Ashli Babbitt Family To Receive $5M Settlement From Trump DOJ: Report

Four years after Ashli Babbitt was shot and killed as she tried to climb through a shattered glass door on Jan. 6, 2021 — quite literally all that separated lawmakers inside the U.S. Capitol from a raging mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters — her family has received a settlement of $5 million from the U.S. Department of Justice.

The settlement figure in the wrongful death lawsuit first brought in January 2024 was reported by The Washington Post and confirmed to CBS News by outgoing U.S. Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger.

In January 2024, Babbitt’s husband, Aaron Babbitt, and the family’s estate sued the federal government with the help of Judicial Watch, a far-right legal network long allied with President Donald Trump. Their wrongful death claim painted the 35-year-old’s journey from California to Washington, D.C., in January 2021, as a trip Babbitt took to “exercise what she believed were her God-given, American liberties and freedoms.”

Babbitt wasn’t there for an “unlawful or nefarious purpose,” the family’s lawyers claimed, but only went to attend the Women for America First rally at the Ellipse and to listen to Trump speak. (Women for America First was integral in generating support for Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement, and records uncovered by the Interior Department’s inspector general in December 2023 revealed the group lied on a permit form to the National Park Service about its intentions for its Jan. 6 rally. The group claimed attendees would not march to the Capitol when in fact, text messages sent by Women for America First to a speaker for the Jan. 6 rally indicated that was exactly what they intended: “This stays only between us, we are having a second stage at the Supreme Court again after the ellipse. POTUS is going to have us march there/the Capitol.”)

After her death, Roger Witthoeft, Babbitt’s brother, said their family had no idea politics had consumed her and he has said he had no idea she was going to the Capitol on Jan. 6 though it didn’t surprise him that she was there, he told CNN.

His sister was someone he described as principled, tough and “invincible.”

A Bellingcat review of Babbitt’s digital footprint in the run up to the insurrection revealed a frequent and increasing array of angry outbursts at the federal government and Joe Biden — “no Biden the kid raper, no vaccines,” she wrote in one outraged December 2020 post on X, then Twitter.

Her open embrace of QAnon had begun months earlier in February 2020.

Espousing accusations from some of the far-right movement’s most popular sham theories including that Trump was a savior sent to Washington to stop a ring of satanic pedophiles that had infiltrated U.S. politics and Hollywood, her posts were littered with QAnon slogans and hashtags. As the certification of the 2020 election neared, Babbitt’s social media became an echo chamber for Trump’s repeatedly debunked lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

Using parlance popular to the QAnon movement, a day before she arrived in Washington, D.C., she gushed online: “Nothing will stop us. They can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours… dark to light,” she wrote.

A broken window at the U.S. Capitol building, Jan. 7, 2021.

The Washington Post via Getty Images

On Jan. 6, Babbitt wore a Trump flag draped around her neck.

In the moments before she was shot, video footage from the Speaker’s Lobby showed rioters confronting two to three police guarding the door where dozens of lawmakers and staffers were corralled just behind it.

Rioters punched and kicked the glass doors and at one point, Babbitt can be seen screaming into an officer’s face before another rioter steps between her and others at her flank. This man is heard screaming at the tightly packed crowd: “These guys ain’t the ones you have to get past!”

What ensued was a chaotic and guttural cacophony, punctuated by chants of “Fuck the Blue!” as rioters told police to “clear a path” for a coming horde. Then, moments later, rioters battered apart the windows, making a hole in the glass large enough for someone to climb through.

Someone could be heard shouting, “There’s a gun!” Others in the crowd can also be heard issuing the same warning.

The gun belonged to U.S. Capitol Police Lieutenant Michael Byrd. He had pointed it toward the door where rioters were trying to breach the Speaker’s Lobby but, as he told NBC News in August 2021, he couldn’t see very well to the other side. He and other police officers had swiftly set up makeshift barricades, piling furniture high near the door.

Then, Byrd saw Babbitt coming through the hole. He told NBC he couldn’t see whether she had anything in her hands and was unsure whether she was armed. She was not armed. He could see, however, that she was wearing a backpack but he didn’t know what was in it. Byrd said he had no idea what her intentions were but rioters “had shown violence leading up to that point” and then, he made a choice of “last resort.”

“I tried to wait as long as I could. I hoped and prayed no one tried to enter through those doors,” Byrd told NBC. “But their failure to comply required me to take the appropriate action to save the lives of members of Congress and myself and my fellow officers.”

Video footage shows Babbitt being hoisted up by two men as she attempts to climb through the smashed glass of the Speaker Lobby’s door. When Byrd fired, he shot her once in the shoulder, not in the head as Trump falsely and repeatedly claimed after Jan. 6.

U.S. Capitol Police emergency services ended up making their way to where Babbitt had fallen and after giving her aid, she was taken to a local hospital where she succumbed to her injuries.

Byrd was investigated by the Justice Department as well as U.S. Capitol Police and he was cleared of any wrongdoing. For a time, Capitol Police had declined to name Byrd as the officer responsible for the shooting out of an abundance of caution. Byrd was flooded with death threats after his name started circulating online.

As HuffPost reported earlier this month, a settlement in principle had been reached between the Justice Department and the Babbitt family and estate. In recent weeks, a lawyer who once represented the Babbitt family in the wrongful death case has been duking it out in court, seeking attorney’s fees that he says have gone unpaid.

Lawyers for the Babbitt family and spokespeople for the Justice Department did not immediately return a request for comment Monday.