger.

    The veteran Capitol Police officer who spoke to RCI on the condition of anonymity said his colleague was not following department firearms training, which requires officers to keep their weapons pointed in a safe direction while making sure of what’s in front of and beyond a target, and to keep the finger off the trigger until ready to fire.

    “His trigger finger shouldn’t be inside the trigger guard and the gun shouldn’t be pointed at other officers. He’s even pointing it in the direction of a member of Congress,” the fellow officer said, referring to Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), a former professional mixed-martial-arts fighter who had joined the scrum in front of the chamber doors.

    “I can’t tell you how many officers have contacted me to say that what that guy did doesn’t pass muster,” Roberts said in an extensive interview.

    He violates 2 of the 4 rules for firearm safety.

    1) All guns are always loaded. The purpose of this rule is to develop safe habits. …
    2) Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy. …
    3) Keep your fingers off the trigger until your sights are on the target. …
    4) Be sure of your target and what is beyond it. The first part is to positively identify your target. …

  12. Yes – of course his “utmost” adjective is a hoot – but why were the lives that he saved “countless” ?

    His magnificence is beyond all comprehension.

    His modesty unquestionable.

  13. Sickening, disgusting, vile.

    My only hope is that Ashlie Babbitt’s family can make the individual, and everyone associated, pay very dearly. If the suit is brought in DC, that is no doubt a vain hope. About the same odds that Officer Chauvin would get a fair trial in Minneapolis.

  14. dargon:

    Also not a lie. Just a carefully chosen word designed to imply something that isn’t true. But not a lie.

    The reason I say that is that some of the demonstrators were violent. It was very much a minority, but they absolutely exist, and they did physically harm some officers. So that’s why the word “attack” is not a lie – but it’s meant to indicate that hundreds and hundreds of people were attacking the police and were planning to attack the members of Congress. And there is no evidence for that.

  15. Neo:

    That’s still debatable. Did these demonstrators enter the Capitol with violence in mind or were they intent on causing mayhem and expressing their anger and only got violent when confronted/engaged by the police? Unlike antifa/blm protestors who do actively seek out violence against the police, no one was armed, and it was only through the supposed finding of some zip ties that the media concluded that the demonstrators’ ultimate goal was to attack and kidnap congresspeople.

    The problem is that outside of some home videos on the internet, the people who have all the evidence of what precisely happened are the same people who are intent on framing this as a coordinated “attack”. Thus we will probably never know the truth.

  16. dargon:

    I think there is video evidence that at least some of the demonstrators started and/or escalated violence.

    Of course, those may have been the FBI’s entrappers.

  17. Not a lie in the legal sense, as far as could be proven.

    However a lie is where you know what the truth is but craft your words to convey, into the minds of those listening, an image that conflicts with the truth as you know it. The lie isn’t in what is said but in the message that the words, intonation, facial expressions, are intended to convey.

    Speech always involves an intent to create an image in the mind of another. The words might be defensible as not technically a lie, but the intent behind them was to pass a lie into another’s mind.

  18. “I know that day I saved countless lives, Byrd said.”

    Yes, because he stopped shooting unarmed, innocent people after just one.

  19. TommyJay —

    In the video I saw, Byrd extended his arm pointing the gun at Babbitt, took a short step forward, and fired. No jostling, no bumping. Not an accident.

  20. “Wow – the utmost courage. I have actually never heard a hero say something like that of himself or herself; it’s rather odd and uncharacteristic and unheroic. Heroes are almost always humble and downplaying their actions…”

    MOH winner, Maynard “Snuffy” Smith (a real eight ball) comes to mind. He was a “hero” and everyone should wait on him and be grateful that they could just be around him.

  21. Bryan Lovely,
    I looked at an NBC video several times. I’d say you are correct. Although, the real time video shows the gun jerk a little about 1/2 second before the firing. The slo-mo clip starts just after the jerk. Not sure what to make of it, though it looks to be a minor detail.

  22. Erasmus, 7:33pm: not sure if you intended it to be or not but that is very grimly funny. Or grimly very funny.

    Sick consequence of affirmative action: I see that he’s black and can’t help wondering if he was qualified for and/or capable in that job. Especially considering that gun-in-the-bathroom incident.

  23. Having read the link posted by geoffb, it looks to me like Byrd is repeating his lawyer’s narrative, which is what obedient clients do.
    https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/08/05/lawyer_capitol_cop_who_shot_ashli_babbitt_ambushed_her_on_jan_6_without_warning_788569.html

    “He was acting within his training,” Schamel said. “Lethal force is appropriate if the situation puts you or others in fear of imminent bodily harm.”

