House Speaker Kevin McCarthy broke from the MAGA wing of the Republican Party — and its most popular voices Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene — by declaring that Jan. 6 rioter Ashli Babbitt was not murdered by a police officer.
The comments illustrate the growing divide between those in the Republican Party who see the Jan. 6 riot at the US Capitol as a stain on the country and former President Trump, and those who have sought to rewrite the attack as a minor disturbance in which those who violently beat police and ransacked the Capitol Building have been unfairly persecuted.
Greene, the Georgia Republican who was elected to Congress despite her believe in the deranged QAnon conspiracy theory, falls firmly in the latter camp.
At her first Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday, Greene claimed Babbitt was “murdered” and compared her killing to the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols.
That comparison can be traced back to Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who bizarrely argued last week after watching graphic video of the Nichols beating that Babbitt was “murdered… far more clearly” than he was.
Babbitt was shot during the Jan. 6 attack while trying to leap through a window-paneled door that rioters had bashed through.
(Excerpt) Read more in: Mediaite