Ashli Babbitt Awarded Full Military Funeral Honors

Tom Fitton’s Judicial Watch Weekly Update
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August 29, 2025

Air Force Grants Funeral Honors to Ashli Babbitt
Court Raises New Questions About Fani Willis’ Trump Records Scandal
FBI Sued for Records of Comey’s Probe of Candidate Trump
Biden Administration Failed to Track Unaccompanied Alien Children
Justice Department, FBI, and ODNI Sued for Records of Spying on Trump Campaign Advisor Michael Caputo

 

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 reporttitled “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,