Air
Force Grants Funeral Honors to Ashli Babbitt
We are delighted that the U.S. Air
Force has finally decided to provide full military funeral honors to Ashli
Babbitt, the Air Force veteran who was shot and killed inside the U.S.
Capitol by then-Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd on January 6,
2021.
We have been deeply involved in this case on multiple fronts
from the beginning.
Babbitt was the only official January 6 homicide
victim. The Biden administration had previously denied Babbitt and her
family these honors in retaliation for her being at the U.S. Capitol that
day. This new decision comes on the heels of a massive, nearly $5 million
Trump administration settlement to her family for wrongful death and other
claims against the U.S. Government.
Babbitt, 35, owned and operated a
successful pool business with her husband Aaron. Ashli traveled alone
from San Diego to Washington, DC, to attend the Women for America First
(aka Save America) rally on January 6, 2021, at the Ellipse near the White
House.
On July 23, 2025, Judicial Watch Senior Counsel Robert Sticht
wrote a
letter to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth asking him to reverse the
“grave national injustice” of denying Babbitt and her family military
funeral honors:
I am writing to urge you to make a new
determination granting military funeral honors for SrA Ashli Elizabeth
Pamatian, aka Ashli Elizabeth McEntee, and Ashli Elizabeth Babbitt, a War
on Terror veteran of the U.S. Air Force
and Air National Guard.
***
I respectfully encourage the
Department of Defense to favorably consider two major recent developments
and also Ashli's lengthy and meritorious military
service.
First, on January 20, 2025,
President Trump granted clemency for certain offenses relating to the
events at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. The
Presidential proclamation states, “This proclamation ends a grave
national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over
the last four years and begins a process of national reconciliation.”
President Trump (a) commuted the sentences of certain individuals convicted
of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the U.S. Capitol on
January 6, 2021; (b) granted a full, complete and unconditional pardon to
all other individuals convicted of [similar]
offenses….
Second … on July 2, 2025, the
United States of America paid a damage award of nearly five million dollars
to settle a wrongful death lawsuit that Judicial Watch and I brought
forward on behalf of the Estate of Ashli Babbitt and her husband Aaron
Babbitt to ensure justice and accountability for the fatal shooting of
Ashli Babbitt on January 6, 2021. Once again, Gen. Kelly's
denial of military funeral honors for Ashli's funeral cannot be reconciled
with this landmark legal settlement. Many well-documented facts now clearly
show that the fatal shooting was not
justified.
For example, Ashli was the only
official homicide on January 6, 2021. Ashli, age 35, was unarmed when she
was fatally shot. She stood 5’3’ tall and weighed 115 pounds. Her hands
were up in the air, empty, and in plain view of Lt. Byrd and four armed
officers behind him. Seven
additional armed officers were behind Ashli, including four Containment and
Emergency Response Team officers. Ashli posed no threat to the safety of
any officer nor any Member of Congress who stayed after Member evacuation.
Ashli was begging officers to call for backup before she was shot. Officers
ignored Ashli. The only shot fired that day was the one Lt. Byrd fired to
kill Ashli. Lt. Byrd was not in uniform. Lt. Byrd did not identify himself
as a police officer or otherwise make his presence known to Ashli. Lt. Byrd
also did not give Ashli any warnings or commands before firing the shot
that killed her. Ashli never saw Lt. Byrd because he was hidden from her
view. She was ambushed and defenseless. Multiple witnesses at the scene
yelled, “you just murdered her.” Lt. Byrd later told the world on NBC
Nightly News that he “had no clue” about the individual he shot. “I
didn't even know it was a female until hours, way later ... that
night,” he said.
***
Ashli Babbitt's patriotic and
courageous service in the U.S. Air Force and Air National Guard also merits
favorable action on this request.
The decision to
finally extend military funeral honors was confirmed in a
letter on August 15, 2025, written by Under Secretary of the Air Force
Matthew L. Lohmeier to Aaron Babbitt, Ashli’s husband, and Ashli
Babbitt’s mother, Michelle Witthoeft:
On behalf of the
Secretary of the Air Force, I write to extend the offer for Military
Funeral Honors for
SrA Ashli Babbitt. I understand that the family’s initial request was
denied by Air Force leadership in a letter dated February 9, 2021. However,
after reviewing the circumstances of Ashli’s death, and considering the
information that has come forward since then, I am persuaded that the
previous determination was incorrect.
