Marjorie Taylor Greene has claimed that “Democrats want civil war” and she launched a personal attack on porn actor Stormy Daniels as Republicans lash out after the Manhattan grand jury voted to indict former President Donald Trump.
Mr Trump is facing charges of falsifying business records in connection to a $130,000 hush money payment to Ms Daniels made by then-Trump fixer Michael Cohen.
While it has been reported that Mr Trump faces more than 30 charges of business fraud, no specific charges have been revealed. The former president’s arraignment has been scheduled for Tuesday at 2.15pm.
The payment was made in the final stages of the 2016 campaign to have Ms Daniels remain silent about a 2006 affair she alleges she had with Mr Trump, something he has denied.
On Friday morning, the Georgia Republican took to Twitter to push the notion often propagated by Republicans that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is connected to financier and philanthropist George Soros, a longtime target of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. There is no evidence for the claim.
“Democrats want civil war. They want to push us into reacting so they can use their weaponized government to lock us all up. They know Trump did not break the law,” Ms Greene claimed on Friday morning in a post on Twitter.
“They know more than anyone because they’ve been trying for years to find a way to put him in jail and they can’t,” she added. “But now they have a complete fool that is deranged enough to try because he is backed by Soros. And Soros wants war to destabilize America and gain full control.”
Ms Greene also made a personal attack against Ms Daniels.
“Thank you to everyone for your support and love! I have so many messages coming in that I can’t respond...also don’t want to spill my champagne,” Ms Daniels tweeted on Thursday evening following the news of the grand jury vote.
Ms Greene reacted to the post, writing that “Democrat’s policies are so bad that they are relying on their heroine, who is too old and disgusting to make money as a porn star now, so she’s grifting off her lies about Trump”.
While Mr Trump and his allies have attempted to connect Mr Soros and Mr Bragg, the connection between them is far from as close as Republicans would like it to appear.
The racial justice group Color of Change, to which Mr Soros donated $1m in 2021, works to influence government and corporate policy across the US.
The Open Society Policy Center, which is funded by Mr Soros, sent $7m to the group’s 501(c)(4) branch that same year.
But none of those funds was earmarked for the Bragg campaign or connected to attempts to influence him, CNBC notes.
A spokesperson for Mr Soros previously told CNBC that he “has never met or spoken to Alvin Bragg”.
Democrats and experts have often argued that the attacks on Mr Soros, who is Jewish, are anti-Semitic.
In another Ms Greene tweet on Thursday night, Ms Greene referenced the common 2016 refrain among Trump supporters about Hillary Clinton, writing that “our side chants ‘lock her up’ and their side is going to get a mug shot based on a witch hunt. It’s time to change that. Gloves are off”.
Mr Trump is the first US president, current or former, to ever be indicted.
He also faces several other investigations, including a civil probe by the office of the New York Attorney General Letitia James for falsifying the value of assets owned by his business, a criminal investigation overseen by the Department of Justice regarding his attempt to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents after leaving the White House, in addition to a criminal probe in Georgia regarding his attempt to overturn the 2020 election in that state.
President Joe Biden was the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Georgia in 2020 since former President Bill Clinton’s 1992 win.
