SUICIDE BY dEEP sTATE:

Ashli Babbitt should be alive right now. A Capitol Police officer shot and killed the 35-year-old woman on January 6 outside the House chamber as she and other pro-Trump rioters besieged it. Babbitt was one of five people who died during or shortly after the insurrection, along with three other Trump supporters and Officer Brian Sicknick. Two other officers died by suicide in the weeks that followed.

Among those seven deaths, former President Donald Trump and other MAGA adherents have taken a particular interest in Babbitt. He sent out a tweet-like statement last week that simply read, "Who shot Ashli Babbitt?" Then he suggested at a rally on Wednesday that the unidentified officer's actions weren't justified. "The person that shot Ashli Babbitt--boom, right through the head," he told the crowd. "Just, boom. There was no reason for that. And why isn't that person being opened up, and why isn't that being studied? They've already written it off. They said that case is closed. If that were the opposite, that case would be going on for years and years, and it would not be pretty." His allies have followed suit: Earlier this week, Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar published a press release titled, "Who killed Ashli Babbitt?"

The rush to turn Babbitt into a martyr is part of a broader effort among conservatives and Trump loyalists to rewrite the history of January 6--to recast it as a peaceful protest with a few bad apples, rather than a mob of thousands who overwhelmed law enforcement and rampaged through the halls of Congress. But "Who killed Ashli Babbitt?" is actually a pretty easy question to answer: She was killed by the people who keep asking the question.

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