Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene led a delegation of members of Congress of a jail in Washington, DC where inmates are being held for their actions during the January 6 riot.
Ms Greene led a delegation of House Republicans to head to the DC Central Detention Facility in the Southeast part of the city. Ms Greene told reporters she was able to receive the tour through the House Oversight &Accountability Committee.
“We were supposed to be getting more tours, I’m going to demand more tours, I’m going to demand more tours,” Ms Greene told reporters afterward. Across the street from the jail facility a truck pulled a mobile billboard that played footage of the January 6 riot while Ms Greene gave her press conference and also showed former president Donald Trump’s speech that led to his second impeachment.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy placed Ms Greene on the committee after Democrats had stripped her of her committee assignments over previous racist and antisemitic comments and promoting conspiracy theories before she joined Congress.
Ms Greene said that they visited the wing where defendants were being held before their trial.
“They told us stories of being denied medical treatment,” she said. “They told us stories of assault. They told us stories, being threatened with rape and guards laughing about it.”
Ms Greene and other Republicans have recently sought to sanitise what actually happened on January 6. Earlier this week, Mr McCarthy met with the mother of Ashli Babbitt, whom a police officer shot as she tried to break through Capitol security. Similarly, Mr McCarthy earlier this month gave footage of the riot to Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who cherry-picked footage to make the riot seem less violent than it really was.
The Georgia Republican firebrand was one of the biggest promoters of the lie that Mr Trump won the 2020 presidential election. Ms Greene claimed that other inmates had privileges that the January 6 inmates did not have.
“They had televisions with sports games on – I didn't see that in the January 6 wing of the of the jail,” she said. She also said there should be consequences for judges who she claimed unfairly tried defendants from the riot.
“Well, judges can be impeached, that's something that can be done,” she told The Independent. “There's more things that we need to look into. But it's completely wrong that they use their courtrooms as political weapons simply because they don't like the politics of the people that committed the crimes that are that are showing up in their courtrooms.”
In addition to the Republicans who joined the tour of the facility, two Democrats were there also – Representatives Jasmine Crockett of Texas and Robert Garcia of California.
Ms Crockett, a defence attorney by trade, contrasted the conditions with those of prisons in Texas.
“In Texas when it comes to women, all throughout the facility, when it comes to women, they don't even have access to sanitary napkins without paying for it right here,” she said. “I asked them, they say, yep, they do. They've got yoga classes. They talked about getting acupuncture things. I mean, they got more than a lot of people in my district have access to I'm gonna be perfectly honest.”
She said that it was important to refute what Ms Greene said.
“I think that there had to be somebody that was going to be willing to tell the truth that showed up,” she told The Independent. “And honestly, we know that we have members in Congress that don't want anybody to believe even what their eyes see on camera. We saw what happened on January 6, and they still mischaracterize it.”
Ms Crockett said that Democrats and Republicans had different tours. “Like there's a group of people, they have their own cells, they have access to laptops and tablets. I mean, it's, it's unlike anything that I've ever seen,” she said. She noted how some of them had recorded a song with Mr Trump.
“Because I had questions about how in the heck does the January 6 Choir have a number one song on iTunes, if it's so bad, right,” she said.
Mr Garcia noted that the January 6 inmates were being held in the newest part of the facility.
“I’ve visited other jails, I’ve seen really rough conditions that a lot of folks in this country are subjected to,” he told reporters outside the jail. “That’s not the situation. They are able to walk free.”
He added they had access to medical care and the inmates had access to medication as well.
“Quite frankly some of our Republican colleagues were treating some of these folks like they were celebrities,” he said. “And I think that was quite shameful in my opinion and what they’re saying quite frankly is just lies and untruth.”
Initial news reports said that Representative Summer Lee, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, would join but Mr Garcia joined instead. Mr Garcia said that the Oversight Committee’s ranking Democratic member Jamie Raskin asked him to join.
“Obviously as a member of the Oversight Committee, I trust his judgment,” he said, adding that the committee’s Democratic staff joined.
As the members left, the billboard continued to play footage as a reminder of why these inmates were in prison in the first place.
