Did the White House offer Ashli Babbitt's family a plot in Section 16 at Arlington National Cemetery? No, that's not true: The claim originated on a satirical Facebook page with a clear disclaimer. The owner of the page is known for tricking conservatives into liking and sharing made-up content.
The claim originated in a post (archived here) on the Facebook page of "America - Love It Or Leave It" on February 16, 2025 under the title: "Finally, there will be justice for Ashley and her family can find some peace. They were given a plot in Arlington's distinguished Section 16." It read:
The White House has ordered Ashli Babbitt's posthumous reinstatement and offered her family a plot for her at Arlington National Cemetery. Her record will show that she served with distinction and died in defense of her country.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Sun Feb 16 18:30:16 2025 UTC)
The U.S. military has strict guidelines about who can be interred at Arlington and Babbitt, who was a U.S. Air Force veteran with a total of 12 years active and reserve service, would not qualify. A key requirement, with the exception of Medal of Honor recipients and prisoners of war, is that their deaths came during non-training active duty. Babbitt, 35, had left the Air National Guard in 2016.
Even if the offer of interment at Arlington National Cemetery was extended to her family and accepted, it would be questionable how it would be carried out. Babbitt was cremated soon after her death and her cremains were divided among several family members. Find-a-Grave website said some of her ashes were spread over the ocean, while some relatives placed ashes in jewelry and urns.
The Capitol Police officer who shot Babbitt was cleared of criminal wrongdoing. You can read the report from the U.S. Department of Justice's investigation of Babbit's death here.
Lead Stories searched Google News for news reporting mentioning the words "Babbitt" and "Arlington" and no stories were returned (archived here) about moving her remains to Arlington.
The Facebook page (archived here) where the claim originated had a description that read:
A subsidiary of the America's Last Line of Defense network of trollery and propaganda for cash. Nothing on this page is real.
ALLOD is a creation of Christopher Blair. He is a self-professed liberal from Maine who for years has run networks of websites set up to troll conservatives with made-up news items in order to get them to share his posts. He often goes by the nickname "Busta Troll." A 2018 BBC profile called Blair "the Godfather of fake news," describing him as "one of the world's most prolific writers of disinformation."
His websites usually have multiple satire disclaimers and the stories very often contain obvious hints they are not real, like category names indicating they are fiction, links to "sources" that instead go to funny or offensive images or an "S for Satire" logo added to the images used as illustration. Another telltale sign is the name "Art Tubolls" (anagram for "Busta Troll") for characters in the stories. Blair also frequently pays homage to two of his friends who passed away by using their names ("Joe Barron" and "Sandy Batt") in stories.
Blair's stories have been widely copied by foreign website networks trying to make a buck by spamming American conservatives with clickbait headlines.
Here you can find some of the many, many stories from Blair's websites Lead Stories debunked over the years.
