We support our Publishers and Content Creators. You can view this story on their website by CLICKING HERE.

The Capitol cop who cold-bloodedly gunned down Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt during the chaos on January 6, 2021, should have lost his job long before the incident, according to a shocking new report.

Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd who fatally shot the 35-year-old Air Force veteran inside the U.S. Capitol was recommended to be fired in 2001 after an internal affairs investigation that found he had abandoned his post to play cards and then lied about it.

In a bombshell report for Blaze Media, Steve Baker and Joseph M. Hanneman report that the Internal Affairs Division found that Byrd “was charged with abandoning his post, eating and drinking at his post, and lying to investigators — a terminable offense,” in another disciplinary issue that was initially buried, the fourth that has been recently revealed.

The pair of reporters cite a source with “detailed knowledge” of the Internal Affairs Division case who revealed that the officer should have lost his job two decades before he killed Babbitt after he left his post guarding then-House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s office for a card game in a Capitol cloakroom, then fibbed to investigators about it.

The source who has worked at top levels of the USCP administration told the outlet that “Byrd went to relieve the officer who covered Hastert’s office during Byrd’s break, but then abandoned his post and returned to the cloakroom to play cards.”

“Well, the sergeant walks by and was like, ‘Man, there’s nobody in the Speaker’s Office,’” the source said. “This is a big issue.”

Byrd’s abandonment led to the opening of an internal investigation.

“Of course, we have cameras everywhere and we track him walking off post, going back to the cloakroom,” the source told Blaze Media. “And we talked to the other people in there and he was in there playing cards.”

The probe also found that Officer Byrd had been eating and drinking at his post in Hastert’s office which is forbidden by the department’s policy, according to the source.

“Supposed to be a bit of the decorum there, but he’s sitting in a chair eating and drinking a soda, which is a big taboo, especially back then,” the source explained. “It’s the Speaker’s Office.”

When Byrd was informed of the findings, he lied to investigators.

“Mike denies that he was supposed to be assigned to the post,” the source said. “So therefore he couldn’t abandon the post. He denied eating and denied drinking on the post.”

Investigators gave Byrd a chance to “come clean” but he stuck with the lie.

“They told him — and this is what we do when we’re getting ready to charge somebody — ‘We know different, Mike. There are video cameras up there.’ Mike still denies it,” the source stated, adding the disciplinary officer recommended that he be sacked.

“So they charge him with eating, drinking on post, abandoning post,” the source told Blaze Media. “They charge him with untruthful statements with the recommendation to terminate.”

But despite overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing, they didn’t follow through.

“He ends up getting into some trouble, but they won’t terminate him,” the source explained. “So therefore they didn’t want to move forward with the untruthful statements [charge], but that was still a sustained charge against him.”

The source also questioned how the report on the incident as well as other disciplinary cases involving Byrd could have been “missing” as USCP told congressional investigators earlier this year.

“That would’ve been documented so many different ways that it’d be impossible for them not to have it,” the source told the outlet.

“It’s funny to me that everyone knows Mike’s a liar and the case that sustains it that had all the evidence that shows he is a liar is something that Tad [DiBiase] and the department can’t find when there’s all these different records. If they just did a search on the emails, all this stuff, it would be in existence,” the source said, referring to USCP general counsel Thomas A. “Tad” DiBiase

Babbitt, the one person who actually was killed on J6, was clearly the victim of an overzealous cop with a history of disciplinary issues who not only wasn’t charged with murdering her but was given the celebrity treatment by the media when he was interviewed by Lester Holt of NBC News.

Chris Donaldson
Latest posts by Chris Donaldson (see all)

We have no tolerance for comments containing violence, racism, profanity, vulgarity, doxing, or discourteous behavior. If a comment is spam, instead of replying to it please click the ∨ icon below and to the right of that comment. Thank you for partnering with us to maintain fruitful conversation.