Ashli Babbitt’s
family is grateful to President Trump, Secretary Hegseth and Under
Secretary Lohmeier for reversing the Biden Defense Department’s cruel
decision to deny Ashli funeral honors as a distinguished veteran of the Air
Force. Our team spent years investigating, litigating, and exposing the
truth about Ashli’s homicide. We are proud to have done our part in
bringing her family a measure of justice and accountability for Ashli’s
outrageous killing. And our battle for justice will continue.
We obtained
the $4.975
million settlement in the wrongful death lawsuit
against the U.S. Government on behalf of Babbitt’s family (Estate
of Ashli Babbitt and Aaron Babbitt, et al. v. United States of
America (No. 1:24-cv-01701 (formerly 3:24-cv-00033))).
We
have been pursuing several lawsuits to secure transparency regarding
Babbitt’s death and other government activities on January 6.
In
January 2023, documents
from the Department of the Air Force, Joint Base Andrews, MD, showed Byrd
was housed at taxpayer expense at Joint Base Andrews after he shot and
killed Babbitt inside the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
In
November 2021, we released
multiple audio, visual
and photo
records
from the DC Metropolitan Police Department about the shooting death of
Babbitt in the U.S. Capitol Building. The records included a cell
phone video of the shooting and an audio of a brief police interview of
the shooter, Byrd.
In October 2021, we uncovered records
from the DC Metropolitan Police about the shooting death of Babbitt. The
new records include the January 6, 2021, Metro
PD Death Report for Babbitt (identified as Ashli Elizabeth
McEntee-Babbitt Pamatian). The investigators note that the possible manner
of death was “Homicide [Police Involved
Shooting].”
Court Raises New Questions About
Fani Willis’ Trump Records Scandal
Georgia District
Attorney Fani Willis can’t be trusted. Every time we go back to court
there are new excuses and new documents that she never admitted existed.
And now we find that entire universes of records may have been
ignored.
A Georgia state court ordered
her to provide new information and potentially conduct a new search for
Trump-related records because her recent affidavit to the court made no
reference to any searches of the devices of former Fulton County Special
Prosecutor Nathan Wade or those of Chief Investigator Michael L. Hill, who
were involved gathering evidence and coordinating investigative efforts and
likely
met with the January 6 Committee.
The court order was issued in
our lawsuit
filed after Willis falsely denied having any records responsive to our
earlier Georgia Open Records Act (ORA) request for communications with
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office and/or the January 6 Committee (Judicial
Watch Inc. v. Fani Willis et al.
(No. 24-CV-002805)).
A March 7, 2025 court
order directed Willis to turn over 212 pages of records and provide an
affidavit detailing how the records were found and the reason for
withholding them from the public. The records were belatedly found in
response to our request and lawsuit. In a
February 28 hearing Willis’
lawyers admitted to finding the records after what was believed to be a
fifth search of her office.
The court awarded
Judicial Watch $21,578 in “attorney’s fees and costs.” (Willis’
office made payment to Judicial Watch 10 days after the court-ordered
deadline.)
The new court
order
states:
On 7 March 2025, this Court, after hearing about
Defendant’s desultory efforts to determine the full universe of
responsive information, ordered Defendant to produce for in camera review
the records that had been identified -- after repeated denials of their
existence -- but which were being withheld on the basis of being exempt
from disclosure under the State’s Open Records Act…. Defendant timely
complied with the March 2025 Order, providing the Court with (1) an
affidavit from her Legal Counsel summarizing the steps taken to conduct an
actual, meaningful search for the requested information and (2) a digital
storage device containing 212 pages of search protocols, e-mails, text
messages, and written correspondence. The Court has since reviewed these
materials and concurs with Defendant that, at this point, given that the
criminal case related to these materials remains open (if not particularly
active),
pursuant to the exceptions set forth in O.C.G.A. § 50-18-72, these records
are not presently subject to disclosure. Specifically, the Court finds that
the documents are “[r]ecords of law enforcement, prosecution, or
regulatory agencies in any pending investigation or prosecution of criminal
or unlawful activity” (and they are not “initial police arrest reports
and initial incident
reports”)….
Defendant’s work is not
yet done, however. In reviewing the submitted materials, in particular the
search protocols prepared by each employee of Defendant whose records and
devices were reviewed, the Court noticed the following
omissions:
1) There was no search protocol
produced for or by Investigator Michael L. Hill II indicating what
accounts, devices, etc. were searched and for what
terms.
2) It is unclear if anyone consulted
with Nathan Wade, who is now
employed elsewhere but who at the relevant time was, among other things,
Defendant’s lead counsel for her office’s investigation into
“possible criminal disruptions that occurred during the administration of
the 2020 general elections in Georgia” (to use her office’s
phrasing).
