Marjorie Taylor Greene continues to fight her quixotic crusade to prove that the thousands of Trump supporters seen on video attacking the Capitol on January 6 were actually being controlled by a shadowy federal conspiracy.
The Georgia congresswoman on Sunday reacted to the decision this past week by the new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, to release all of the footage gathered and compiled by the now-shuttered select committee to investigate the attack. According to Ms Greene, hidden within the more than 40,000 hours of footage of Trump fans battering police officers and committing other crimes on camera is irrefutable proof of a government conspiracy.
The Trump-aligned GOP, and its conspiracy magnets like Ms Greene, have long latched on to the desperate allegation that the FBI was seemingly in control of the riot from the beginning, and that the president’s supporters would have remained peaceful were it not for secretive government agents egging them on. In reality, no such evidence of government agents directing the crowd has been uncovered, and FBI Director Christopher Wray has testified under oath that those allegations are nothing more than nonsense.
On Sunday, Ms Greene threw down a challenge for the new Speaker, one that is almost certain to be completely ignored: The reformation of the January 6 select committee, presumably staffed entirely by Trump loyalists who would continue to spread lies about the attack under the official banner of a congressional investigation.
“There needs to be investigations and ACCOUNTABILITY for ALL of the lies, deceit, and lives ruined,” she tweeted.
Then, previewing what her fake investigation would inevitably conclude, the congresswoman added: “I’ve said it all along, MAGA did not do this.”
The insinuation that Maga Republicans were not responsible for the crowd of their own supporters attacking the Capitol is as persistent as it is far-fetched. The president and his team openly encouraged his fans to converge on the Capitol in the days leading up to the attack, and there are multiple widely-reported instances of high-ranking White House officials, including the chief of staff, fretting openly about the likelihood that the protest would become violent in the days just before January 6.
There’s also the issue of imprisoned January 6 rioters refusing to show contrition for the violence of the attack and defending their actions in their respective court cases. Ms Greene and her allies have ignored all of this, insisting lamely that they can prove that the attack would not have occurred without outside influence.
Her demand for a new committee’s formation is almost certain to not materialise.
The release of footage from the Jan 6 committee was in and of itself a giveaway by the Speaker to the far-right to keep that faction in line; it would not be likely for Mike Johnson to aquiesce to Ms Greene’s desire to push the bloodshed of the Capitol attack back into public view in the year leading up to a presidential election, one where he has the newfound responsibility of protecting vulnerable Republicans in the lower chamber from Democratic challengers.
Still, the tweet from Ms Greene is an important indication of how fixated the far-right remains on their defeat in 2020 and the willingness of that faction to weaken American democratic institutions to ensure that such a defeat would not happen again.
