America Set To Pay $5 Million To Insurrectionist's Family For Cruelly Not Letting Her Attack Congress
Sure, why not.
Let this be a message for any insurrectionists plotting against the United States: if you storm into the Capitol at the head of a mob of crazed rubes, and you rush headlong toward the House chamber while screaming and breaking glass and just generally giving the impression that you are feeling a bit more murderous than your average visitor to the seat of American government, and a police officer charged with protecting lawmakers shoots you in their defense while you’re barreling straight at the room where they are cowering in fear for their lives, then the government will pay your surviving relatives $5 million to compensate them for you being a colossal asshole.
But only if you’re doing it for Donald Trump. That makes all that Not Bad Anymore.
Yep, $5 million smackaroonis. That is the amount our government is reportedly set to pay the family of Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force veteran who was shot and killed while storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, at the head of a crowd that was screaming for blood because it voted for the bigtime losing side in an election.
The payment to Babbitt’s family would be to settle a wrongful death lawsuit her relatives filed last year, in which they sought $30 million in damages. The case was scheduled to go to trial in July of 2026. Frankly, we’re sorry it’s settling, because we’d love to have watched the Babbitt family’s wingnut attorneys try to convince a DC jury that the braying mob just wanted to exercise its right to register objections to the election results, as if at that point we had not had two months of lawsuits finding that all those objections were loads of horse-hockey.
Because there is no doubt about what happened. None. We’ve all seen the video of Babbitt being the first to crawl through a window someone had just smashed so the mob could get through locked doors into the Speaker’s Lobby outside the House chamber, where they would have been one locked door away from a chamber full of the people’s representatives. A police officer stopped her with one shot, which broke the crowd’s fever and might very well have stopped a lot more bloodshed from occurring.
The Department of Justice had initially opposed settling the case. Then Donald Trump returned to office in January and brought Pam Bondi along as his attorney general. Now any of their ideologically aligned brethren are getting handed piles of money for cynically misguided reasons, we guess:
[T]he Justice Department has agreed to pay just under $5 million to Babbitt’s family, with about one-third to go to their attorneys, who include the conservative group Judicial Watch[.]
Ah, Judicial Watch, the ambulance-chasing wingnut legal chop shop founded by old friend of Wonkette Larry Klayman and currently headed by Tom Fitton and his wardrobe of way-too-small shirts. (We get it, bro, you go to the gym.) Judicial Watch has a long history of glomming onto every conspiracy theory that bubbles up from the fever swamps like carbon escaping from permafrost to shred more of the atmosphere.
The organization also has long defended Donald Trump, if not in court, then certainly in the right-wing media. Fitton has been a regular on Fox News for years, where he has talked about the Babbitt case, among other things. And everyone knows appearing on Fox is the best way to get Trump’s attention.
We’re not saying representing Babbitt’s family is a cynical grift to squeeze money out of the federal government and into Judicial Watch’s own coffers by sucking up to Donald Trump. But we’re also not not saying that.
In addition to the Babbitt settlement, Trump has been making noises about setting up a compensation fund for convicted January 6ers who were unfairly charged with crimes they were caught on video committing, and in many cases being sent to prison after being convicted by juries of their peers, as if that is suddenly the standard America uses to convict and punish people who break its laws, and not whether or not Donald Trump likes them.
We guess pardoning all 1,600 of them and releasing anyone in prison back into society to commit more crimes, as one was arrested for this goddamn weekend, wasn’t enough. They have to get handed checks from the US Treasury as well.
It is impossible to state this any more clearly. Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. He whined and threw tantrums and cried like a toddler denied a cookie. Then his fans whined and cried like toddlers denied a cookie. Then those same fans tried to stop the election from officially being certified for the winner. They did so with violent physical confrontations, and they are goddamn lucky, given how trigger-happy cops so often are, that more of them didn’t get mowed down by overwhelmed Capitol police officers afraid for their lives.
There is just nothing for the MAGA crowd to celebrate here with the Babbitt settlement, though they will anyway. If Babbitt had been shot while protesting racial injustice or something equally weighty, you might have an argument for martyrdom. But Ashli Babbitt was protesting something nonexistent. She was protesting and rioting based on a lie, led on by an orange-faced narcissist who wound her up and pointed her at the Capitol while he safely snacked on a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder behind layers of armed security a mile away.
We so hate this timeline.
[WaPo]
Wonkette isn’t getting handed $5 million bucks by the government for rioting, so we rely on the generosity of our readers to keep us afloat.
Babbitt was a traitor. And from what I've seen in media accounts, the rest of her family are also traitors. IF we get through this, we HAVE to claw that $5m back.
" If Babbitt had been shot while protesting racial injustice or something equally weighty, you might have an argument for martyrdom."
Nah, we'd be hearing non stop wingnut coverage about how "She was no angel"...