The feudbetween the Republicans reached new territory after the two each attempted to push impeachment resolutions directed at President Joe Biden on Wednesday.
She added that Boebert has “never responded to” her and “refused to do so” after she asked her to co-sponsor her articles of impeachment aimed at the president.
“Then, when she introduced her own and forced them to the floor with a privilege resolution without even having the courage to talk to any other Republican in our conference before doing so except Speaker McCarthy and – apparently – a few others,” Greene added.
“Yes, we had a tense conversation when she confronted me about things I had said about it but this is unfortunate that this becomes public on the House floor.”
HuffPost has reached out to Boebert, who was not available for immediate comment on Greene’s claims.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) called Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CP) a “little bitch” amid GOP frustration at the Colorado Republicans’ move to try and force a vote on impeaching President Biden. What do you think?
“I can never follow all of the legalese congresspeople use.”
Adam Klemic, Director Of Operations
Biden Announces Nation Can Stay Up Till 9:30 Tonight
“I think you need at least 50% of the House to get a resolution officially declaring someone a bitch.”
Nancy Pitts, Coaster Artisan
“The party needs to come together and realize the real ‘little bitch’ is high taxes.”
“I did not put my life on pause and leave my four boys and now grandson to come here and just get in spats with people. I came here to legislate and to be effective for Coloradans, Coloradans who are suffering from the Democrats’ policy,” said Boebert before working a few more shots at Democrats into the interview.
“Marjorie is not my enemy. Joe Biden’s policy, the Democrats, that is my enemy that I am combating right now, and I am doing everything I can to make sure I put them in check and hold them accountable.”
Her comments arrived on the same day that Greene confirmed the spat between the two, telling Semafor that Boebert “has genuinely been a nasty little bitch to me” and that she does “absolutely not” see a chance for the two to reconcile.
The congresswomen have had their shareof tense exchanges prior to the Wednesday run-in, including when Greene brought the feud to Twitter as they disagreed on then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s hopes to become House speaker when Republicans took control of the chamber after the 2022 midterm elections.
Boebert, earlier on Thursday, “brushed off” a reporter’s question over her exchange with Greene.
The conservative darling has recently come under-fire for calling Bowman “aggressive” and claiming she felt threatened after a confrontation on the steps of the Capitol last month ― comments which many have called a racially-charged dog whistle.
A Greene constituent took her to task during a recent town hall-style event in Georgia, which ex-GOP official Ron Filipkowski shared in a Twitter video on Saturday.
Pointing out the dangerous implications of Greene’s accusations, the voter asked, “Do you know who Carolyn Donham is?”
Marge Greene has a heated confrontation with a constituent at her Town Hall after she says Marge’s comments about Rep. Jamaal Bowman were the same as those said by a white woman that got Emmett Till murdered. pic.twitter.com/Z7J63vs0Qx
“She was the woman who said that Emmett Till looked at her the wrong way, or said something to her, the way you did Jamaal Bowman…” she explained.
While Greene supporters interrupted the voter with boos, she didn’t back down, telling the crowd, “Would you be quiet? I have the right to say what I want to say.”
“I think you’re reckless,” she continued. “I think you’re reckless. You had no business saying, ‘Oh, he’s so big. Oh, I feel so, like, he’s gonna hurt me.’”
“It’s the same thing Carolyn Donham said that got Emmett Till killed, and that was reckless, and you did a reckless thing. And if anything happens to Jamaal Bowman, it’s going to be on your hands,” she went on.
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene speaks to the press after passing a bill on the debt ceiling on May 31.
Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Greene seemed defensive in her response, telling the constituent, “Let me ask you, were you in New York when he stood outside my car… and he brought a crowd around me? Were you there?”
“No, you were not in New York City when that happened. It’s on video, it’s on video, and you may watch the video. And you can see how he cussed. That’s wrong. This isn’t about skin color. I refuse, I refuse for you to do that.”
Bowman previously called Greene’s comments a clear case of stereotyping.
Last month, he told the press, “Unfortunately, this country has a history of characterizing Black men who are outspoken, who stand their ground, and who push back, as being threatening or intimidating.”
“So she’s not even using a dog whistle; she’s using a bullhorn to put a target on my back to the people that she refers to as MAGA people out there who might want to cause harm.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) found out firsthand what her Democratic co-workers think of her on Wednesday ― and it apparently isn’t much.
The Georgia representative was speaking during a House session when she made a simple request of her congressional colleagues.
“Members are reminded to abide by decorum of the House,” she said, only to spark raucous laughter.
The giggle fest was so extreme that Greene was forced to bang her gavel repeatedly, to little effect.
Yeah, we know: Pictures or it didn’t happen.
Decorum isn’t exactly a word that’s been associated with Greene during her time in Congress, which a few Democrats noted on Twitter.
Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) compared Greene’s call for decorum to “Leonardo DiCaprio telling people to date people their own age,” while Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) tweeted that he hadn’t “laughed this hard in a while.”
Extremist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Thursday praised former President Donald Trump for his controversial, lie-filled town hall on CNN — calling it “outstanding.”
The far-right congresswoman claimed she “laughed and laughed” with the former president after his appearance on Wednesday.
“I enjoyed congratulating President Trump on his outstanding town hall and undefeated record against CNN,” the conspiracy theory-peddling lawmaker tweeted alongside an image of herself on a cell phone.
“They had to air him telling the truth about how the 2020 election was rigged and stolen,” she added, referencing Trump’s on air peddling of his baseless election claims.
“We laughed and laughed,” Greene concluded the post.
Critics certainly weren’t tickled by her tweet, though:
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) railed against climate change mitigation programs in Congress Wednesday, not merely because she doesn’t believe in man-made climate change — but because people during the ice age didn’t have to pay taxes to combat it.
“People are not affecting climate change,” said Greene. “You’re not going to tell me that back in the ice age, how much taxes did people pay, and how many changes did governments make to melt the ice? The climate is going to continue to change.”
She continued, “And there is no reason to just open up our borders and allow everyone in and continue to funnel over $50 billion or however many billions of dollars or trillions of dollars to foreign countries all over the world simply because they don’t like the climate change.”
Greene reportedly expounded on her beliefs at a town hall in Murray County, Georgia.
“How much taxes and how much money did the people back in the ice age spend to warm up the Earth?” Greene asked. “Maybe, perhaps, we live on a ball that rotates around the sun, that flies through the universe, and maybe our climate just changes.”
Greene directly denied man-made climate change and said “maybe our climate just changes.”
J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
Unlike Greene, millions of scientists studying the climate have long agreed that people directly impact global carbon emissions and related temperature increases worldwide. NASA reported that 97% of “actively publishing climate scientists” agree.
“I’ll tell you what the New Deal and our new infrastructure plan will do,” said Greene. “It’s going to bring us down to net zero carbon emissions, right? So we’ve got to stop using oil and coal, right? Because that makes a lot of sense to a little girl named AOC from New York.”
