House Democrats’ attempts to spread disinformation during an Oversight Committee hearing about the Jan. 6 uprising at the US Capitol backfired after Republican congressmen grilled officials about a cover-up in the Ashli Babbitt murder and other ‘big lies.’
Although the title of the hearing was “The Capitol Insurrection: Unexplained Delays and Unanswered Questions,” Democrats, including committee chair Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-NY, were more interested in perpetuating an objectively false narrative, much of which has been debunked by evidence.
Leading the rebuttal was Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., who prominently had spoken out against the disputed election outcome during the Joint Session of Congress on Jan. 6, shortly before participants of a mostly peaceful, pro-Trump protest breached or were invited into the Capitol.
Gosar denounced the Democrats’ deceptive claims as “outright propaganda and lies.”
Despite false media reports to the contrary, Babbitt was the only person killed during the incursion after she attempted to climb through a broken window into the Speaker’s Lobby, which had already been evacuated.
The Biden Justice Department has refused to release the killer’s identity, but it determined that no charges would be filed since the killer acted appropriately.
Video showed the officer, who was barricaded behind furniture in what appeared to be an alcove or corridor, step forward and take the kill shot with no advance warning, hitting Babbitt in either the neck or upper torso.
During the hearing, Gosar challenged former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen—who had replaced William Barr at the DOJ just a few weeks prior—to name the person responsible.
“Mr. Rosen, do you recall the name of the young lady—a veteran, wrapped in the US flag—that was killed in the Capitol,” he began.
Asked whether Babbitt was armed at the time, Rosen attempted to dodge the line of questioning.
“I just don’t wanna talk about individual situations,” he said.
However, Gosar cut him off to reclaim his time—borrowing an interrogation tactic from the Democrat playbook that was notoriously used last year in a hearing with Rosen’s predecessor.
Rosen, who insisted he was “not trying to be unhelpful,” also refused to answer a basic question of record about whether Babbitt’s death was a homicide—a fact confirmed by Washington, DC’s chief medical examiner on her official death certificate.
Gosar again reclaimed his time.
“Who executed Ashli Babbitt,” he asked.
Rosen again refused to answer.
After getting nowhere with Rosen, Gosar shifted his questioning to Robert Contee, chief of DC’s Metropolitan Police Department, who had been named to the post only four days before the Jan. 6 clash.
He asked Contee what the MPD’s rules of engagement were.
“The only time we engage—donning riot gear, that kind of thing—is when—in situations where there’s an actual attack going on,” Contee said.
Given the location of the killing, Babbitt’s killer is likely to have been a member of the US Capitol Police and not the MPD, further shrouding the case in mystery.
The Capitol Police answer directly to congressional leaders including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, D-NY.
Both of the top Democrats were deeply involved with spreading the partisan disinformation about the uprising in its immediate aftermath, as they sought to use impeachment to prevent former president Donald Trump from holding office again.
On Wednesday, Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., sought to counter their bogus effort to paint the events as a terrorist ‘insurrection’ by noting that many who entered the Capitol processed through in an “orderly” and respectful manner.
Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) arguing that the takeover of the Capitol Jan. 6 was akin to a “normal tourist visit” and that those who entered the Capitol did so in “an orderly fashion”:pic.twitter.com/EuNv8uxqXy
— Ursula Perano (@UrsulaPerano) May 12, 2021
Gosar also dismissed the claims of violence within the Capitol, demanding that surveillance footage from the building be released.
He said the footage could provide exculpatory evidence for the nearly 500 individuals who have been arrested and charged as part of the DOJ’s “shock and awe” campaign, and also to GOP congressmen, like himself, who had been accused by partisan radicals on the Left of “inciting” a riot.
Although he was unable, during the hearing, to offer anything in the way of direct answers to GOP interrogation, Rosen robustly defended his response to the uprising.
He and former acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller insisted that they “took appropriate precautions” by putting tactical and other elite units on standby.
However, the two also maintained that they had avoided a more forceful initial response to the “hysteria” because they were fearful that they might be perceived as engaging in a military coup.
Even before the election’s outcome was formally determined on Nov. 3, Democrats had long obsessed over whether Trump would relinquish his power peacefully.
“My obligation to the nation was to prevent a constitutional crisis,” Miller said.
In a separate hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday, far-left Attorney General Merrick Garland sought to justify his politicized response by falsely hyping “white supremacy” as the nation’s No. 1 security threat.
Democrats have frequently used the canard to deflect from domestic terrorism committed by leftist pro-anarchy groups such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter, as well as downplaying the problem of Islamic terrorism.
Despite having abated somewhat during the Trump administration, the concern over foreign terrorists forming sleeper cells within the US has been exacerbated by the now-porous border.
Although Garland might simply have been playing to the crowd while trying to garner more financial support from Democrats, his confirmation hearing in February also suggested he maintained a distorted view of what constituted “terrorism.”
He bizarrely claimed at the time that Antifa’s regular attacks on a federal building in Portland did not count as terrorism since they happened at nighttime.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Garland hyperbolically characterized the Capitol uprising as one of the worst things he’d ever witnessed.
“In my career as a judge and in law enforcement, I have not seen a more dangerous threat to democracy than the invasion of the Capitol,” he said.
He said the DOJ’s relentless pursuit of dissidents who openly doubted the validity of his boss’s election rightfully needed to take top precedent over issues like gang violence, drug abuse and human smuggling.
“[T]here has to be a hierarchy of things that we prioritize,” Garland said of the Capitol inquisition. “This would be the one we’d prioritize.”
But Ashli Babbitt’s family, on the other hand, had a much different priority.
They announced recently that they planned to file a civil suit to further shed light on the attempted cover-up and potentially force discovery of her killer’s identity.
The people have a right to know: who executed an unarmed 100lb woman at point blank range with no warnings, no commands or non-lethal force? pic.twitter.com/eTrgyhM8on
— Paul Gosar (@DrPaulGosar) May 12, 2021
