Marjorie Taylor Greene says Jan. 6 domestic terrorists are merely 'patriotic'

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) continues to defend the insurrectionists who violently broke into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in an attempt to stop the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, saying that the people who were at the Capitol were “patriotic.”

Greene made the comment Wednesday during an appearance on former Donald Trump aide Steve Bannon’s podcast, as part of an extended rant about a memo Attorney General Merrick Garland issued Monday, in which he announced that the FBI is going to partner with local law enforcement to address the spate of violence and threats that parents, teachers, and school board officials have received in recent weeks from people enraged over mask requirements in schools and so-called “critical race theory.”

She described those people, as well as the hundreds of people who went to the Capitol on Jan. 6 to oppose the Electoral College certification, as “patriotic,” before saying this:

You’re not a domestic terrorist if you went to the Capitol on Jan. 6 supporting President Trump and caring about election integrity and not wanting to see fraud in our election systems. That doesn’t make you a domestic terrorist.

 

What happened on Jan. 6 was a riot and it needs to be treated as so. These people have been locked up, held in solitary confinement, and now the FBI and the Department of Justice is hunting Americans all over the country.

 

But you see here’s what’ going to happen. People are going to be fed up with these [sic] intimidation, because we’ve seen it before in our history books. We’ve seen it before with the Brown Shirts. We’ve seen it before with the Gestapo. We’ve seen it before in countries like Russia. We see it now in China. We’ve seen it in Venezuela.

 

And I believe the American people are strong enough, that they need to form together not in violence but in a loud clear voice telling the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Biden administration all the way down to the school boards and local elected Democrats, ‘We are not going to be intimidated.’

While Greene tried to downplay the Jan. 6 attack, FBI Director Christopher Wray explicitly labeled the Jan. 6 insurrection as an act of domestic terrorism.

Wray said in a March hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee that, “Jan. 6 was not an isolated event. The problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a long time now and it’s not going away anytime soon. Understanding how these forces culminated in an attack on the infrastructure of our democracy is critical to preventing future attacks.”

Greene has been crusading to support the hundreds of people arrested and charged for their role in the Jan. 6 attack. Roughly 140 law enforcement officers were injured that day, some of whom are still suffering from their wounds. And four officers who responded to the attack have since taken their own lives.

Officers have testified about the violence and racist slurs they were subjected to by the pro-Trump mob that day, and have expressed outrage that lawmakers like Greene would downplay the attack and defend the domestic terrorists from that day.

But Greene has been trying to paint the insurrectionists as victims, trying — unsuccessfully — to visit some of the offenders in the jails in which they are being held. She also tried to hold a news conference with other Republican lawmakers who support the insurrectionists, but that event was shut down by protesters.

Greene herself was a major player in planning the attempt to stop certification of Biden’s victory, attending White House meetings to discuss how members of Congress could vote to block the certification on Jan. 6.

On Dec. 21, 2020, she tweeted a video of herself leaving the White House, where she said she had a “great planning session for our Jan. 6 objection.”

“We aren’t going to let this election be stolen by Joe Biden and the Democrats,” she says in the video, lying that Trump “won in a landslide” and urging Trump supporters to call their lawmakers to encourage them to object to the Electoral College results.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.