During the House Oversight and Accountability Subcommittee on Select Coronavirus Crisis hearing Wednesday, the Republican congresswoman decided to grill Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, about her credentials.
“Are you a medical doctor?” Greene asked, followed by, “Are you a mother?”
Weingarten admitted she was not a doctor and was “a mother by marriage” and added that her wife was also at the hearing.
Greene then noted that Weingarten hadn’t taught a class since the 1990s, to which the union leader pointed out that she would be a guest teacher at Cornell University later in the year.
Greene grilled Weingarten about a tweet the union leader posted that supported Twitter suspending Greene, leading her to say that Weingarten was more of “a political activist” than anything else on her resume.
After Greene raged about Black Lives Matter, Weingarten delivering supplies to teachers in Ukraine and COVID-19 school closures, Weingarten tried to speak up in protest.
That set Greene off even more, and she railed against Weingarten for, among other things, not being a biological parent.
“I didn’t ask you a question. What I would like to talk about is your recommendations to the CDC, as not a medical doctor, not a biological mother, and really not a teacher, either. So, what you did is you advised the CDC?” Greene said.
The exchange inspired Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) to mention Greene’s unacceptable decorum and give Weingarten a moment to note that she is a mother whether Greene believes her to be or not.
He later posted the exchange on Twitter with a defense of Weingarten.
When Marjorie Taylor Greene says that adopted or parents through marriage aren’t real parents, you’ll be damn sure I’ll object. pic.twitter.com/iNOfso8G3N
— Congressman Robert Garcia (@RepRobertGarcia) April 26, 2023
Of course, many people were aghast at Greene’s cruel comments.
Here is the moment where Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested that Randi Weingarten — and EVERYONE who has step children or adopted children — are not real parents. Just nasty and offensive — not to mention wrong! https://t.co/0egk9aciuT
Marjorie Taylor Greene attacking a Congressional witness today, who also happens to be a lesbian: “People like you need to admit that you’re a political activist…not a teacher, not a mother, and not a medical doctor.”
Marjorie Taylor-Greene – who like all Gender Critical’s enjoys taunting trans people by saying we’re not ‘real’ – telling a mum who adopted a child that she’s not a real mother. Wow. The cold cruelty of these people. pic.twitter.com/1EvcqG8vkT
Suggesting non-biological parents are not “real” parents is such an evil, heinous thing to say that the natural conclusion of reasonable people might be to wonder if Greene was misquoted or guilty of a misstatement.
But Wednesday’s rant wasn’t the first time she railed against non-biological parents.
In July 2022, Greene said children are in “great danger” because “traditional family values are being destroyed,”according to LGBTQNation.com.
“The idea that mom and dad together ― not fake mom and fake dad ― but the biological mom and biological dad, can raise their children together and do what’s right for their children, raising them to be confident in who they are, their identity, their identity is, you know, they’re a child made by God…” she said during a segment of her Facebook show, “MTG Live.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene called non-biological parents, “fake mom and fake dad” while ranting about “danger” to children in America. pic.twitter.com/pReZkyLkw4
💯 I saw them when I went there to protest against the weaponization of government against President Trump by a George Soros funded DA. https://t.co/vofSolCTd5
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) April 16, 2023
On Sunday, the MAGA lawmaker retweeted an op-ed published by The New York Post which claimed that weed, which was legalized in the city in 2021, is “turning New York workers into zombies.” Greene coudn’t agree more.
“I saw them when I went there to protest against the weaponization of government against President Trump by a George Soros funded DA,” Greene tweeted.
Marijuana “zombies” (there’s a band name for whoever wants it) was another surreal exaggeration from Greene, who had previously claimed that she saw “people basically dying on drugs” who “can’t even stand up.” There was also the now de rigueur GOP claim about rampant crime when it’s actually down, both from last year and historically.
In the fantastical mind of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jack Teixeira—the 21-year-old Air National Guardsman who was arrested Thursday for allegedly sharing intelligence documents to an online gaming chat—is not a victim of his own malice or stupidity. Rather, he is yet another “White, male, Christian” being persecuted by the Biden administration. The Republican lawmaker ginned up the narrative shortly after authorities identified Teixeira as the suspect behind a leak of classified materials—which ranged from intelligence on South Korea and Israel, to the Russia-Ukraine war and China-Russia relations—that wound up on a Discord server.
“Jake Teixeira is white, male, Christian, and antiwar. That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime,” tweeted Greene, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee. She then claimed that the real threat to US national security is “the administration that is waging war in Ukraine, a non-NATO nation, against nuclear Russia without war powers.”
The comment was reproved by Representative Eric Swalwell, who accused Greene of siding with “one of the biggest traitors in America’s history.” He also called out House Speaker Kevin McCarthy for not denouncing the leaker and described Greene, who was stripped of her committee assignments in the last congressional session but awarded new ones in January, as McCarthy’s “top lieutenant.” Former GOP congresswoman Liz Cheneytweeted that Greene has made it clear “she cannot be trusted with America’s national security information and should not have a security clearance of any kind.”
Greene’s theory of oppression, in this case, has not been adopted by her Republican colleagues. However, she did find a friend in Tucker Carlson, who shared a similar view during his Thursday night Fox News broadcast. “Tonight, the news media are celebrating the capture of the kid who told Americans what’s actually happening in Ukraine,” Carlson told his viewers, before lashing out at news outlets for reporting on the reportedly racist and antisemitic content shared in Teixeira’s Discord server. “They are treating him like Osama bin Laden, maybe a little worse actually, because, unlike al-Qaida, apparently, this kid is a racist.”
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Like Greene, Carlson cited leaked files on the presence of 14 American troops in Ukraine to claim that Washington has become “a direct combatant in a war against Russia. As we speak, American soldiers are fighting Russian soldiers.” US officials have denied this characterization, according to Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich, stating instead that a small detachment of US special forces are stationed at the US embassy in Kyiv and have not seen combat.
On a brisk but sunny Monday morning, Lower Manhattan was swarmed with satellite trucks and news crews. In front of the New York State Supreme Court, two TV reporters were doing news hits, with one noting “a very tight security apparatus” and “huge media contingent” anticipating Donald Trump’s arraignment on Tuesday. But the real media circus was situated some 300 feet away, where, across from Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s office, a mass of white tarps lined the street. The names of various outlets—AP, ABC, NY1, Bloomberg, Fox Business, USA Today, Getty—were scrawled on pieces of duct tape adhered to the concrete in front of their respective canopies. I overheard one cameraman explaining to an evidently confused tourist what they were all doing there as he sipped his coffee, and spotted about a dozen cameras inside Collect Pond Park, where a reporter was standing on a bench doing a TV hit. On the other side of the square was a line of parked satellite trucks. “They said 2:15 tomorrow,” I heard an NYPD officer tell his colleague outside 80 Centre Street. “We’re gonna be removing a lot of vehicles too,” she replied.