    Added Schamel: “There should be a training video on how he handled that situation. What he did was unbelievable heroism.”
    [Babbitt family attorney] Roberts argued that he could have retreated if he feared for his life, as other officers did that day — and later received medals for heroism — but Schamel countered that he was guarding a critical chokepoint and saved a “potential massacre of lawmakers and staff” by the mob.

    The first thought I had reading Byrd’s assertions was that he sounded exactly like LTC Vindman of Impeachment 1.0 fame, who was also a Hero in his own estimation.

    https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-lt-col-vindman-returns

    Now, Vindman has written a book, Here, Right Matters , about his experience. And in one recent publicity interview, with the Lawfare podcast , he said that if there had been no whistleblower complaint against Trump, Vindman would not have “let things stand.” Instead, Vindman said, he would have devised some other tactic to protect Joe Biden, Trump’s Democratic rival for the presidency, from harm by Trump’s actions.

    His work, Vindman said, combined with the strain of the Covid pandemic and last year’s racial unrest, “came together to allow President Biden to defeat President Trump.”

    “We contributed to that,” Vindman said, with a touch of pride. “We public servants, the antibodies against corruption, contributed to that. And then the public, the United States citizenry, held the president accountable ultimately where the Senate failed. And that, I think, is a success.”

    Vindman was asked whether that attitude confirms what Trump and his supporters have long said about the “deep state” — that there were nameless, faceless functionaries, deep inside the bureaucracy, trying to influence the political process to defeat a president who had been elected by tens of millions American voters.

    Not true, Vindman insisted. “The judgments that come in and would label me as a deep stater are partisan, political judgments,” Vindman explained, “when an impartial, fair assessment would suggest that all I did was do my duty.”
    In short: My critics are partisan, but I am not.

    To this day, Vindman, who says he discussed the Trump-Zelensky call with six people, will identify five of them but has steadfastly refused to reveal the sixth. That person, Republicans believe, became the whistleblower.

    It sure doesn’t sound apolitical. Yet Vindman told the Lawfare podcast, “I still consider myself apolitical.” In fact, he took part in one of the most political exercises one could imagine — and still won’t reveal his entire role in it.

  24. “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”

    –Ralph Waldo Emerson

  25. As far as saving ‘Countless Lives’, well…..I guess that’s a range from zero to infinity, with my emphasis on the former. Who can listen to a man describing himself as heroic and offering this rationalization without describing who it is he thinks he actually saved? The chamber was already mostly evacuated, and they knew exactly how many people were in it.

    With the help of the Establishment, which has provided the identity-cloaking services up till now, Byrd is able to front-run the inevitable release of his identity in the Civil case that is in process, and to establish his story as the first one out there, hopefully to dominate – again, with the help of the Establishment. This is merely cynical self-interest in the manner to which we have become familiar. It will convince nobody of his innocence, and harden the beliefs of those who think otherwise. They need a change of venue to West Virginia.

  26. “Better to remain silent and leave your intelligence in doubt, than to speak, and to remove all doubt.”

  27. Sick consequence of affirmative action: I see that he’s black and can’t help wondering if he was qualified for and/or capable in that job. Especially considering that gun-in-the-bathroom incident.

    He’s probably fine on a routine day. Doesn’t cut it. The man’s a security guard at heart and should be patrolling the Smithsonian answering patron questions and armed with a billy club or collapsable baton.

    AA does this in every stratum of the public sector and in segments of the private sector addled by diversity discourse (the education sector especially). Also, because our odious federal judiciary has insisted civil service examinations be gutted so dopey black applicants can pass them, their screening function is vitiated for all segments of the workforce. We have public bureaucracies chock-a-block with the chronically underperforming because that’s what the judges and the legislators and the public employee unions want. Our elites are horrid.

  28. Lon Horiuchi is still out there and wandering around on a government pension, so Byrd probably thinks he’s home free, too. Both federal officers, both minorities, both shot an unarmed woman who was committing a non-capital federal crime.

    From his interview, I distinguish a few differences, mainly in native intelligence. Horiuchi was a West Point graduate, before they woke themselves down. Byrd has a high school diploma.

    Unless the FBI puts him in the witness protection program, as was effectively done for Horiuchi, he may not be as home free as he thinks.

  29. For this smurf climbing through the window, a punch in the mouth would have been excessive.
    If she’d actually attacked someone, I imagine a passerby would tell the victim about it. Courteous thing to do.

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