On January 6, 2021, Capitol Police officer Michael Byrd shot and killed Ashli Babbitt, who was unarmed. Despite the lawsuit Babbitt’s family filed against Byrd and an eyebrow-raising disciplinary track record, Byrd has been repeatedly rewarded.
Not only was he given a “$36,000 retention bonus, more than $21,000 in security upgrades at his personal residence, and instructions that [he] not sit for a fitness-for-duty evaluation after Jan. 6, 2021,” Byrd was also “promoted from lieutenant to captain in 2023,” according to a recent article by Blaze News investigative journalist Joseph Hanneman.
Now Hanneman and fellow Blaze News investigative journalist Steve Baker join Jill Savage and Blaze News editor in chief Matthew Peterson on “Blaze News Tonight” to break it down.
Byrd has “a history of carelessness with weapons,” says Hanneman. The most notable of these is the incident when Byrd “fired his service weapon at fleeing vehicles near his home while his neighbor was in the line of fire,” which was recently reported by a congressional oversight committee.
Byrd also “left his service weapon on the toilet tank in the Capitol Visitor Center.”
However, there are “three more case files” on Byrd, but these have magically “disappeared.”
“The records are missing,” says Hanneman, adding that from what he understands, the contents of these missing reports make the incidents we already know about “look rather tame.”
But Byrd’s incomplete record isn’t the only mystery. There’s also the conundrum of Frick and Frack — “the unidentified men near Ashli Babbitt when she was shot.”
To learn more about the scandals surrounding the death of Ashli Babbitt, watch the episode above.
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