The city is bracing for the historic arraignment of the former president, whom a Manhattan grand jury voted to indict last week for his role in the 2016 hush-money payout to porn star Stephanie Clifford (aka Stormy Daniels). TV networks wereglued to Trump’s motorcade ride to a Palm Beach airport Monday, en route to New York, and Tuesday’s courtroom appearance is sure to dominate cable news. For the reporters who cover the criminal courts, and are accustomed to high-profile proceedings—such as Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 rape trial or the 2011 sexual assault case against former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, which was later dismissed—the circus surrounding Trump is reaching a whole other level. “I think this is going to dwarf those cases,” said Laura Italiano, who worked at all three New York City tabloids before landing at Insider, where she’s been focusing on Trump’s legal exposure in New York state court. “I’ve been at this for 30 years, and it’s the biggest case in my career.”
The media frenzy had been building for weeks but the indictment came somewhat out of left field, because, as reporters were told a day earlier, the grand jury was set to break for a previously scheduled hiatus, which would push any indictment of Trump until at least the end of April. “Everything was quiet. Some reporters were planning vacations,” said Patricia Hurtado, who’s been covering courts for Bloomberg for 18 years. “As a veteran court reporter—and I’ve covered federal and state courts for decades—this has been the strangest thing, because it’s been a whiplash,” she told me of the inquiry. “It’s been maddening.” Right before the indictment news broke, Italiano told me she’d just filed a story with a headline along the lines of “This Trump Indictment Long Break Is Not a Sure Thing.”
Molly Crane-Newman, who covers the Manhattan federal and state courts for the New York Daily News, was at her desk, located inside the courthouse, when she heard Trump had been indicted. “I shrieked,” she recalled. “I cover all manner of cases in the courts—the high-profile ones, but also the hyper-local ones,” she said, noting that reporting on indictments being filed is “routine” for her. “The process is going to be the same as it would be for any defendant, but obviously most of the defendants aren’t accompanied by Secret Service when they surrender.”
When I caught up with the three reporters after the indictment news broke, they were all focused on making sure they’d be able to do their jobs with the rest of the press corps parachuting in. There are a limited number of seats in the courtroom, and Italiano said Insider’s lawyers were “ready preemptively, in case there’s any kind of objectionable limitation on access,” like a pool situation where there’s one camera and one print reporter—“the kind of nightmare that keeps me awake,” as she put it. Crane-Newman pointed to past high-profile trials like Weinstein’s, or El Chapo’s in federal court in Brooklyn. “In those instances, reporters who don’t have in-house credentials have been required to start lining up outside the courthouse the night before,” she said, noting that she was among them for El Chapo, arriving at 11 p.m. the night before. Even that wasn’t enough, she noted: “I was the first reporter in overflow.”
For Weinstein’s trial, Hurtado said she got up at 4:30 a.m.—by which time the line was already around the block—to make sure she was there in time. In preparation for Tuesday, Hurtado joked about asking a lawyer she knows, who lives in an apartment building next door to the courthouse, whether she could crash on their floor in a sleeping bag. “It’s a big slog,” she said. Press access to documents may also be a challenge, as it has been with previous high-profile state court cases, said Hurtado, because while the federal court system is electronic, the state court still operates largely on paper. During Weinstein’s trial, reporters were taking photos of the filing with their phones, Hurtado said. “The courthouse system is kind of trapped in 1923,” she said.
The chaos might not be limited to the press swarm, as a threat of potential unrest has officers on high alert. Last month, when Trump predicted he would be “arrested on Tuesday,” the former president called on supporters to “protest” and “take our nation back.” At least one of his sycophants in Congress has heeded the call, as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greenetweeted that she’s coming to New York on Tuesday to “protest this unprecedented abuse of our justice system and election interference,” and will be headlining a rally planned by the New York Young Republican Club at a nearby park.
After only two years in Congress, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has accumulated power and landed on top committees. She remains a dangerous politician to some, a hero to others. Lesley Stahl reports.
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It’s rare for a member of the House of Representatives to become well-known nationally, especially someone in only their second term. But Marjorie Taylor Greene – MTG – is as famous as they get. She’s gained her national celebrity, some say notoriety, with a sharp tongue and some pretty radical views like her proposal for a national divorce where red and blue states would go their separate ways.
But, she has managed in just two years in Congress to accumulate real power, landing on important committees, and influencing the direction of Republican policies. Before Congress, she helped run the family construction company in Georgia — known to be smart and fearless and has a history of believing in conspiracy theories.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Looks like the average troll in my Twitter feed, so I don’t really care.
Lesley Stahl: You’re used to it?
Marjorie Taylor Greene: I don’t let name calling bother me or offend me. I just don’t.
Lesley Stahl: How much have you styled yourself after Donald Trump?
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Hmm.
Lesley Stahl: People say that you are Trump in high heels.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: I didn’t intentionally style myself after President Trump, but I can see how people draw those similarities. We both come from the same industry: construction. I also have pretty much a plain-speaking style and so does he.
Lesley Stahl: But also he’s often in attack mode. And you appear to be.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Yeah. I think, but I think our government deserves it. They don’t really deserve to be respected that much.
Including, for her, the president.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in her office
60 Minutes
While many consider Marjorie Taylor Greene’s behavior outlandish, even thuggish, MAGA activists and right-wing media eat it up.
In just two years, Greene, at age 48, has moved from the fringe of the party to the front row-–
–without changing either her style or her views.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: On an issue, when I’m outspoken about it, and I take my stand or my position, the first reaction is, ‘Marjorie’s crazy. Marjorie’s extreme. Marjorie’s a right wing extremist.’ And then what will happen is my colleagues will go back home to their district, and their own constituents are coming up and saying, ‘Are you supporting Marjorie? Do you agree with Marjorie? Have you cosponsored Marjorie’s bill?’ And then they find out, ‘Oh, maybe she’s not crazy.’ And then they end up agreeing with me.
This is fueling her clout in the Republican Party, as is her record as a top fundraiser and a close adviser to Kevin McCarthy.
After MTG helped him win the speakership, he rewarded her with positions on two powerful committees: House Oversight that’s investigating the Biden family business dealings, and Homeland Security.
Now, what she thinks about the issues matters – like preventing the government from going into default by raising the debt ceiling.
Lesley Stahl: Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary, says that if we don’t raise the debt ceiling that this country will be thrown into an economic and financial catastrophe and so I’m asking you if you’re willing to risk that?
Marjorie Taylor Greene: You know what put us in an economic catastrophe is, again, the people that have spent $31 trillion that forced this situation to happen.
Lesley Stahl: Well, wait a minute. Trump is as much responsible–
Marjorie Taylor Greene: I said everybody.
Lesley Stahl: For that as–
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Everybody.
Lesley Stahl: –All right.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Republicans, Democrats.
Lesley Stahl: OK.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: It was all before I got here.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene
60 Minutes
Lesley Stahl: Would you be willing to vote for compromise? In other words, raise some taxes?