3) While Legal Counsel’s
affidavit avers that Defendant’s own records were searched, the
responsive materials do not include the search protocol used to do so nor
is the scope of the search
described.
Consequently, Defendant shall,
within fourteen days of entry of this Order, submit to the Court the search
protocols (i.e., search terms used and data sources searched) for
Investigator Hill and Defendant as well as a clarification of whether
Attorney Wade’s materials were searched. If they were not, they shall be
and any responsive records forwarded to the Court. If they already were,
then the same
requirement of supplying the search protocol applies. Any additional
materials that are generated by this effort will be received in camera and
will remain in camera pending an analysis similar to the one the Court
performed with the first set of submitted materials.
In
December 2024, Willis finally admitted
to having records
showing communications with the January 6 Committee but refused to
release all but one document in response to the
court order that found her in default. She cited a series of legal
exemptions to justify the withholding of communications with the January 6
Committee. The only document she did release was one already-public letter
to January 6 Committee Chairman Benny Thompson (D-MS).
We
subsequently filed a
motion, asking the court to conduct a private inspection of any records
found.
We have several FOIA lawsuits on the lawfare targeting
Trump:
In February 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice asked
a federal court to allow the agency to keep secret the names of top
staffers working in Special Counsel Jack
Smith’s office that is targeting former President Donald Trump and other
Americans.
(Before his appointment to investigate and prosecute
Trump, Special Counsel Jack Smith previously was at the center of several
controversial issues, the IRS
scandal among them. In 2014, our investigation
revealed that top IRS officials had been in communication with Jack
Smith’s then-Public Integrity Section about a plan to launch criminal
investigations into conservative tax-exempt groups. Read more here.)
In
January 2024, we filed a lawsuit
against Fulton County, Georgia, for records regarding the hiring of Nathan
Wade as a special prosecutor by District Attorney Fani Willis. Wade was
hired to pursue unprecedented criminal investigations and prosecutions
against former President Trump and others over the 2020 election
disputes.
In October 2023, we sued
the DOJ for records and communications between the Office of U.S. Special
Counsel Jack Smith and the Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney’s
office regarding requests/receipt of federal funding/assistance in the
investigation of former President Trump and his 18 codefendants in the Fulton
County indictment of August 14, 2023. To date, the DOJ is refusing to
confirm or deny the existence of records, claiming that to do so would
interfere with enforcement proceedings. Our litigation challenging this is
continuing.
Through the New York Freedom of Information Law, in July
2023, we
received the engagement
letter showing New York County District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg paid
$900 per hour for partners and $500 per hour for associates to the Gibson,
Dunn & Crutcher law firm for the purpose of suing Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) in
an effort to shut down the House Judiciary Committee’s oversight
investigation into Bragg’s unprecedented indictment of former President
Donald Trump.
FBI Sued for Records of Comey’s
Probe of Candidate Trump
The FBI and Justice Department need
to make all of former FBI Director James
Comey’s records of his unprecedented and abusive lawfare available to the
American public.
We filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit
in May 2025 against the U.S. Department of Justice for all records
regarding the FBI, under Comey, initiating an investigation of then-2016
presidential candidate Donald Trump (Judicial
Watch Inc. v. U.S. Department of Justice (No.
1:25-cv-01413)).
We sued the Justice Department after it failed to
respond to a February 28, 2025, FOIA request for:
All
records, including emails, email chains, email attachments, text messages,
team chats, video or audio recordings, photographs, outlook calendars,
meeting minutes, correspondence, statements, letters, memoranda, reports,
briefings, presentations, notes, summaries, assessments, requests for
assistance, referrals or other form of record, regarding:
(1) Former
FBI Director James Comey or his
designated representative initiating or recommending an assessment,
inquiry, preliminary investigation, full investigation into then
Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump.
(2) Any FBI persons assigned
to conduct an assessment, inquiry, preliminary investigation, full
investigation into then Presidential candidate Donald J.
Trump.
The request identified the time frame as June 1,
2015, to July 1, 2016.
In July 2019, we uncovered FBI
records, showing that in June 2017, a month after Comey was fired by
President Donald Trump, FBI agents
visited his home and collected “as evidence” four memos that allegedly
detail conversations he had with President Trump.
In August 2018, a
federal court ordered
the Justice Department to preserve federal records located in Comey’s
personal email accounts.
In May 2018, emails
we uncovered showed Comey was advised by FBI officials in May 2017 to
consult with Special Counsel Robert Mueller prior to testifying before any
congressional committees regarding Russian meddling in the 2016
presidential election and his firing as FBI director.
