G.O.P. Quiet as Pressure Mounts to Address
Lawmaker’s Conspiracy Claims
In a newly unearthed video from 2018, Representative
Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested that 9/11 was a hoax, President Barack Obama
was a Muslim and the Clintons were guilty of murder.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has created a
dilemma for her party’s leaders, who for months have been largely unwilling to
publicly rebuke her inflammatory posts for fear of alienating voters.
By Catie
Edmondson
Jan. 29,
2021
Updated
8:54 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON
— Marjorie Taylor Greene had just finished questioning whether a plane really
flew into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, and flatly stating that President
Barack Obama was secretly Muslim when she paused to offer an aside implicating
another former president in a crime.
“That’s
another one of those Clinton murders,” Ms. Greene said, referring to John F.
Kennedy Jr.’s death in a 1999 plane crash, suggesting that he had been
assassinated because he was a potential rival to Hillary Clinton for a New York
Senate seat.
Ms. Greene
casually unfurled the cascade of dangerous and patently untrue conspiracy
theories in a previously unreported 40-minute video that was originally posted
to YouTube in 2018. It provides a window into the warped worldview amplified by
the freshman Republican congresswoman from Georgia, who in the three months
since she was elected has created a national brand for herself as a
conservative provocateur who has proudly brought the hard-right fringe to the
Capitol.
In the
process, Ms. Greene, 46, has also created a dilemma for Republican leaders, who
for months have been unwilling to publicly rebuke or punish her in any way for
her inflammatory statements, in part for fear of alienating voters delighted by
her incendiary brand of politics and conspiratorial beliefs.
After
avoiding the issue for months in the hope that it would resolve itself,
Republicans are now facing calls from Democrats to expel Ms. Greene from
Congress, pressure from a prominent group of Jewish Republicans to discipline
her, and private consternation from within their own ranks.
Their
reticence to take action is yet another example of how Republican leaders have
allowed those forces to fester and strengthen. Some leaders have privately said
they are eager to move past the fringe movements and the charged messaging used
by President Donald J. Trump that fueled the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Representative
Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and the minority leader, has yet to
say anything personally about Ms. Greene’s comments or conduct, even after a
week in which a slew of problematic social media posts and videos have surfaced
from the years before she was elected. In them, Ms. Greene circulated and endorsed
a seemingly endless array of hate speech and conspiracy theories explicitly
rooted in Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and the belief that government actors
were secretly behind a sweeping range of violence.
Ms. Greene
suggested in 2018 that a devastating wildfire that ravaged California was
started by “a laser” beamed from space and controlled by a prominent Jewish
banking family with connections to powerful Democrats. She endorsed executing
Democratic lawmakers, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She served as a prolific
writer for a now-defunct conspiracy blog called “American Truth Seekers,”
writing posts with headlines including “MUST READ — Democratic Party Involved
With Child Sex, Satanism, and The Occult.” And she argued that the 2018 midterm
elections — in which the first two Muslim women were elected to the House —
were part of “an Islamic invasion of our government.”
Ms. Greene
has repeatedly claimed in multiple videos and social media posts that several
school shooting massacres were “false flag” events perpetrated by government
officials in an attempt to drum up support for gun control laws. In an October
2020 video surfaced on Friday by Mother Jones, she said that the “only way you
get your freedoms back is it’s earned with the price of blood.”
Ms. Greene
is perhaps best known for having endorsed QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy
movement that claims that Mr. Trump was facing down a shadowy cabal of
Democratic pedophiles. (She told Fox News last year that she “chose a different
path,” and a spokesman, Nick Dyer, told The New York Times this week that she
did not support QAnon.)
Sent a list
of detailed questions about her beliefs and postings, Mr. Dyer declined to
respond to any of them. In her own statement posted on Twitter on Friday
afternoon, Ms. Greene assailed the “radical, left-wing Democrat mob” and
reporters she said were trying to smear her, and claimed she was profiting
politically and financially from the outrage she has provoked, saying that
every negative news report “strengthens my base of support at home and across
the country.”
She also
issued what amounted to a threat to top Republicans who might be contemplating
punishing her, warning that they would pay steep consequences.
“If
Republicans cower to the mob, and let the Democrats and the fake news media
take me out,” Ms. Greene said, “they’re opening the door to come after every
single Republican until there’s none left.”
The
statement came as internal pressure was mounting for Republican leaders to
address Ms. Greene’s comments. The Republican Jewish Coalition, which over the
summer intervened in a rare move to back Ms. Greene’s primary challenger,
disavowed the congresswoman in a scathing statement and said it was “working
closely with the House Republican leadership regarding next steps.”