Marjorie Taylor Greene: I don’t think we have a revenue problem in Washington. We have a spending problem.
Lesley Stahl: You know something? That’s glib. That’s glib. That, what does that mean? The two sides have to come together and hammer it out.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Cut spending.
Lesley Stahl: Both sides.
Marjorie Taylor Green: Both sides need to cut spending.
Lesley Stahl: Where do you want to cut it?
Marjorie Taylor Greene: COVID bailout money and a lot of green energy spending.
Lesley Stahl: But are you willing to let us go into default?
Marjorie Taylor Greene: No. I’ve always said I wouldn’t do that.
Lesley Stahl: So, would you compromise?
Marjorie Taylor Greene: It depends.
Lesley Stahl: On taxes?
Marjorie Taylor Greene: No. I’m not raising taxes.
Greene complains that the news media harp on things she did in the past, like, as in this video, chasing after a survivor of the Parkland, Florida school shooting.
And things she says that are over the top, like —
Lesley Stahl: The Democrats are a party of pedophiles.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: I would definitely say so. They support grooming children.
Lesley Stahl: They are not pedophiles. Why would you say that?
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Democrats, Democrats support, even Joe Biden, the president himself, supports children being sexualized and having transgender surgeries. Sexualizing children is what pedophiles do to children.
Lesley Stahl: Wow. OK. But my question really is, can’t you fight for what you believe in without all that name-calling and without the personal attacks?
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Well, I would ask the same question to the other side, because all they’ve done is call me names and insult me non-stop since I’ve been here, Lesley. They call me racist. They call me sen, anti-Semitic, which is not true. I’m not calling anyone names. I’m calling out the truth basically-
Lesley Stahl: Pedophile?
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Pedophi– call it what it is.
She also still calls the 2020 election stolen as she made clear in February.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: I come home as often as I can when we’re not in session.
Born and raised in Georgia, she now lives in an upscale section of her home district in the northwest corner of the state.
Lesley Stahl: How many acres do you have?
Marjorie Taylor Greene: I have 10 acres.
Her net worth is estimated at $11 million. But she says, when she was a child, her parents struggled financially trying to start their construction company. She told us that her dad, an arch-conservative, listened to right-wing talk radio all day long.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: And naturally, me being with my parents a lot, I, I listened, as well.
Lesley Stahl: Your dad knew you as a politician. What did he think of your style, your pitbullness?
Marjorie Taylor Greene: He was very proud of me.
Lesley Stahl: Your mother, did she ever say, ‘Marjorie, you need to tone it down?’
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Yeah, she did, actually. She’s a Southern mom, and she believes in manners.
She says her combative style came later in her life, after she graduated from the University of Georgia…
Marjorie Taylor Greene: This is our family photo.
…and had three children with her now ex-husband.
She worked for the family construction business, that she and her then-husband bought from her dad and grew into a lucrative enterprise.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene worked for the family construction business. She and her then-husband bought it from her dad and grew into a lucrative enterprise.
60 Minutes
Lesley Stahl: What are you up to now?
Marjorie Taylor Greene: This is 205.
Lesley Stahl: Oh my God.
Greene didn’t discover her brazen gutsiness, she says, till after 2011 when she got hooked on CrossFit workouts. She got into the extreme exercising with a passion, ending up in competitions, gaining self-confidence. She opened her own gym with a business partner. But, at age 43, she sold her stake and turned to politics in 2019.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: What made me run for Congress when I saw the Republicans in Congress, the House and the Senate, completely fail to deliver the agenda that we had all voted for, the reasons why we voted for Donald Trump. It was the Ameri–
Lesley Stahl: The Republicans?
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Yep.
Not Joe Biden, not Nancy Pelosi. but the traditional Republicans who, she says, failed to rein in federal spending, repeal Obamacare, or fund President Trump’s border wall when Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: They failed us.
Lesley Stahl: Like who?
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham. Those, yeah, those types of Re– Mitt Romney. I’m not even sure why he calls himself a Republican.
Marjorie Taylor Greene with a family of Trump supporters
60 Minutes
Lesley Stahl: Why don’t you blame Donald Trump?
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Well, I blame— I blame all of them for a lot of things but again-–
Lesley Stahl: But not him.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Well, the president doesn’t control everything.
Most of her constituents in her conservative, largely white, working-class district agree with her on the issues, and especially like the way she fights for her beliefs.
Woman: I’m a New York transplant to Georgia and I just love you.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Well welcome to freedom! Nice to meet you.
Shortly after she arrived in Washington, the Democratic-led house ousted her from her committees because of her past endorsement of violence against some Democratic leaders and her history of embracing QAnon that she explained in a speech on the House floor.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Well, I apologized to my colleagues. I think apologies are important.
Lesley Stahl: Okay, did you ever apologize to Nancy Pelosi about the bullet to her head?
An image captured from social media shows a like from Marjorie Taylor Greene’s account on a comment about Nancy Pelosi.
60 Minutes
Marjorie Taylor Greene: I didn’t say that, so I don’t need to apologize for words that weren’t mine–
Lesley Stahl: Well, you– didn’t you like it?
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Other people also ran my social media. I don’t think I did that.
Lesley Stahl: Are you saying that you don’t stand by what’s on your social media?
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Well, of course I stand for what’s on my social media. But at times not– you’re not always in control. We have all kinds of people that work on our social media.
Lesley Stahl: Did you apologize for your position on Parkland, Florida?
Marjorie Taylor Greene: What was my position on Parkland, Florida?
Lesley Stahl: That it was a false flag—
Marjorie Taylor Greene: I don’t know if you actually have my– No, I never said Parkland was a false flag. No, I’ve never said that. School shootings are horrible. I don’t think it’s anything to joke about.
An image captured from social media shows Marjorie Taylor Greene’s response to a comment describing a shooting as a “false flag planned shooting.”
60 Minutes
Lesley Stahl: We fact-checked before I got to this interview. That’s what–
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Have you fact-checked all my statements from kindergarten through 12th grade? And in college? And as I’ve paid my taxes, and never broken a law, And the only– I got a few speeding tickets. Do we need to talk about those too?
Lesley Stahl: Well—
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Because I think where you’re going down is the same attacks that people have attacked me with over and over and over.
Lesley Stahl: Well, if this is what you’re ‘known for,’ I think it’s good that you’re responding to the charges. I think–
Marjorie Taylor Greene: I think being— because— people–
Lesley Stahl: I think it’s a legitimate thing for us to do.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: -constantly focus on it, but never focus on anything good about me.
Lesley Stahl: Let me button this up and we’ll move on. You want to bring the Republican Party closer to your views. You want to bring the country closer to your views. You’ve said that.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Mmhmm.
Lesley Stahl: Okay. Here are some of the things you’ve said: that America should have a Christian government, that abortion should be banned nationally. That you wanna defund the FBI. Yes? You want immigration to stop for four years. You’ve said those things, correct?
