Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said Monday she was only joking when she boasted that extremists would have been armed and would have “won” the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol if she had led the attempted insurrection.
The far right-wing firebrand said critics should “learn how sarcasm works” after she was hit with a torrent of criticism for her seemingly dead-serious remarks at a New York Republican fundraiser over the weekend.
“My comments were making fun of Joe Biden and the Democrats, who have continuously made me a political target since Jan. 6,” Greene said in a statement. “I will never back down from my support of the Second Amendment. And I will never allow the White House, Democrats, or the media to continue to accuse me of something I had nothing to do with.”
Greene, a high-profile apologist for the Jan. 6 attack, showed no signs of being sarcastic or joking when she declared she had no role in organizing the storming of the Capitol by thousands of extremist supporters of former President Donald Trump.
She told the supporters that she and right-wing provocateur Steve Bannon, who was sitting in the crowd, would have “won,” apparently meaning they would have succeeded in blocking Congress from certifying President Joe Biden’s election victory.
“I will tell you something: If Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed,” she told the well-heeled cheering crowd.
“A bunch of conservative Second Amendment supporters went into the Capitol without guns?” she said. “I don’t think so.”
Organizing an armed effort to interfere with Congress doing its job would be a potential crime, particularly if it had succeeded as Greene suggested.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates denounced Greene’s remarks.
“It goes against our fundamental values as a country for a Member of Congress to wish that the carnage of Jan. 6 had been even worse, and to boast that she would have succeeded in an armed insurrection against the United States government,” Bates said.
Neither Greene nor Bannon has been charged with organizing the Jan. 6 attack, although their names have come up in the overlapping probes into Trump’s effort to build support for his campaign to cast doubt on the election results.
Greene has led efforts to downplay the seriousness of the attack and has vigorously defended the hundreds of attackers who have been charged for their roles in it.