In February
2018, in response to our lawsuit,
the FBI agreed to review 16,750
pages of Comey’s records that were archived after he was
dismissed.
In a January 2018 lawsuit
we forced the FBI to turn over to the court for in camera,
non-public, review former Comey’s memos allegedly detailing conversations
he had with President Donald Trump.
In November 2017, the Justice
Department compared
Comey to Wikileaks. After Comey was fired by President Trump on May 9,
2017, he gave The New York Times a February 14, 2017, memorandum
written about a one-on-one conversation he had with President Trump
regarding former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.
In June
2016 we sent Acting FBI Director Andrew G. McCabe a
warning letter concerning the FBI’s legal responsibility under the
Federal Records Act (FRA) to recover records, including memos Comey
subsequently leaked to the media, unlawfully removed from the Bureau by
Comey.
Biden Administration Failed to Track
Unaccompanied Alien Children
The Biden administration failed
to safeguard hundreds of thousands of illegal alien children it helped
traffic into the United States. We’ve filed a lawsuit to get details of
this mass tragedy.
We filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit
against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for records about efforts
to locate unaccompanied alien children lost during the Biden Administration
(Judicial
Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of Homeland
Security (No. 1:25-cv-02558)).
We sued in the
U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after Homeland Security
and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) failed to respond to April
26, 2025, FOIA requests for a document titled “Unaccompanied Alien
Children Joint Initiative Field Implementation,” associated
communications and other records concerning unaccompanied minors coming
across our borders.
The document
titled “Unaccompanied Alien Children [UAC] Joint Initiative Field
Implementation” is an internal ICE memo written in late January 2025
under the Trump Administration:
The Department of
Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE),
Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), and Enforcement and Removal
Operations (ERO) will commence an operational initiative to locate
unaccompanied alien children (UAC) who were encountered by DHS and released
from the care and custody of the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services, Office of
Refugee Resettlement (HHS-ORR). DHS has not had contact with the identified
UAC since their release from HHS-ORR’s care.
The purpose of this
initiative is for HSI to support ERO in locating UAC, making sure UAC’s
immigration obligations are met, and conducting investigative activities to
ensure UAC are not subjected to crimes of human trafficking or other
exploitation.
As our Corruption
Chronicles blog reported:
The government’s UAC
program has for years been rocked by many other problems that have put
young migrants at risk, including physical and sexual abuse at U.S.-funded
shelters… A [2020] federal
audit blasted the agency for failing to protect UAC from sexual
misconduct at the facilities. During a six-month period alone,
investigators from the HHS Inspector General’s office uncovered more than
750 incidents involving sexual misconduct at dozens of shelters housing
minor detainees.
In July
2025 Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari testified
before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and
reported “failures to properly track, process, and safeguard nearly
448,000 unaccompanied alien children who entered the United States
illegally over the last four years.” His testimony referenced a March
2025 report titled “ICE Cannot Effectively Monitor the Location and
Status of All Unaccompanied Alien Children After Custody.”
In
December 2022, we received records
from the Health and Human Services detailing the nighttime transportation
of unaccompanied alien children (UAC) by
air from Texas to Tennessee, as well as two other flights making multiple
stops across the country.
In September 2021, we received records
from the Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR)
which listed 33 separate incidences of alleged sexual abuse in a one-month
time period.
In July 2018, after a three-year delay, we obtained records
containing nearly 1,000 summaries of Significant Incident Reports (SIRs)
from Health and Human Services, revealing that “unaccompanied alien
children” processed during the Obama administration included admitted
murderers, rapists, drug smugglers, prostitutes, and human
traffickers.
In 2014, we uncovered records
from Health and Human Services revealing that the Obama administration paid
Baptist Children and Family Services (BCFS) $182,129,786 to provide
“basic shelter care” to 2,400 “unaccompanied alien children” (UAC)
for four months in 2014. The BCFS budget included charges for $104,215,608
for UACs at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and an additional $77,914,178 for UACs at
Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio,
Texas.
Justice Department, FBI, and ODNI Sued for
Records of Spying on Trump Campaign Advisor Michael
Caputo
There is significant evidence showing that the Biden
FBI and Justice Department were spying on the Trump campaign. Michael
Caputo, a campaign advisor, used his emails to help devise strategy for the
Trump campaign, and the Biden gang was rooting through it all.
We
filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits
against the U.S. Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence after the agencies failed to respond adequately to
requests for records regarding the investigation of former Trump campaign
adviser and communications strategist Michael
Caputo (Judicial
Watch Inc. v. U.S. Department of Justice (No.