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Yeah, these are– these are some of my views.
Lesley Stahl: The Constitution, the very First Amendment, prohibits having a religion in the government.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Yet, the Founding Fathers quoted the Bible constantly and were driven by their faith.
As a fervent supporter of the now-indicted Donald Trump, she was a featured speaker at his rally in Waco last weekend. While she’s adored here, the latest national poll has her approval rating at just 29%.
Donald Trump (at Waco rally): Marjorie Taylor Greene, you happened to be here. Would you like to run for the Senate? I will fight like hell for you, I’ll tell ya.
The question for her, and the country, is can she expand her brash MTG brand beyond the right wing, populist base?
Produced by Richard Bonin. Associate producer, Mirella Brussani. Associate producer, Wren Woodson. Edited by Richard Buddenhagen.
Since being sworn in to Congress in January 2021, Marjorie Taylor Greene has been suspended and restricted by Twitter on numerous occasions for spreading misinformation about COVID-19, vaccines, and the 2020 election. On Tuesday, the Georgia representative was once again shut out of her official account, this time thanks to her rabid attacks on trans people.
While Greene has long been a hatefulbigot and opponent of trans rights, she’s redoubled her efforts since the mass shooting at the Covenant School on Monday, choosing to focus not on the fact that the shooter was able to easily obtain firearms in a country that does extremely little to restrict them, but that the shooter reportedly identified as a trans man. In tweets and retweets on both her personal and congressional account, the GOP lawmaker blamed the shooting, which left three children and three adults dead, specifically on the fact that the assailant was trans.
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But it was a graphic shared on Tuesday, which she repeatedly posted, with a caption claiming that “Antifa is organizing a Trans Day of Vengeance” in DC next month, that got her official account temporarily restricted. Ella Irwin, the site’s head of trust and safety, explained that Twitter performed an automatic “sweep“ of the platform and removed over 5,000 tweets and retweets of the image. She added, “We do not support tweets that incite violence irrespective of who posts them. ‘Vengeance’ does not imply peaceful protest. Organizing or support for peaceful protests is ok.”
Not surprisingly, Greene cannot comprehend why the company would do this.
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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) (L) talks to the media as the Congressional Integrity Project video truck showing 12 minutes of footage from the Jan. 6 insurrection drives around the DC Department of Corrections on Mar. 24, 2023 in Washington, DC.
Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for Congressional Integrity Project
A congressional tour of the Jan. 6th defendants’ wing of the Washington, D.C. jail ended with contradictory accounts of how the accused Capitol rioters are being treated behind bars.
In a post-tour news conference disrupted by protesters, hecklers and some physical confrontations among those in the audience, Republican House members claimed the Jan. 6 defendants are being deprived of due process, some medical care and services afforded to other jail inmates.
But Democratic House members who joined the tour argued the Jan. 6 defendants are receiving uniquely favorable conditions — with access to entertainment equipment, freedom of movement and 24-hour medical care access.
The two-hour Friday afternoon tour for the bipartisan group of House members included a lengthy visit with some of the Jan. 6 defendants who are being held in pretrial detention in the D.C. jail. The House Republicans who joined the tour, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, said the defendants have been held for unacceptably long durations awaiting trial.
“They’re entitled to a quick and speedy trial,” Greene said. “That’s not happening here.”
She claimed the defendants lack access to some of the education programs and sports television viewing offered to other D.C. inmates.
Rep. Byron Donalds, Republican of Florida, said the lengthy pretrial detention terms are a violation of “constitutional rights and constitutional principles.”
But Democratic Reps. Jasmine Crockett, of Texas, and Robert Garcia, of California, slammed the Republicans’ criticism. Crockett contended that the Jan. 6 defendants were the recipients of “privilege,” including freedom to move and individual jail cells, as opposed to shared cells.
Crockett said, “Jan. 6 (defendants) had more access to technology (than other defendants).” Crockett, who was an attorney before she was elected to Congress, told reporters, “They have access to laptops and tablets. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”
She also said the Jan. 6 defendants had access to yoga classes, were able to send text messages to family and could enroll in programs to earn their GEDs while in jail.
There were contradictory allegations about the medical care received by Jan. 6 defendants inside the jail.
But Greene argued that the inmates are not receiving full or proper care, including one accused rioter who is a cancer patient.
However, Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia disputed that notion and said the Jan. 6 defendants had access to “24-hour medical care” and a “very professional” staff.
Republicans on the jail tour “were treating some of these folks like they’re celebrities,” Garcia told reporters. “That’s quite shameful in my opinion,” adding, “we were in an open room with people that attacked our country.”
In the two years since the Jan. 6 attack, the number of defendants in the D.C. jail has generally ranged from 20-40.
In a statement Friday, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said the current inmates include “17 who are charged with violently assaulting federal officers and nine of them already convicted of that crime or other equally serious offenses.”
Relatives of some of the Jan. 6 defendants hold a nighty protest outside the jail, which has been led by the mother of Ashli Babbitt. Babbitt was shot and killed while breaching a door into the House Speaker’s Lobby on Jan. 6, 2021, as members of Congress were trying to evacuate and get away from the mob. The protests have been taking place nightly since Aug. 1, 2022. Another organizer, Nicole Reffitt, of Texas, estimates 5,000-8,000 people watch a live stream of video feeds of the protest.
During the news conference Friday by House Republicans, hecklers and demonstrators shouted and used a whistling device to drown out the audio of the lawmakers. Another protester deployed a large video screen displaying images of some of the most violent moments of the Capitol attack within sight of the news conference.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) was fact-checked by the chief of the U.S. Border Patrol after she claimed agents had found an “explosive” near the southern border in January.
Greene highlighted her claim about this so-called threat in a question to Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz during a Wednesday Homeland Security Committee hearing in Texas. However, Ortiz didn’t clarify the matter when speaking to lawmakers. Afterward, Greene repeated her claim via a tweet, along with a picture of the alleged device, accusing “the Cartel” of “planting bombs” and “murdering Americans everyday through drugs and crime.”
Fox News national correspondent Bill Melugin shared the tweet, adding that he had spoken to a “high-level CBP source” that said the object was a fake. “While it appeared nefarious, I’m told it did not contain any explosives,” he tweeted.
Shortly afterward, Ortiz chimed in with a tweet.
“Today, I testified before the Committee on Homeland Security & it was alleged that Agents found an explosive device near the border,” he wrote, sharing the same image Greene posted. “During a Jan. briefing, leadership was notified that Agents found a duct-taped ball filled with sand that wasn’t deemed a threat to agents/public.”
NEW: A high level CBP source tells me that this was a fake, and was actually filled with dirt. It was discovered by Border Patrol agents in Rio Grande City in the RGV, and while it appeared nefarious, I’m told it did not contain any explosives. https://t.co/x1iWUQ4scZ
Today, I testified before the Committee on Homeland Security & it was alleged that Agents found an explosive device near the border. During a Jan. briefing, leadership was notified that Agents found a duct-taped ball filled with sand that wasn’t deemed a threat to agents/public. pic.twitter.com/SXV9qK8uo1
Greene refused to back down, insisting that unnamed Border Patrol agents had told her otherwise.
