The White House on Monday strongly condemned the claim from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) that she and former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon would have executed a successful attack on Jan. 6, 2021, if they had organized the storming of the U.S. Capitol and they would have “been armed.”
The divisive Republican pushed back on theories that she was a ringleader of the violent incident that left more than 100 law enforcement officers injured. “I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, we would’ve been armed,” Greene said Saturday at a dinner hosted by the New York Young Republican Club, according to the New York Post.
Deputy White House press secretary Andrew Bates said the comments were a “slap in the face” to the law enforcement officers who risked their lives to keep Greene and other lawmakers safe from the violent mob seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and stop Congress from counting the electoral votes for Joe Biden’s win over President Donald Trump.
“It goes against our fundamental values as a country for a Member of Congress to wish that the carnage of January 6th had been even worse, and to boast that she would have succeeded in an armed insurrection against the United States government,” Bates said in a statement. “This violent rhetoric is a slap in the face to the Capitol Police, the DC Metropolitan Police, the National Guard, and the families who lost loved ones as a result of the attack on the Capitol.”
“All leaders have a responsibility to condemn these dangerous, abhorrent remarks and stand up for our Constitution and the rule of law,” Bates added.
Greene has regularly argued that participants in the Jan. 6 attack have been mistreated and she has indicated that she plans to investigate the bipartisan House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attacks when Republicans take the majority in January. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who is hoping to become speaker in the next Congress, also has signaled that the GOP would investigate the panel.
The insurrection, the worst attack on the seat of U.S. democracy in more than two centuries, left four people dead, and police officer Brian D. Sicknick, who had been sprayed with a powerful chemical irritant, had two strokes and died the next day. About 140 members of law enforcement were injured as rioters attacked them with flagpoles, baseball bats, stun guns, bear spray and pepper spray.
And Greene initially objected to the language in the original legislation to award the Congressional Gold Medals — the highest honor from Congress — to the police officers that protected the Capitol and lawmakers that day.
“I wouldn’t call it an insurrection,” she told Politico at the time.
Last week, Congress awarded the Congressional Gold Medals to the law enforcement officers who protected lawmakers nearly two years after the insurrection. Members of Sicknick’s family declined to shake hands with Republican leaders because their fealty to Trump.
McCarthy has pledged to award Greene committee assignments after the first-term lawmaker was stripped of them in February 2021 for articulating extremist views, including being an open adherent of the QAnon ideology, a web of false claims that played a role in inspiring the Capitol attack. She has also claimed that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by government forces and that a Jewish cabal had sparked a deadly wildfire with a space beam.
On Jan. 3, Greene is scheduled to be sworn in for another term and take an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same.”