“She
repeatedly used offensive language in long online video diatribes, promoted
bizarre political conspiracy theories, and refused to admit a mistake after
posing for photos with a longtime white supremacist leader,” the group said.
“It is unfortunate that she prevailed in her election despite this terrible
record.”
A spokesman
for Mr. McCarthy told Axios this week that newly surfaced Facebook posts
written by Ms. Greene and reported by CNN, in which she discussed executing top
Democratic politicians, were “deeply disturbing” and that Mr. McCarthy planned
to “have a conversation” with her about them next week.
But Mr.
McCarthy’s silence so far reflects, in part, the sway Mr. Trump still has over
the Republican Party and its leaders. The former president has praised Ms.
Greene effusively and refused to condemn QAnon, despite being asked to disavow
it repeatedly while in office.
On Friday
evening, Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts and the
chairman of the House Rules Committee, suggested Democrats could move
unilaterally to strip Ms. Greene of her committees if Republicans did not act.
“We could
break precedent,” Mr. McGovern said on CNN. “We should talk about that if
nothing changes.”
In her own
telling, Ms. Greene became more outspoken about her politics in 2016, after she
sold the CrossFit gym she owned and felt she no longer needed to worry about
alienating her customers by stating her beliefs.
She began
traveling to Washington for conservative events, including a prayer rally
hosted by the White House, and to lobby lawmakers against passing gun safety
measures. On one such trip, Ms. Greene accosted David Hogg, a student who had
survived a 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla., who was also on Capitol
Hill, but to lobby in support of stricter gun laws. In a video that CNN
unearthed this week, Ms. Greene follows Mr. Hogg as he walks toward the
Capitol, calling him a “coward” and accusing him of “using kids” to promote his
own political agenda.
When Ms.
Greene decided to run for Congress, she initially started her campaign in a
Georgia district held by Representative Lucy McBath, a Democrat. But after
Representative Tom Graves, a Republican, announced he would retire, Ms. Greene
moved her campaign to his more conservative district. She eventually placed
first in a crowded primary race, and advanced to a runoff election against Dr.
John Cowan, a mild-mannered neurosurgeon.
On the
campaign trail, Ms. Greene presented herself as a deeply conservative,
pro-Trump Christian mother and business owner, arguing that her work in the
construction industry had imbued her with the toughness that comes from working
in a male-dominated field. She railed against the ascendant progressive wing in
Congress, emphasized the importance of the Second Amendment while toting an
AR-15, and warned of “thousands” of immigrants “pouring over” the southwestern
border.
Ms. Greene
largely veered away from the conspiratorial on the trail, though she did cut a
campaign ad claiming that “‘Deep State’ actors tried to sabotage President
Donald J. Trump before he even took office” and claimed on her campaign
accounts that George Soros, the billionaire investor and Democratic donor, was “bankrolling
left-wing movements worldwide who want to destroy Israel.”
The
messaging raised alarm at the time among House Republican leaders and some
members of the Georgia delegation who worried that if elected, Ms. Greene could
create a grave problem for their party. But they never mobilized to defeat her.
While the top three House Republicans condemned a series of racist videos Ms.
Greene made, surfaced by Politico, only Representative Steve Scalise of
Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican, endorsed Dr. Cowan. Mr. McCarthy and
Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the third-ranking leader, stayed neutral.
Privately,
according to a person familiar with their thinking, top Republicans hoped that
outside groups would swoop into the primary race in support of Dr. Cowan and
weaponize Ms. Greene’s incendiary comments against her, dooming her candidacy.
But the outside effort never materialized.
Instead,
Ms. Greene’s campaign received an important boost when the political arm of the
ultraconservative Freedom Caucus endorsed her, as did Representatives Andy
Biggs of Arizona, the group’s chairman, and Jim Jordan of Ohio, a founder. She
handily won the runoff in August and cruised to victory in November.
That left
Republican leaders hoping that, once sworn in, Ms. Greene would clean up her
act, disavowing her past comments and dialing back her outlandish rhetoric.
Instead,
she charged into Congress and immediately faced scrutiny for her support of the
“Stop the Steal” campaign that falsely claimed that Mr. Trump had won the 2020
presidential election.
She
referred to Jan. 6, the day Congress was slated to formalize the election
results, as Republicans’ “1776 moment” in the lead up to the violent storming
of the Capitol by pro-Trump rioters. After the rampage, she pledged that Mr.
Trump would “remain in office” and that attempts to remove him from the White
House constituted “an attack on every American who voted for him.”
Days later,
she announced she would file articles of impeachment against President Biden.
“Troll
level: EXPERT,” Dinesh D’Souza, a right-wing firebrand, wrote on Twitter.
Ms. Greene
liked the post.
Catie
Edmondson is a reporter in the Washington bureau, covering Congress.
@CatieEdmondson
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