“I’m just explaining what I was told today,” she said.
When reached by HuffPost for comment, Greene’s spokesperson did not clarify Greene’s sources or provide evidence, instead writing: “Stop being a state-sponsored propagandist.”
Thank you for your testimony today Chief Ortiz and I know you are explaining what you were told when you inquired about the situation after the hearing. Unfortunately, several Border Patrol agents are saying it was some sort of IED and there is video surveillance and pictures of… https://t.co/xQeBqXajZ6
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) March 15, 2023
Greene, an anti-immigration hardliner, has hammered the Biden administration over undocumented U.S. border crossings from Mexico, often using incorrect figures. Last month, she faced ridicule after she accused the government of allowing “6 billion” people illegally cross into the U.S. (She later updated the figure to 6 million ― which is still dubious.)
Weeks ago, she used the deaths of two brothers who died from fentanyl poisoning to attack the Biden administration for its “refusal to secure our border and stop the Cartel’s [sic] from murdering Americans everyday.” When a fact-checker pointed out that those men died in 2020, when Donald Trump, not Biden, was president, Greene’s spokesperson told him that lots of people had died from drugs under Biden and “do you think they give a fuck about your bullshit fact checking?’”
Greene has also leaned into the controversial white supremacist “invasion” and “replacement” language in her pushes for border security. On Wednesday, she tweeted a graph about illegal migrant encounters, writing: “We have no idea who or what is coming across our Southern border. But we do know that we’re being systematically and intentionally replaced by Joe Biden and the Democrats’ open border policies.”
President Joe Biden made a quick reference to Donald Trump on Thursday ― then just as quickly dismissed him.
“I had a big fight with the former president, and maybe future president,” he said at an event in Philadelphia, referring to the 2020 campaign battle.
The crowd jeered the reference to Trump.
“Bless me father,” Biden said, then made the sign of the cross:
The sign of the cross has a range of meanings, from a blessing to a means of warding off evil. Biden, a Catholic, uses it on occasion in a joking manner, as he also did last week when referring to conspiracy theorist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).
He asked the crowd if they remembered her jeers during the State of the Union address, when she interrupted his speech with shouts of “liar!”
The crowd laughed, and Biden made the sign of the cross.
Biden doesn’t like to mention Trump, and often doesn’t use his name when he does.
At one point, Biden referred to him simply as “the former guy.”
The Conservative Political Action Conference is underway in Maryland. And the members of Congress, former government officials and conservative personalities who spoke at the conference on Thursday and Friday made false claims about a variety of topics.
Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio uttered two false claims about President Joe Biden. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia repeated a debunked claim about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama used two inaccurate statistics as he lamented the state of the country. Former Trump White House official Steve Bannon repeated his regular lie about the 2020 election having been stolen from Trump, this time baselesly blaming Fox for Trump’s defeat.
Rep. Kat Cammack of Florida incorrectly said a former Obama administration official had encouraged people to harass Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina inaccurately claimed Biden had laughed at a grieving mother and inaccurately insinuated that the FBI tipped off the media to its search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence. Two other speakers, Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and former Trump administration official Sebastian Gorka, inflated the number of deaths from fentanyl.
And that’s not all. Here is a fact check of 13 false claims from the conference, which continues on Saturday.
Marjorie Taylor Greene said the Republican Party has a duty to protect children. Listing supposed threats to children, she said, “Now whether it’s like Zelensky saying he wants our sons and daughters to go die in Ukraine…” Later in her speech, she said, “I will look at a camera and directly tell Zelensky: you’d better leave your hands off of our sons and daughters, because they’re not dying over there.”
Facts First: Greene’s claim is false. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky didn’t say he wants American sons and daughters to fight or die for Ukraine. The false claim, which was debunked by CNN and others earlier in the week, is based on a viral video that clipped Zelensky’s comments out of context.
19-second video of Zelensky goes viral. See what was edited out
In reality, Zelensky predicted at a press conference in late February that if Ukraine loses the war against Russia because it does not receive sufficient support from elsewhere, Russia will proceed to enter North Atlantic Treaty Organization member countries in the Baltics (a region made up of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia) that the US will be obligated to send troops to defend. Under the treaty that governs NATO, an attack on one member is considered an attack on all. Ukraine is not a NATO member, and Zelensky didn’t say Americans should fight there.
Greene is one of the people who shared the out-of-context video on Twitter this week. You can read a full fact-check, with Zelensky’s complete quote, here.
Right-wing commentator and former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon criticized right-wing cable channel Fox at length for, he argued, being insufficiently supportive of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Among other things, Bannon claimed that, on the night of the election in November 2020, “Fox News illegitimately called it for the opposition and not Donald J. Trump, of which our nation has never recovered.” Later, he said Trump is running again after “having it stolen, in broad daylight, of which they [Fox] participate in.”
Facts First: This is nonsense. On election night in 2020, Fox accurately projected that Biden had won the state of Arizona. This projection did not change the outcome of the election; all of the votes are counted regardless of what media outlets have projected, and the counting showed that Biden won Arizona, and the election, fair and square. The 2020 election was not “stolen” from Trump.
Bannon has a harsh message for Fox News at CPAC
Fox, like other major media outlets, did not project that Biden had won the presidency until four days later. Fox personalities went on to repeatedly promote lies that the election was stolen from Trump – even as they privately dismissed and mocked these false claims, according to court filings from a voting technology company that is suing Fox for defamation.
Rep. Jim Jordan claimed that Biden, “on day one,” made “three key changes” to immigration policy. Jordan said one of those changes was this: “We’re not going to deport anyone who come.” He proceeded to argue that people knowing “we’re not going to get deported” was a reason they decided to migrate to the US under Biden.
Facts First:Jordan inaccurately described the 100-day deportation pause that Biden attempted to impose immediately after he took office on January 20, 2021. The policy did not say the US wouldn’t deport “anyone who comes.” It explicitly did not apply to anyone who arrived in the country after the end of October 2020, meaning people who arrived under the Biden administration or in the last months of the Trump administration could still be deported.
Biden did say during the 2020 Democratic primary that “no one, no one will be deported at all” in his first 100 days as president. But Jordan claimed that this was the policy Biden actually implemented on his first day in office; Biden’s actual first-day policy was considerably narrower.
Biden’s attempted 100-day pause also did not apply to people who engaged in or were suspected of terrorism or espionage, were seen to pose a national security risk, had waived their right to remain in the US, or whom the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement determined the law required to be removed.
The pause was supposed to be in effect while the Department of Homeland Security conducted a review of immigration enforcement practices, but it was blocked by a federal judge shortly after it was announced.