1:25-cv-02631)), (Judicial
Watch Inc. v. U.S. Department of Justice (No.
1:25-cv-01903)), (Judicial
Watch Inc. v. Office of the Director of National
Intelligence (No. 1:25-cv-02469)).
We
submitted the requests in response to information that Caputo’s email was
the subject of a secret search warrant of his Google email account in
September 2023, three weeks after he began working for the Trump 2024
presidential campaign. (Dan Scavino, another Trump campaign adviser and
current White House aide, also disclosed he was targeted by a similar
secret subpoeana.)
We sued
the Justice Department, FBI, and ODNI after the agencies failed to
adequately respond to FOIA requests for records about the targeting of
Caputo, including:
All investigative reports, memoranda,
intelligence products, interview transcripts and summaries, or similar
records regarding Mr. Michael
Caputo.
All subpoenas and other requests for information submitted
to, records received from, and records of communication with
Google/Alphabet, Inc. or any other search engine or social media company
regarding Mr. Michael Caputo.
All records of communication between
any official or employee of the four Justice Department components and any
official or employee of any other branch, department, agency, or office of
the Federal government regarding or mentioning Mr. Michael
Caputo.
Caputo, as he detailed in a March 28, 2019, op-ed,
said he received death threats and drained his bank accounts after he
became “ensnared by the congressional and special counsel
investigations” into alleged Trump-Russia collusion.
Our lawsuits
show that the lawfare and spying against Trump never really ended but was
only paused. These records can’t be released soon enough.
In June
2025, we sued
the Justice Department for records regarding Biden era Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA) subpoenas, warrants, court orders and other
authorizations obtained to surveil President Trump.
We were
instrumental in uncovering much of what the public knows about
“Russiagate,”
which involved a long list of Democratic political figures, lawyers, and
staffers who shaped the narrative around the Trump-Russia hoax.
In
August 2018, the Justice Department admitted in a court filing that the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held no
hearings on the FISA spy warrant applications targeting Carter Page, a
former Trump campaign part-time advisor who was the subject of four
controversial FISA warrants.
In July 2018, we released records
about FISA warrants targeting Page, which appeared to confirm that the FBI
and DOJ misled the FISA court by withholding material information showing
that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC were behind the
“intelligence” used to persuade the court to approve the FISA warrants
targeting the Trump team.
In October 2020, we uncovered
heavily redacted email communications among top-level State Department
officials and a U.S. ambassador expressing skepticism about reports by
Christopher Steele’s London-based private intelligence firm Orbis
Business Intelligence. (Steele was the author of the Clinton-funded,
anti-Trump dossier.) The emails show one assistant secretary of state
saying some of Steele’s reports sound “extreme” and others “do not
ring true,” while the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine called some of the
Steele reports “flaky.”
In April 2020, we obtained emails
between former FBI official Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page,
including an email dated January 10, 2017, in which Strzok said that the
version of the dossier published by BuzzFeed was “identical”
to the version given to the FBI by McCain and had “differences” from
the dossier provided to the FBI by Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson and
Mother Jones reporter David Corn. January 10, 2017, is the same
day BuzzFeed published the anti-Trump dossier by former British
spy Christopher Steele. The emails also show Strzok and other FBI
agents mocking President Trump a few weeks before he was inaugurated. In
addition, the emails revealed that Strzok communicated with then-Deputy
Director Andrew McCabe about the “leak investigation” tied to the
Clinton Foundation (the very leak in which McCabe was later
implicated).
In September 2019, we released State Department records
revealing that Steele had an extensive and close working relationship
dating back to May of 2014 with high-ranking Obama State Department
officials including
Jonathan Winer and Victoria Nuland.
In August 2019, we obtained “302”
report material from 2016 FBI interviews of Associate Deputy U.S.
Attorney Bruce Ohr, who was removed from his position in December 2017. (A
Form 302 is used by FBI agents to memorialize interviews they undertake
during an investigation.) In a November 22, 2016, interview, Ohr said that
“reporting on Trump’s ties to Russia were going to the Clinton
Campaign, Jon Winer at the U.S. State Department and the FBI.” In a late
September 2016 interview, Ohr described a person (likely
Christopher Steele) as “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and
was passionate about him not being the U.S. President.” “Ohr knew that
[Fusion GPS’s] Glen Simpson and others talking to Victoria Nuland at the
U.S. State Department.”
In July 2019, we obtained records
revealing a September 2016 email exchange between Nuland and Winer,
discussing a “face-to-face” meeting on a “Russian
matter.”
Until next week,