Rep. Ralph Norman strongly suggested the FBI had tipped off the media to its August search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and resort in Florida for government documents in the former president’s possession – while concealing its subsequent document searches of properties connected to Biden.
Norman said: “When I saw the raid at Mar-a-Lago – you know, the cameras, the FBI – and compare that to when they found Biden’s, all of the documents he had, where was the media, where was the FBI? They kept it quiet early on, didn’t let it out. The job of the next president is going to be getting rid of the insiders that are undermining this government, and you’ve gotta clean house.”
Facts First: Norman’s narrative is false. The FBI did not tip off the media to its search of Mar-a-Lago; CNN reported the next day that the search “happened so quietly, so secretly, that it wasn’t caught on camera at all.” Rather, media outlets belatedly sent cameras to Mar-a-Lago because Peter Schorsch, publisher of the website Florida Politics, learned of the search from non-FBI sources and tweeted about it either after it was over or as it was just concluding, and because Trump himself made a public statement less than 20 minutes later confirming that a search had occurred. Schorsch told CNN on Thursday: “I can, unequivocally, state that the FBI was not one of my two sources which alerted me to the raid.”
Brian Stelter, then CNN’s chief media correspondent, wrote in his article the day after the search: “By the time local TV news cameras showed up outside the club, there was almost nothing to see. Websites used file photos of the Florida resort since there were no dramatic shots of the search.”
It’s true that the public didn’t find out until late January about the FBI’s November search of Biden’s former think tank office in Washington, which was conducted with the consent of Biden’s legal team. But the belated presence of journalists at Mar-a-Lago on the day of the Trump search in August is not evidence of a double standard.
And it’s worth noting that media cameras were on the scene when Biden’s beach home in Delaware was searched by the FBI in February. News outlets had set up a media “pool” to make sure any search there was recorded.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a former college and high school football coach, said, “Going into thousands of kids’ homes and talking to parents every year recruiting, half the kids in this country – I’m not talking about race, I’m just talking about – half the kids in this country have one or no parent. And it’s because of the attack on faith. People are losing faith because, for some reason, because the attack [on] God.”
Facts First: Tuberville’s claim that half of American children don’t have two parents is incorrect. Official figures from the Census Bureau show that, in 2021, about 70% of US children under the age of 18 lived with two parents and about 65% lived with two married parents.
About 22% of children lived with only a mother, about 5% with only a father, and about 3% with no parent. But the Census Bureau has explained that even children who are listed as living with only one parent may have a second parent; children are listed as living with only one parent if, for example, one parent is deployed overseas with the military or if their divorced parents share custody of them.
It is true that the percentage of US children living in households with two parents has been declining for decades. Still, Tuberville’s statistic significantly exaggerated the current situation. His spokesperson told CNN on Thursday that the senator was speaking “anecdotally” from his personal experience meeting with families as a football coach.
Tuberville claimed that today’s children are being “indoctrinated” in schools by “woke” ideology and critical race theory. He then said, “We don’t teach reading, writing and arithmetic anymore. You know, half the kids in this country, when they graduate – think about this: half the kids in this country, when they graduate, can’t read their diploma.”
Facts First: This is false. While many Americans do struggle with reading, there is no basis for the claim that “half” of high school graduates can’t read a basic document like a diploma. “Mr. Tuberville does not know what he’s talking about at all,” said Patricia Edwards, a Michigan State University professor of language and literacy who is a past president of the International Literacy Association and the Literacy Research Association. Edwards said there is “no evidence” to support Tuberville’s claim. She also said that people who can’t read at all are highly unlikely to finish high school and that “sometimes politicians embellish information.”
Tuberville could have accurately said that a significant number of American teenagers and adults have reading trouble, though there is no apparent basis for connecting these struggles with supposed “woke” indoctrination. The organization ProLiteracy pointed CNN to 2017 data that found 23% of Americans age 16 to 65 have “low” literacy skills in English. That’s not “half,” as ProLiteracy pointed out, and it includes people who didn’t graduate from high school and people who are able to read basic text but struggle with more complex literacy tasks.
The Tuberville spokesperson said the senator was speaking informally after having been briefed on other statistics about Americans’ struggles with reading, like a report that half of adults can’t read a book written at an eighth-grade level.
Rep. Jim Jordan claimed of Biden: “The president of the United States stood in front of Independence Hall, called half the country fascists.”
Facts First: This is not true. Biden did not denounce even close to “half the country” in this 2022 speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. He made clear that he was speaking about a minority of Republicans.
In the speech, in which he never used the word “fascists,” Biden warned that “MAGA Republicans” like Trump are “extreme,” “do not respect the Constitution” and “do not believe in the rule of law.” But he also emphasized that “not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans.” In other words, he made clear that he was talking about far less than half of Americans.
Trump earned fewer than 75 million votes in 2020 in a country of more than 258 million adults, so even a hypothetical criticism of every single Trump voter would not amount to criticism of “half the country.”
Rep. Scott Perry claimed that “average citizens need to just at some point be willing to acknowledge and accept that every single facet of the federal government is weaponized against every single one of us.” Perry said moments later, “The government doesn’t have the right to tell you that you can’t buy a gas stove but that you must buy an electric vehicle.”
Facts First: This is nonsense. The federal government has not told people that they can’t buy a gas stove or must buy an electric vehicle.
The Biden administration has tried to encourage and incentivize the adoption of electric vehicles, but it has not tried to forbid the manufacture or purchase of traditional vehicles with internal combustion engines. Biden has set a goal of electric vehicles making up half of all new vehicles sold in the US by 2030.
There was a January controversy about a Biden appointee to the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission, Richard Trumka Jr., saying that gas stoves pose a “hidden hazard,” as they emit air pollutants, and that “any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” But the commission as a whole has not shown support for a ban, and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a January press briefing: “The president does not support banning gas stoves. And the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is independent, is not banning gas stoves.”
Rep. Ralph Norman claimed that Biden had just laughed at a mother who lost two sons to fentanyl.
“I don’t know whether y’all saw, I just saw it this morning: Biden laughing at the mother who had two sons – to die, and he’s basically laughing and saying the fentanyl came from the previous administration. Who cares where it came from? The fact is it’s here,” Norman said.
Kiessling has demanded an apology from Biden. She is entitled to her criticism of Biden’s remarks and his chuckle – but the video clearly shows Norman was wrong when he claimed Biden was “laughing at the mother.”
Rep. Kat Cammack told a story about the first hearing of the new Republican-led House select subcommittee on the supposed “weaponization” of the federal government. Cammack claimed she had asked a Democratic witness at this February hearing about his “incredibly vitriolic” Twitter feed in which, she claimed, he not only repeatedly criticized Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh but even went “so far as to encourage people to harass this Supreme Court justice.”
Facts First: This story is false. The witness Cammack questioned in this February exchange at the subcommittee, former Obama administration deputy assistant attorney general Elliot Williams, did not encourage people to harass Kavanaugh. In fact, it’s not even true that Cammack accused him at the February hearing of having encouraged people to harass Kavanaugh. Rather, at the hearing, she merely claimed that Williams had tweeted numerous critical tweets about Kavanaugh but had been “unusually quiet” on Twitter after an alleged assassination attempt against the justice. Clearly, not tweeting about the incident is not the same thing as encouraging harassment.
Williams, now a CNN legal analyst (he appeared at the subcommittee hearing in his personal capacity), said in a Thursday email that he had “no idea” what Cammack was looking at on his innocuous Twitter feed. He said: “I used to prosecute violent crimes, and clerked for two federal judges. Any suggestion that I’ve ever encouraged harassment of anyone – and particularly any official of the United States – is insulting and not based in reality.”
Cammack’s spokesperson responded helpfully on Thursday to CNN’s initial queries about the story Cammack told at CPAC, explaining that she was referring to her February exchange with Williams. But the spokesperson stopped responding after CNN asked if Cammack was accurately describing this exchange with Williams and if they had any evidence of Williams actually having encouraged the harassment of Kavanaugh.
Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana boasted about the state of the country “when Republicans were in charge.” Among other claims about Trump’s tenure, he said that “in four years,” Republicans “delivered 3.5% unemployment” and “created 8 million new jobs.”
Facts First: This is inaccurate in two ways. First, the economic numbers for the full “four years” of Trump’s tenure are much worse than these numbers Kennedy cited; Kennedy was actually referring to Trump’s first three years while ignoring the fourth, which was marred by the Covid-19 pandemic. Second, there weren’t “8 million new jobs” created even in Trump’s first three years.
Kennedy could have correctly said there was a 3.5% unemployment rate after three years of the Trump administration, but not after four. The unemployment rate skyrocketed early in Trump’s fourth year, on account of the pandemic, before coming down again, and it was 6.3% when Trump left office in early 2021. (It fell to 3.4% this January under Biden, better than in any month under Trump.)
And while the economy added about 6.7 million jobs under Trump before the pandemic-related crash of March and April 2020, that’s not the “8 million jobs” Kennedy claimed – and the economy ended up shedding millions of jobs in Trump’s fourth year. Over the full four years of Trump’s tenure, the economy netted a loss of about 2.7 million jobs.
Lara Trump, Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law and an adviser to his 2020 campaign, claimed that the last time a CPAC crowd was gathered at this venue in Maryland, in February 2020, “We had the lowest unemployment in American history.” After making other boasts about Donald Trump’s presidency, she said, “But how quickly it all changed.” She added, “Under Joe Biden, America is crumbling.”
Facts First: Lara Trump’s claim about February 2020 having “the lowest unemployment in American history” is false. The unemployment rate was 3.5% at the time – tied for the lowest since 1969, but not the all-time lowest on record, which was 2.5% in 1953. And while Lara Trump didn’t make an explicit claim about unemployment under Biden, it’s not true that things are worse today on this measure; again, the most recent unemployment rate, 3.4% for January 2023, is better than the rate at the time of CPAC’s 2020 conference or at any other time during Donald Trump’s presidency.
Multiple speakers at CPAC decried the high number of fentanyl overdose deaths. But some of the speakers inflated that number while attacking Biden’s immigration policy.
Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump administration official, claimed that “in the last 12 months in America, deaths by fentanyl poisoning totaled 110,000 Americans.” He blamed “Biden’s open border” for these deaths.
Rep. Scott Perry claimed: “Meanwhile over on this side of the border, where there isn’t anybody, they’re running this fentanyl in; it’s killing 100,000 Americans – over 100,000 Americans – a year.”
Facts First: It’s not true that there are more than 100,000 fentanyl deaths per year. That is the total number of deaths from all drug overdoses in the US; there were 106,699 such deaths in 2021. But the number of overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids other than methadone, primarily fentanyl, is smaller – 70,601 in 2021.
Fentanyl-related overdoses are clearly a major problem for the country and by far the biggest single contributor to the broader overdose problem. Nonetheless, claims of “110,000” and “over 100,000” fentanyl deaths per year are significant exaggerations. And while the number of overdose deaths and fentanyl-related deaths increased under Biden in 2021, it was also troubling under Trump in 2020 – 91,799 total overdose deaths and 56,516 for synthetic opioids other than methadone.
It’s also worth noting that fentanyl is largely smuggled in by US citizens through legal ports of entry rather than by migrants sneaking past other parts of the border. Contrary to frequent Republican claims, the border is not “open”; border officers have seized thousands of pounds of fentanyl under Biden.
President Joe Biden drew laughs on Tuesday when he brought up Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) ― but rather than make a crack about the conspiracy theorist lawmaker, Biden let his fingers do the talking.
Speaking at an event in Virginia Beach, the president asked the audience if they remembered her howls during his State of the Union speech, when she repeatedly interrupted with shouts of “liar!”
Biden resisted the temptation to strike back with a barb of his own and made the sign of the cross instead.
“I’m gonna be good,” he said, as his audience laughed:
Biden, a devout Catholic, occasionally uses to sign of the cross in a joking manner. The gesture has several meanings, including a blessing and as protection from evil.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has clarified how her proposed “national divorce” might look, and it’s as disturbing as it sounds.
The far-right firebrand on Tuesday expanded on the divisive rhetoric that saw her condemned by many Democrats and even some Republicans over the long weekend. On Presidents Day, Greene tweeted “We need a national divorce,” calling for the country to “separate by red states and blue states.”
Many critics interpreted her proposal as a call for secession, and she was widely criticized for using divisive and dangerous rhetoric. She appeared on the right-wing “Charlie Kirk Show” podcast Tuesday to explain herself.
In Greene’s estimation, a so-called national divorce would not bring a civil war but would instead give states more power to govern themselves. Under this system, Greene suggested, red states could temporarily strip Americans who move from blue states of the right to vote and could implement laws to openly discriminate against LGBTQ people.
“Well, if we have a national divorce, there’s no need for the Department of Education,” she said. “Red states and blue states would be in control of the education in each state.”
“They would not allow any type of gender lies being taught in their schools, LGBTQ woke teachers would be fired and not allowed to teach there,” she continued, adding that schools in red states “would allow parents to be able to choose the curriculum.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene: “If Democrat voters choose to flee these Blue states…Well, once they move to a Red state, guess what? Maybe you don’t get to vote for five years” pic.twitter.com/AcAPwmYXcu
If Democratic voters opted to move interstate, Greene riffed, Republican states could potentially decide to temporarily strip them of a constitutional right.
“Once they moved to a red state, guess what? Maybe you don’t get to vote for five years,” she said. “You can live there, you can work there, but you don’t get to bring your values that you basically created … by voting for Democrat leaders.”
Civil war broke out in the U.S. in 1861 after an alliance of Southern states seceded over slavery. The war lasted four years and led to the deaths of more than 600,000 soldiers.
